Kristiana Kahakauwila

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Kristiana Kahakauwila is the author of This Is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth, 2013), which is set in contemporary Hawaiʻi. An assistant professor of creative writing at Western Washington University and an instructor in the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Oregon State University-Cascades, she is interested in Oceanic literature and indigenous studies as well as in creative writing.

At Radcliffe, Kahakauwila is working on a historical novel, a multigenerational family saga set against the fight for water and native rights on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

Kahakauwila earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and a BA in comparative literature from Princeton University. Her work has appeared in Off the Path Volume II: An Anthology of 21st Century American Indian and Indigenous Writers (Off the Pass Press, 2015) and in the journals GEO and Mission at Tenth, among others. She was the Jane Tinkham Broughton Fellow in Fiction at the 2013 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and more recently has received residencies from the BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California. This Is Paradise was short-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and named a 2013 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection.