The New Oceania Literary Series

Craig Santos Perez, series editor

In the pivotal essay “Towards a New Oceania” (1976), author and editor Albert Wendt describes the artistic and literary renaissance in the Pacific during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of political decolonization. Wendt asserts that the arts enriched culture, reinforced cultural pride, and unified the region. Across decades, his books and curated anthologies—many of which were published by University of Hawaiʻi Press—highlighted the vibrant diversity of Pacific literature.

The New Oceania Literary Series continues this legacy by creating books, many of them anthologies, focused on vital and urgent themes of Pacific literature today. These books feature creative writing, literary scholarship, and pedagogical materials by multilingual voices and an intergenerational network of writers, scholars, and educators from Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and the global Pacific diaspora. Topics will include environmentalism, food, LGBTQ identity, migration, sociology, colonialism, spirituality, history, politics, science fiction, and fantasy literature.

The New Oceania Literary Series aims to inspire and empower Pacific Islanders. It strives to produce books that will be useful tools in the classroom and cherished gifts in the community, to spark civic engagement and literary activism. This series will engender fresh conversations that reach far beyond island reefs, creating the space for Pacific authors to write a new Oceania.

Interested scholars may submit queries and proposals to the series editor at csperez@hawaii.edu.

Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam). He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of San Francisco and a Ph.D. in ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of four collections of poetry, and the co-editor of three anthologies of Pacific literature. He co-founded Ala Press, the only small press publisher in the U.S. dedicated to Pacific poetry. He serves on the editorial boards of the Sun Tracks series (University of Arizona Press) and The Contemporary Pacific journal (University of Hawaiʻi Press). He works as an associate professor in the English department and as affiliate faculty with the Center for Pacific Islands Studies and the Indigenous Politics Program at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa.