At this intimate Live from the Atherton event, two Native Hawaiian short story writers discussed the beauty, challenges, and possibilities of the short story form. How does a writer balance concision and expansion? What makes for memorable characters? And how can the short story form address our contemporary moment in Hawai‘i? Kakimoto and Kahakauwila offered brief readings from their work, engaged in conversation, and welcomed questions from the audience, before concluding with a book signing.
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the Kanaka Maoli author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare(Bloomsbury 2023), a USA Today national bestseller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Joyland, and elsewhere. Named a Fall 2023 “Writer to Watch” by Publisher’s Weekly, she has received the “Author Under 35” Award by the HONOLULU Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature. Her work has been supported by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tin House Winter Workshop. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and is an Affiliate Faculty in Fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles and a Lecturer in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. A Fiction Editor for No Tokens journal, she lives in Honolulu.
Instagram @megankkakimoto
Bluesky @megankkakimoto.bsky.social
Kristiana Kahakauwila is a Kanaka Maoli writer known for her award-winning books This Is Paradise: Stories and Clairboyance, a novel for middle-grade readers. Recently, Clairboyance was selected as a 2025 Honor Book for Children’s Literature by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association. Kristiana earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. She has held faculty positions at Western Washington University, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Chaminade University of Honolulu, and she was a Lisa Goldberg Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Since 2020, she has taught in the Department of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa where she directs the creative writing program.
Instagram @kkahakauwila
The 2025 Live from the Atherton: Storytellersʻ Series was produced by Kyla Herrmann with audio production and post-production by Ananddev Banerjee. The broadcast of this event was produced by Russell Subiono.
