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= Christopher Patterson (Kawika Guillermo) =

Christopher Patterson is an Associate Professor in the Social Justice Institute at The University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D in English from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2013. Patterson has taught at Hong Kong Baptist University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the New York Institute of Technology, Nanjing.

His research focuses on transpacific discourses surrounding literature, video games, and new media through the lens of empire studies, Asian American studies, and queer theory. Patterson's academic writings have appeared in publications such as American Literature, America Quarterly, Cultural Studies, and Games and Culture. Under his pen-name, Kawika Guillermo, he has published over forty short stories in publications including The Cimarron Review, Feminist Studies, and The Hawai’i Pacific Review . His forthcoming works include two edited collections: Transpacific, Undisciplined (University of Washington Press), co-edited with Lily Wong and Chien-ting Lin, and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press), co-edited with Tara Fickle.

Publications
In 2018, Rutgers University Press published his first book, Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific, in which Patterson considers how authors from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, as well as Southeast Asian migrants in Canada, Hawaii, and the U.S. mainland, have used English strategically as a means for building interethnic alliances and critiquing ruling power structures in both Southeast Asia and North America. Transitive Cultures won the American Studies Association’s 2020 Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies. His latest book, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games, was published by New York University Press in 2020. In it, Patterson explores video games as a medium, examining games erotically, as players do—seeing games as "Asiatic playthings" that afford new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments. Open World Empire was a runner-up for both the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award, and the 2021 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association.

He writes fiction under his matrilineal name, Kawika Guillermo. His writing style has been described as a "unique blend of personal testament [with] the objective coolness of someone observing from afar, almost detached". His short story, No Name Islands, published in Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction, was praised for its haunting, "visceral" imagery. His debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, published by Westphalia Press in 2018, won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Creative Prose and was the award-winning finalist in the Fiction: Literary category of the 2019 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest. His follow-up speculative fiction novel, All Flowers Bloom, published in 2020 also by Westphalia Press, was described in an interview with Chopsticks Alley as "a love story that spans generations, timelines, [with] no fixed gender or race as [the] protagonist chases their lover through a thousand different lives they live across time". Entropy described it as an "unapologetic discussion in analyzing the human condition". All Flowers Bloom was awarded the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel. His non-fiction novel Nimrods: a fake-punk self hurt anti-memoir published in 2023 by Duke University Press, explores the absurdities of being a newly hired professor teaching in a Social Justice Institute, and an overly-tired father haunted by the “inner ghosts of patriarchy, racial pessimism, and imperial arrogance”. Publishers Weekly has described the novel’s mixture of raw prose and poetry as an “affecting, unmistakeable narrative: one in which Guillermo catalogs his difficulties, considers their effects, …and learns to find hope anyway”.

Other Work
In 2013, he founded the podcast New Books in Asian American Studies, and in 2020, The JAAS Podcast. He serves as the Managing Editor for decomp journal, and is the current Book Review Editor for The Journal of Asian American Studies.

In 2023, his video game Stamped: an anti-travel game was released and was created with the support of Analgesic Productions and the University of British Columbia. The game is an adaptation of his debut novel Stamped: an anti-travel novel, and “follows the journeys of six young, queer and racialized travelers whose paths intersect across Asian urban landscapes”. The game allows players to engage with three different game modes: poetic interactive fiction, visual novel banter, and point-and-click travel stories and features three to four hours of playtime. The art style of the game mixes various mediums like hand-drawn images, real oil painting, digitally illustrated backgrounds, and “incredibly cute manga-style sprites”. The game is currently available to play on gaming sites such as itch.io and Steam.

Awards
His commitment to teaching was recognized in 2018 when he was awarded Hong Kong Baptist University’s Arts Faculty Early Career Teaching Award.