Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the Japanese and Kanaka ʻŌiwi author of Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury 2023), a USA Today national bestseller. She is the recipient of the 2025 Elliot Cades Award for Literature for Emerging Artist from the Hawaiʻi Literary Arts Council and the “Author Under 35” Award by the HONOLULU Book Awards. Named a Fall 2023 “Writer to Watch” by Publisher’s Weekly, she has also been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bon Appétit, Granta, Joyland, and elsewhere. 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 and at Honolulu Community College. A Fiction Editor for No Tokens journal, she lives in Honolulu.
- MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction (secondary concentration in Screenwriting) from the Michener Center for Writers, University of Texas at Austin, TX
- BA in English (Honors) from Dartmouth College
As a teacher, I seek to bring inclusion and diversity to the forefront of my classes. I encourage open dialogue, honest conversation, and a curriculum that draws on diverse authors and texts so that every student feels valued and seen. My goal is to help new writers identify and hone their personal voice, style, and approach to writing by studying authors they admire and with whom they feel their work is in conversation. In creative writing workshops, I meet each student’s work with equal parts rigor and respect, and I encourage the class to consider the question of “the reader” for each individual writer so as to approach the story on its own terms. Ultimately, I encourage writers to lean away from “finding” an audience for their work and writing toward an audience whose thoughts matter to them.
- Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare Bloomsbury Publishing, U.S. rights, Granta Books, UK rights
- “‘Our Hawaiian stories are not meant to be easy for you’: Megan Kamalei Kakimoto on telling her ancestral tales,” The Guardian
- “Touch Me Like One of Your Island Girls: A Love Story,” Granta
- “Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare,” Joyland
- “The Love & Decline of the Corpse Flower,” Black Warrior Review 48.1
- “Leaving Cynthia,” Conjunctions, 76
- USA Today Bestseller, Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare
- Summer/Fall 2023 Indies Introduce, American Booksellers Association, Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare
- September Indie Next, American Booksellers Association, Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare
- Keene Prize in Literature, Finalist, College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin