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Messy Roots:
“Messy Roots is a laugh-out-loud, heartfelt, and deeply engaging story of their journey to find themself--as an American, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, as a queer person, and as a Wuhanese American in the middle of a pandemic.”—Malaka Gharib, author of I Was Their American Dream
After spending her early years in Wuhan, China, riding water buffalos and devouring stinky tofu, Laura immigrates to Texas, where her hometown is as foreign as Mars—at least until 2020, when COVID-19 makes Wuhan a household name.
In Messy Roots, Laura illustrates her coming-of-age as the girl who simply wants to make the basketball team, escape Chinese school, and figure out why girls make her heart flutter.
Insightful, original, and hilarious, toggling seamlessly between past and present, China and America, Gao’s debut is a tour de force of graphic storytelling.
Beast At Every Threshold:
An unflinching shapeshifter, Beast at Every Threshold dances between familial hauntings and cultural histories, intimate hungers and broader griefs. Memories become malleable, pop culture provides a backdrop to glittery queer love, and folklore speaks back as a radical tool of survival. With unapologetic precision, Natalie Wee unravels constructs of “otherness” and names language our most familiar weapon, illuminating the intersections of queerness, diaspora, and loss with obsessive, inexhaustible ferocity—and in resurrecting the self rendered a site of violence, makes visible the “Beast at Every Threshold.”
Beguiling and deeply imagined, Wee’s poems explore thresholds of marginality, queerness, immigration, nationhood, and reinvention of the self through myth.
Laura Gao is a queer artist, author, bread lover, and continental drifter. Originally from Wuhan, China, Gao immigrated to Texas where their fondness for pecan pie stood unmatched by none other than salted egg yolk mooncakes. Gao's art career began by doodling on Pokémon cards and has since blossomed to be featured on NPR, the New York Times, the Museum of Chinese in American, and most notably, their parents’ fridge. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Gao worked as a Product Manager in San Francisco until April 2020, when in response to anti-Asian racism and rampant misinformation about their hometown, they published a webcomic, "The Wuhan I Know", on Twitter where it went viral. The comic inspired their bestselling debut graphic memoir, MESSY ROOTS, which was published in March 2022 with HarperCollins and has since garnered three starred reviews, been featured in NPR and the New York Times, and is shortlisted for the Harvey Awards, Indies Next List, Indies Introduce List, and the Texas Maverick List. Besides drawing and fending off early-onset back pain, Gao enjoys biking through Ghibli-esque worlds and binging SNL.
Erin Jin Mei O’Malley is a queer Asian adoptee writer who is based in New York. They have received nominations for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, and their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Nashville Review, The Margins, The Shade Journal, and others. They are a Roots. Wounds. Words. and Lambda Literary Fellow.
Natalie Wee is a queer creator whose work explores themes of race, gender, queerness, and nationhood, and is deeply informed by grassroots communities. She wrote two poetry collections, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (San Press, 2021) and Beast At Every Threshold (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). Born in Singapore to Malaysian parents, Natalie is currently a settler in Tkaronto. Learn more at https://natalieweewrites.com/.