What to send me:

What not to send me:

I am not a good fit for hard science fiction, anything involving extraterrestrials, dystopian, YA nonfiction, memoirs, tech thrillers, books where sports are the focus (jock characters are okay!), books with animal POVs, or anything that can be described as “quiet.” I’m also not the best editor for books whose primary subjects are heavy or dense, like rape, suicide, addiction, or eating disorders (though I am okay with these as secondary or tertiary plot threads, or as thoughtful elements of character), nor am I looking for anything message-driven, or where identity shame is the primary source of conflict. While I love dark stories, I’m not a good fit for books that feature gun violence, or where the darkness is unrelenting. I’m also currently not acquiring as much straightforward contemporary YA, and prefer contemporary manuscripts that are plot-driven, high concept, or feature genre elements.

what i’m looking for:

• anything that celebrates Chinatowns, especially PB and genre, especially as it highlights Canto, Hoklo, Teochew, and Hakka diasporas (please note I am not a good fit for immigration angst narratives)

• Sino diaspora content from outside of North America—most especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia, as well as content about being an ethnic or religious minority within China or Taiwan, or being in double diaspora (e.g. Chinese-Indonesian Americans, Chinese-Malaysian Taiwanese)

• I’m also really interested in the condition of being displaced and in diaspora, being a cultural but not an ethnic minority, and how to navigate that identity (e.g. Wong Kar-wai, who was born in Shanghai and relocated to Hong Kong and grew up among Shanghainese communities in Hong Kong)

• Indigenous cyberpunk, including alternate history speculative futurism

• a YA Superstore, comedies about teens with after school or summer jobs and the absurdities of working retail and service jobs

• anything that can be comped to Riverdale, Nancy Drew (CW), Elite, or Sabrina (Netflix)

• if Byron, Shelley, or Keats would like it, so will I

• if Guillermo del Toro would like it, so will I

• dark historical fantasy about or inspired by the Hashashiyan

• cozy, slice of life fantasy—give me a tailor’s assistant scraping by on commissions from High Warlocks, a milkmaid trying to find romance while the village is under a prophesied curse, that sort of thing

• the same, but historical

• upper YA campus romance set against the backdrop of the student strikes and protests of the ‘60s and ‘70s, especially the Third World Liberation Front strike of 1968

• anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-anticommunism

• Buzzfeed Supernatural as a punchy YA/MG

• Central Asian historical + contemporary fantasy

• contemporary romance set outside of Europe and North America

• diverse historical mystery—manor houses, high tea, and murder

• well-researched retellings that engage deeply and intelligently with their source material and bring new themes and perspectives into the text—think Wide Sargasso Sea or The Penelopiad more than “legacy media property set in a different time or place”

• tragic romances with Asian ghosts, demons, sprites, monks—think Green Snake (Tsui Hark) or A Chinese Ghost Story (Ching Siu-tung)

• diverse fantasy/romance based in religious mysticism, though I’m not generally a good fit for Celtic and Norse mythologies

• anything rooted in Chinese folk culture and religion, especially pre-Han dynasty shamanism and ritual sacrifice, anything that’s set among the common folk and not the court or courtly intrigue

• Asian American political history

• these two kinds of unhealthy, toxic relationships

• anything that can be described using the term “feral gods”—”feral” and “untamed” are generally two descriptors that appeal to me in manuscripts

• cryptids, small towns, the odd, and the strange

• the monstrous, the ecastatic, the abject, the sublime

• anything with Night in the Woods vibes—weird, regional, nostalgic, atmospheric, witty, wry, culty coming-of-age with themes of nostalgia, stagnation, growth, surviving the ennui and alienation of late capitalism, and letting go, featuring a mentally ill protagonist with an alternate college experience and some light cosmic horror

• weirdcore, Appalachian Gothic, Southern Gothic, Southwestern Gothic (but nothing extraterrestrial, think more along the lines of skinwalkers and Welcome to Night Vale)

• strong anti-war and anti-colonial themes

• dark Americana vibes, the coy, self-conscious, satirical, tragicomic performance of apple pie-Americanness, think Born to Die-era Lana del Rey or Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain

• Hozier vibes, motifs of finding the divinity and sublimity within the corporal and the carnal, the mortification of all-consuming love

• love, but it’s Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (religion as a carnal act, sex as a religious act)

• anything that toes the line between divinity and monstrosity

• zany, weird, hilariously vulgar apocalypse stories in the vein of Daybreak

• dark academia (but think Deadly Class more than Donna Tartt, though I could be convinced of the latter too)

• cloistered communities and characters (small towns, cults, etc.)

• in book form, the story that Promising Young Woman could have been but wasn't (bloody, angry, vengeful, sharp, satirical)

• Silk Road fantasies, emphasising themes of Afro-Asian and inter- and intra-continental connection, exchange, and trade

• Books about classical antiquity that recognize & affirm Greco-Roman interconnectedness with North Africa and West Asia

• campy, feminist takes on female villainy and sociopathy, à la The Love Witch

• nuanced, honest takes on female historical figures with complicated legacies—I don’t want reductive narratives of whitewashed girlboss apologia that sands down any hard corners, but rather morally grey stories that allow women to exist as fully fleshed human beings and asserts room for them to be bad, bloodthirsty, perverse, power-hungry, ambitious, unapologetic, destructive, vile, patriarchal, corrupt, and unpalatable, yet still not undeserving of sympathy

• historical thriller/mystery set in African or Asian academic institutions (madaris in the SWANA region, for example, or the Hanlin Academy)

• fallen angels (in the strictest Biblical sense) and the aesthetics of blasphemy, the desire to be better than you are but sinking to ever-lower depths to achieve it

• I would love to see a middle grade or picture book that takes on McCarthyism and HUAC, the Hollywood Ten, the Waldorf Statement, etc.

• girls who SUCK