Kawika Guillermo w/ LeiLani Nishime, OF FLOATING ISLES

Award-winning writer and educator Kawika Guillermo discusses their memoir Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games, an immersive journey into the author’s lifelong attachment to video games, revealing how they shape us, shatter us, and give us the courage to start again. Interweaving memoir with cultural critique, Kawika Guillermo explores the subtle yet transformative influences of video games in shaping them as a queer and mixed-race grandson of two preachers; as a traveller, immigrant, and games scholar; and as a father, caregiver, and mourner. They're joined in conversation by LeiLani Nishime, a UW Professor of Communication.

Of Floating Isles is a captivating collection of personal essays that unpack the mystifying and often intimate roles that video games play in our lives.Through a mixture of fanciful musing, rigorous inquiry, and unflinching self-reflection, Of Floating Isles reframes the gamer's retreat from others not as social isolation, but as a quest for a different community, one where they feel seen, heard, and understood. This deep-seated longing to belong, Guillermo suggests, forms the imaginative worlds of video games and the floating isles they conjure.

By exploring their own lifelong attachment to video games, Guillermo shows how games can spark rage, confusion, and the desire to escape, but these emotions are not necessarily bad—they are the growing pains that many young people must work through. So too can games provide reflective realms to dwell, to imagine, and to build spaces for queer, trans, racialized, and neurodiverse groups. Envisioning games as forms of poetic interaction, Of Floating Isles boldly conveys their truth-telling powers: their ability to offer guidance in times of loss and hardship, and their power to reveal the oppressive mechanisms of our "real" world.

Kawika Guillermo (they/he) is an award-winning author of six books and a third generation Filipinx American whose family is primarily from Hawai’i and Texas. They have lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae South Korea, Nanjing China, Hong Kong, and Vancouver Canada. Their debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Creative Prose, and was adapted into a free-to-play video game, Stamped: an anti-travel game. Their follow-up speculative fiction novel, All Flowers Bloom, won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel. Their first prose-poetry book, Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir, was a Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Their most recent book, Of Floating Isles: on growing pains and video games, brazenly mixes stories of personal tragedy with cultural commentary and game analysis, revealing the transformative personal and political power of video games.

LeiLani Nishime is a Professor of Communication at the University of Washington. She is an Associate Director in the Center for Communication, Difference and Equity and the Grants Manager for the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. She has written about multiracial Asian Americans in the book Undercover Asian and edited the anthologies East Main Street, Global Asian American Popular Culture, and Racial Ecologies.

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