Born in Indonesia, writer-filmmaker Edward Gunawan grew up speaking three languages in a Chinese Buddhist household while attending Christian missionary schools in the most populous Muslim country in the world. Being gay only necessitated the departure from his family and community’s expectations to redefine for himself notions of love, belonging, and kinship. 

Blending intimately memoiristic prose with confrontational spoken-word poetics, Gunawan situates the intersectional specificity of an individual within a larger historical context to weave experiences of migration and mental wellness from a diasporic queer perspective. Foregrounding the power of solidarity and resilience in community, Gunawan’s work converses with queer writers both living and dead, from Audre Lorde and James Baldwin to Yanyi and Natalie Diaz. 

Confronting the legacy of inherited and self-inflicted traumas through direct and deceptively simple language, Gunawan's hybrid collection navigates the choppy post-colonialcross-currents of identity, sexuality, and transnationality — as he invites all of us to chart our own true course back to self, to love, to home.

Edward Gunawan Website