In my decade as a creative writing professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, I had the great fortune to advise hundreds of emerging writers. As your manuscript doula, I offer you the level of care that I gave my students: the emotional and creative support needed to finish your manuscript.

A successful mentorship relationship is borne of authenticity and respect—two people coming together over a common love of putting words on paper. We convene as writers: talking about craft, dissecting a sentence, debating the nuances of a particular word choice, and contemplating how words can make a difference in the world.

My undergraduate and graduate mentees have gone on to publish award-winning books with indie and NY presses. As a faculty member of our Creative Writing MA and PhD programs, I helped guide twenty-nine full-length manuscripts (fiction, nonfiction, poetry) to completion. For my university work, I received a Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Research and an Excellence in Teaching Award.

I also bring my experience as a prize-winning novelist. I am the author of two novels: Water Ghosts (Penguin Press, 2009) and Green Island (Knopf, 2016). Booklist called Water Ghosts “accomplished and affecting,” while The Boston Globe pronounced it a “notably assured debut.” It was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a Northern California Book Award finalist. In 2015, I was awarded the Elliot Cades Emerging Writer Award, Hawai‘i’s highest literary honor, by the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council. I received a Fulbright to live in Taiwan and research my second novel Green Island, which received an American Book Award and the Association for Asian American Studies Best Book Award, among other honors. Both of my novels are taught at a number of universities across the nation and have been the subject of academic articles and dissertations.