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Advanced Praise for Mixed Roots:

“I was moved beyond words from the first pages of this book and by every essay that followed. An unprecedented ode to the wide range of mixed-root experiences and what is shared across difference. Required reading for anyone who has ever been asked what are you? I want everyone to read this.”  

—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood and The Dry Season

“Each writer within this anthology boldly charts their own path to belonging. But the true magic forms in the broader chorus, where voices who have never felt a ‘we’ write themselves into collective lineage… This anthology is a gift for anyone who lives within the both/and.”

  —Tessa Hulls, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and artist of Feeding Ghosts

 “I adore this book! HUMAN BEINGS - we are all at home in these pages, making new friends as infinitely rich in variations as we have always felt. Why fear the mixtures?”

—Naomi Shihab Nye, award-winning poet and author of Sidekick

  “Evocative, nuanced, and brimming with heart, Mixed Roots illuminates the mixed-race experience in all its kaleidoscopic wonder. This collection takes the familiar quandary of never feeling ‘enough’ and offers something far less commonplace: In these stories, I felt like I’d come home.”

  —Daniel Tam-Claiborne, author of Transplants

  "I read Mixed Roots with wondrous recognition of how our collective awareness can forge future connection out of historical displacement.”

— Kristen Millares Young, author of Desire Lines and Subduction

“Mixed Roots meets individuals at all points of the journey to understand one's multi-racial identity and root out internalized racism and anti-Blackness… Anne Liu Kellor has curated with care a collection of voices eager to join the growing conversation about the fluid nature of race and identity.”

— Minda Honey, author of The Heartbreak Years

“This anthology is for us — the Both/And, the defiantly uncategorizable. A chorus of multiracial voices — including writers of nonwhite mixed heritage and transracial adoptees — moves through absences and questions, toward the weaving together of countless parts, into the reckoning of ancestry and belonging. Identity here is plural, nonbinary, and radically whole. This book IS a beautiful community.” 

- Susan Kiyo Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere

“Whatever confusion or ache you’ve experienced, residing in the land of in-between, you will find camaraderie within these pages. An existential homecoming for the soul.”  

—Stephanie Elizondo Griest, author of Mexican Enough and Art Above Everything

29 Contributors:

Keliko K. M. Adams is a writer, artist, and educator from Wahiawā, Hawai‘i, now based in the Pacific Northwest. She has a Master’s in Education and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. She was a 2025 Fellow with the Center for Arts and Social Justice at VCFA.

Faith Adiele is the author of Meeting Faith, which won a PEN memoir award; My Journey Home, a PBS documentary about finding her Nigerian father and siblings; and 4 hybrid chapbooks about her Afro-Nordic identity. She has written for HBO, Calm, Oprah Magazine, Essence, among others, and teaches around the world.

Rabha Ashry is an Egyptian immigrant, who grew up in Abu Dhabi, and is now based in Chicago. The recipient of the Brunel International Poetry Prize 2020, she is the author of the chapbooks Loving the Alien (2021) and Grief and Ecstasy (2023). Rabha writes in a hybrid of memoir/poetic forms about exile, family, belonging, mental illness, queerness, and home. She teaches at DePaul University and her memoir, Hope You Still Love Me, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project in 2027.

Karine Bell, founder of Rooted Global Village, is a somatics educator, practitioner, scholar-activist, and clown-in-training. A PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, she explores decolonial depth psychology and ecologies of care, weaving somatics, liberation, and indigenous and eco-psychologies into her work.

Samantha Chagollan is a writer of mixed Mexican American descent living in southern California. Her work has been featured in Alebrijes Review, Latin@ Literatures, Yellow Arrow Journal, and the anthologies Nonwhite and Woman and The COVID Monologues. She is currently writing Homesick, a memoir.

Dawn Noel Chen is a writer and mother who lives in Tucson, Arizona. She is at work on a mystery novel set in the San Juan Islands. Its mixed-race protagonist inspired her to explore her own mixed-roots story. 

Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award, and Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War.  She is Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. 

Rebecca Delacruz-Gunderson is a Filipina and white Seattleite who loves teaching English and reading with her cats. Fifth generation Washingtonian on her dad's side and the first born in the US in her mom's family, she is interested in ambiguity and diaspora, especially after living abroad in Singapore and Canada.

Alayna Erhart is a mixed-race artist whose mediums of filmmaking, photography, and writing are guided by her conviction to celebrate the bold, brave, and tender truths that make us human. She's currently developing the manuscript for her memoir––an interrogation of emotional inheritance, intergenerational assimilation, and finding her inner light in an implausible place. 

Malaka Gharib is a Filipino Egyptian American journalist, cartoonist and graphic novelist. She is the author of the graphic memoirs "I Was Their American Dream," winner of an Arab American Book Award, and "It Won't Always Be Like This." She is an editor at the NPR podcast Life Kit.

Elisabeth Vasquez Hein is a Filipina American writer and photographic artist based in Seattle. Influenced by her upbringing in disparate geographies, Elisabeth’s work explores displacement, in-betweenness, and belonging. She is a 2025 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow, and her writing can be found in CRAFT, the Pinch, Bellingham Review, Silk Road Review, and Salt Hill Journal.

Joemy Ito-Gates she/her, is a mother and Ethnic Studies educator based in the Bay Area on unceded Ohlone land. She has been a public educator for over twenty years and helped to co-found a summer program in 2004 called Fusion Camp, for Multiracial and transracially raised children of color.

Hei Kyong Kim is a transracial adoptee from South Korea, a psychologist/healer, and a writer. Her work can be found in numerous journals and anthologies, including Outsiders Within, How Dare We! Write, and The World I Leave You.  The Translation of Han is her first book of prose and poetry. 

Leticia H. Lopez is an emerging writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Brian, and animal children: Lola, Benny and Juno. Her professional and creative background includes non-profit administration, sexuality education, youth development and theatre. She is working on a memoir. www.thelopezianway.com

Shannon Luders-Manuel is the author of The One Who Loves You: A Memoir of Growing Up Biracial in a Black and White World (Lawrence Hill Books). She holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for such publications as the LA Times and the New York Times. 

Steve Majors is the author of High Yella: A Modern Family Memoir and the forthcoming essay collection Man Made: In Search of Dads, Daddies, Father Figures and Fatherhood (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). His essays have been published in outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, CNN.com and NBC Think.

Jeannie Messer lives with her family on Gadigal Land, Sydney, Australia. She is a speechwriter and linguist whose writing explores language loss, literacy, and history and reflects a deep interest in the connections between language, culture, and the past.

Donna Miscolta is the author of three books of fiction. Her fourth, the novel Ofelia and Norma, will be published in 2026. She has received an Independent Publishers Award, three International Latino Book Awards, and a Next Generation Indie Book Award. She was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

Leslie V. Nguyen-Okwu is the author of the forthcoming memoir American Hyphen, exploring borders and belonging as a first-generation Vietnamese Nigerian American. A Stanford and Harvard-educated journalist, her career covering displacement, statelessness, and contested homelands, with bylines in The New York Times and National Geographic, shapes her storytelling.

Dr. Leticia Nieto immigrated from Mexico to the U.S. Trained in theatre, human development, and clinical psychology, she was a counseling and leadership graduate professor, sharing a model for intersectional transformative liberation in her book, Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment. Now she works as a leadership coach, psychotherapist, and educator, using action methods such as psychodrama/expressive arts.

Savala Nolan is the author of Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body and Good Woman: A Reckoning. Her writing has appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Time, and more. She directs the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley.  

Jordynn L. Paz is Apsaalooké from Garryowen, MT on the Crow Reservation. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism & Native American Studies from the University of Montana. Her passion is Indigenous storytelling and writing for her people. She extends deep gratitude to those who have prayed for and supported her work over the years. 

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of Paper Cotton Leather, Malak, and Dear Outsiders and is the co-author of Book of Levitations. Her prose has appeared in The Rumpus, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, and others. She co-founded and co-edits Josephine Quarterly and teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University.

Jeremy O. Simer’s memoir in progress is about reconnecting with his Turkish heritage while navigating a tumultuous relationship with his narcissistic father, who quite possibly worked for the CIA. He works as a strategic researcher for a labor union and lives with his family in Portland, Oregon.

TaRessa Stovall is a multiplatform writer tackling mixed and intersectional identities, anti-racism, and anti-colorism. Her new memoir, Swirl Girl: Coming of Race in the USA, reveals how she forged her identity on her own terms. TaRessa blogs at Mixed Auntie Confidential and is active on IG as @taressatalks.

Elizabeth Su is the author and creator of The Everyday Millennial Oracle and The Adventure Tarot (AMU/Simon & Schuster). She earned her master’s in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University where she researched burnout and perfectionism. She’s spoken at The Washington Post and featured in the Los Angeles Times, POPSUGAR, and Bustle. @heyelizabethsu

Terra Trevor is the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press). She is a contributor to fifteen books in Native American Indigenous studies. Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Lenape, and Seneca, her stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, and shaped by her identity as a mixed-blood. 

Miyo Tubridy is a Queer, mixed-race Japanese American and Irish American writer, storyteller, and educator. She was born and raised in Seattle, WA and now lives in Harlem, NY with her child.

Ben Zaidi is a mixed-race writer & artist from an island near Seattle. At 17 his songs caught the attention of local labels and Harvard University, where he studied poetry and played punk-rap shows in myriad basements. He currently writes songs and produces albums for others from his home in LA.

The Story Behind Mixed Roots:

This anthology was born of community. In 2019, Anne Liu Kellor first offered a workshop for multiracial writers called Shapeshifting: Reading and Writing the Mixed-Race Experience, and later renamed Both/And. As she continued to offer annual iterations of this workshop, she realized that most multiracial people had never been in spaces created exclusively for them, and were hungry to interrogate their individual and collective experiences. Many mixed folks have struggled with knowing where we fall in racial conversations and have felt silenced about understanding, sharing, or embracing our full identity. With silencing comes shame and missed opportunities to fully take part in the movement towards racial reckoning and justice.

Inspired by the conversations and essays being birthed within intimate learning spaces, Anne got the idea to curate an anthology, soliciting work both from her former students and from established writers. Several years later, Mixed Roots found a home with Beacon Press, which has a long history of publishing works in the social justice field. The writers in this anthology are thrilled to share their work with the world, both in these pages and in a series of group readings planned for 2026-2027 in the Seattle area, Tacoma, Portland, the Bay Area, LA, Chicago, online, and beyond.

Stay tuned or subscribe to learn more as dates are announced, and come join the conversation!

SAVE THE DATE FOR THE IN PERSON LAUNCH ON 10.15.26 AT THIRD PLACE BOOKS, LAKE FOREST PARK, REGISTRATION LINK TO COME!