While many of us will remember the last year as a time when superstar authors published highly anticipated follow-ups — think Michelle Obama, Jennifer Egan and Hanya Yanagihara — it was also a banner year for emerging voices.
Bay Area authors of color, led by Oakland’s Leila Mottley, whose powerful first novel is being translated into 15 languages, made splashy debuts we’re still talking about. Here are four Bay Area authors to watch.
Leila Mottley, 'Nightcrawling'
“Nightcrawling,” Leila Mottley’s book about a Black girl in East Oakland who gets caught in a storm of poverty, sex trafficking and corrupt cops, blew the literary world away when it came out in June 2022.
Dave Eggers called it “an electrifying debut.” Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club, making it an instant bestseller. And the book was long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, making Mottley the youngest author ever to receive the honor.
Making Oprah’s Book Club “was the shock of a lifetime,” says the 20-year-old Oakland native. “It took months for the reality to set in.”
Despite the media frenzy, which included appearances on late night talk shows with Trevor Noah and Seth Meyers, the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate remains grounded in the day to day of her “real life.” Most young adults her age are working or going to college. She writes.
“It’s really not different than any other passion or pursuit,” she says.
Before becoming a famous novelist, Mottley worked as a preschool substitute teacher. After graduating from high school, she spent the summer of 2019 writing “Nightcrawling.” Following a 13-way bidding war, the book was sold at auction to Knopf. Mottley was 18, midway through her second semester at Smith College, when she inked the deal.
The book follows Kiara, a 17-year-old high school dropout who falls into sex work while struggling to pay rising rent for herself and her older brother, who clings to visions of rap stardom. Their father is dead; their mother, absent.
The book is inspired by Mottley’s research into police sexual violence, including a 2015 high-profile sex abuse case, in which members of the Oakland Police Department were charged with sexually exploiting a minor. Mottley was 13 when the case broke and remembers how the coverage was focused on the officers and not on the implications for the young girl.
“I wanted the story to touch on vulnerability within Black girlhood and link that closely to what it means to be harmed by those who are supposed to protect us,” she says.
“Nightcrawling” will be released in paperback this spring. Mottley is currently working on her second novel and will be publishing her first collection of poetry, also from Knopf, in the next year.
Jane Kuo, 'In The Beautiful Country'
In San Carlos, California author Jane Kuo’s novel, “In the Beautiful Country,” (Quill Tree, $17), a lyrical, moving debut written in verse about family, struggle and belonging, the narrator is a 10-year-old Taiwanese immigrant named Anna. And she’s experiencing a beautiful country — the Chinese name for America — that is difficult, to say the least, and nothing like she dreamed.
“I experienced a lot of the stuff she experienced in school,” says Kuo, who immigrated with her parents to northeastern Los Angeles in 1979. “I was subjected to racist taunts, bullied for wearing high-water pants and teased for my lunch.”
The book, which came out in June, mirrors parts of Kuo’s life. Anna lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her parents and spends her days after school helping out at the flailing fast-food restaurant they poured their savings into. The novel is set in the small town of Duarte in Los Angeles County, where Kuo’s own family settled. Like them, Anna’s family endures overt racism, vandalism and feelings of alienation within their own Asian American community.
A career nurse, Kuo started writing the middle grade novel in 2016 at the height of the deep racial tensions that surfaced during the presidential election.
“As an Asian American, I remember asking myself, ‘Do I feel welcome here?'” Kuo says. “From a cultural context, the book is really a family story with a lot of nostalgia.”
A fan of adult memoirs, Kuo didn’t set out to write a middle grade novel in verse. But once she found Anna’s voice — vulnerable, insightful and courageous — the 20,000 words flowed seamlessly from one poetic chapter to the next.
At times heartbreaking and desperate — “I’d like to have friends/but I’ll settle/for being left alone” — the book is ultimately about hope and finding advocates, such as Terry, a grocery store clerk who embraces the family. It’s about making a home.
“There really was a Terry and (her husband) Don, and they really did take me to Disneyland,” she says. “What motivated these people to be so kind to us?”
Find out this summer, when Kuo’s follow-up, “Land of Broken Promises,” is released. It takes place a year later, when a more confident and stable Anna heads to sixth grade.
Joanna Ho, 'The Silence that Binds Us'
Palo Alto, California’s Joanna Ho has always been driven by a passion for equity and representation.
The Taiwanese-Chinese American writer spent years in education, first as an English teacher and later as vice principal of East Palo Alto Academy, a high school where 85% of the students are Latinx. She’s developed holistic, alternative-to-prison programs that fuse education with residential living. Even her journey as a children’s book author started from a place of inclusivity.
“I was looking for holiday books with diverse characters for my newborn and couldn’t find anything, so I decided to write one,” recalls Ho, the author of three children’s books, including the New York Times bestselling “Eyes That Kiss in the Corners,” a tender story about self-acceptance. “I believe all kids need to see themselves and others in books.”
So it’s no surprise that Ho’s debut young adult novel is a poignant call to action. Released in June, “The Silence That Binds Us” (Harper Teen, $18) is about a grief-stricken Asian American teen named May who loses her Princeton-accepted brother to suicide. In the aftermath, she contends with racist accusations hurled against her parents for “putting too much pressure” on him.
“The Silence That Binds Us” was inspired by Ho’s experiences as an educator and her research into the high rate of suicide amid Palo Alto teens, as well as interactions in the community, once at a dinner party of predominantly white guests and another time in a ride-sharing car. Both times, people said the same thing: that because Asian families put too much pressure on their kids, it makes it too difficult for other students to compete.
“I’m literally so invisible, people don’t see me as they’re saying these things,” she says. “The book is timely in the public perspective, but the racism and invisibility is something Asian Americans have been dealing with for a long time.”
Ho is hopeful that change is possible. She is inspired by the “insightful, hopeful, observant” youth around her, similar to May, who goes against her parents’ advice to “keep her head down” amid the hate and instead publishes her opinions about these stereotypes and ultimately mobilizes support and solidarity against the racist accusations.
“She takes back the narrative, and that’s very powerful,” she says.
Ho, who is now a librarian at East Palo Alto Academy, has nine books coming out in the next three years, including her first middle-grade novel and “One Day,” a picture book about a mother’s hope of positive masculinity for her baby boy. “One Day” is due out in March.
Lio Min, 'Beating Heart Baby'
In the young adult novel, “Beating Heart Baby” (Flatiron Books, $18), Oakland music journalist and author Lio Min cleverly weaves the worlds of anime and music into a coming-of-age story about queer teen love.
The novel, Min’s first, centers around two Los Angeles boys who find a sense of belonging in their high school marching band. There’s Santi, the artist and new kid who is navigating a world without his internet best friend. And Suwa, the prickly prodigy who is trans and working through a tumultuous relationship with his dad.
Both Asian boys are trying to find themselves when they find each other, and it is a shared history they didn’t know they had that provides the biggest, sweetest reward for readers of this lush, page-turning debut. Along the way, the novel explores issues of grief, abandonment and emotional abuse with hope and tenderness.
Its early seeds go back to a summer Min spent working as a camp counselor in Oakland and the illuminating interactions they had with kids as young as 5. Min, who identifies as trans and uses the pronouns they/them, says they wrote the book for all youth, not just those living in marginalized identities.
“I want all kids to live in a world that is a little more tender and accepting than the one we live in right now,” they say. “You can only push yourself to the future, if you can imagine there is a place for you in there.”
In the novel, which is set up as an album, with track numbers as chapters with an A-side and a B-side, Santi and Suwa find their places among the Sunshower marching band community, which, like the entire book, is filled with a diverse cast. There are trans, biracial and pansexual characters as well as Black female role models, like Santi’s loving guardian, Aya.
Min developed the characters and overall book as a novelization of shōnen anime — their second love, after music — but with an element of inclusivity that they felt has long been missing from the genre, which is marketed to adolescent males.
“Even fans of the shows will agree that girls are often ancillary to the story, their interiority is narrow and they’re not treated as well as the boys,” Min says. “I wanted to build an anime from the ground up and do it in a way that was correct to someone like me.”
