Today we are very excited to share an interview with author Kao Kalia Yang!
Read on to learn more about the author, the book, and a giveaway!
Meet the Author: Kao Kalia Yang
Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer. She is the author of the adult memoirs The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, The Song Poet, and Somewhere in the Unknown World. Yang is also the author of the children’s books A Map Into the World, The Shared Room, The Most Beautiful Thing, and Yang Warriors. Her work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the PEN USA literary awards, the Dayton’s Literary Peace Prize, the American Library Association, Kirkus Best Books of the Year, the Heartland Bookseller’s Award, and has garnered four Minnesota Book Awards. Kao Kalia Yang lives in Minnesota with her family, and teaches and speaks across the nation.
Website * X * Instagram * Facebook
About the Book: THE DIAMOND EXPLORER
From APALA-winning author and Guggenheim Fellow Kao Kalia Yang, a middle-grade debut about a Hmong American boy’s struggle to find a place for himself in America and in the world of his ancestors.
Malcolm is the youngest child of Hmong refugees, and he was born over a decade after his youngest sibling, giving him a unique perspective on his complicated immigrant family.
In the first part of the story, we meet Malcolm as an elementary school kid through the eyes of the adults in his life—his parents and siblings, but also the white teachers at his Minnesota schools. As middle school begins, we encounter Malcolm in his own words, and suddenly we see that this “quiet, slow Hmong boy” is anything but. Malcolm is a gifted collector of his family’s stories and tireless seeker of his own place within an evolving Hmong American culture, and his journey toward becoming a shaman like his grandparents before him is inspiring and revelatory.
~Author Chat~
YABC: What gave you the inspiration to write this book?
I found my inspiration for this book in a boy I know, a boy full of questions, a boy whose questions our world had no clear answers for, a boy who has become a young man who is lost, not to the world, but himself.
YABC: Who is your favorite character in the book?
My favorite character in this book is Pog. Pog whose legacy Malcolm inherits.
YABC: Which came first, the title or the novel?
The title.
YABC: What scene in the book are you most proud of, and why?
I feel tender about the moment when Malcolm sees the night fires across the dark and he comes upon the group, his siblings now all old, sitting there waiting with an empty seat, filled with fear and hope, and the realization that he has found them.
YABC: Thinking way back to the beginning, what’s the most important thing you’ve learned as a writer from then to now?
Kao Kalia Yang, you will learn how to write yourself into being on many pages, across many books, and in the process, you will flounder and float, and learn that you will go on many great journeys in the pursuit of this one, that you will die many deaths so that you might live again and again.
YABC: What do you like most about the cover of the book?
I love the Minnesota prairie at the bottom of the cover, a single path leading to that house of dreams, that house of beginnings and endings, that little house that can never hold in the child that will rise forth.
YABC: What’s a book you’ve recently read and loved?
I got a great deal from Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard; it was a wonderful and necessary reminder of the power of clean language and an enduring story.
YABC: What’s up next for you?
A Christmas book that we will push forth for next year, 2025, titled The Christmas Coat.
YABC: Which was the most difficult or emotional scene to narrate?
The part where Malcolm’s grandfather is murdered was challenging to write because it existed first on the page as a simple story, a fact, but then must become Malcolm’s grandmother’s reality, a memory that she must carry forward. It was emotionally challenging to unravel, to network the traumas across generations, to somehow let life progress after such a death.
YABC: Which character gave you the most trouble when writing your latest book?
Curly. Curly has to come to the reader only via stories. Malcolm has never met Curly. It would be easy for him to judge her but he can’t; to judge her would be to unsee/unhear/unknow all that will be revealed.
YABC: What is the main message or lesson you would like your reader to remember from this book?
Everybody thinks they know where you belong but they can’t until you do, and that is a journey of a lifetime, not a moment, not a given story, not a found truth, each of these is only a stepping stone to the place where you stand, sit, sleep, dream.
YABC: What would you say is your superpower?
I am skilled at anticipating and not expecting.
YABC: Is there an organization or cause that is close to your heart?
Yes, refugees. We live in a world fraught with wars, a world where stories end long before they can begin. I was a refugee kid; that kid is the fuel for my writer’s heart.
YABC: What advice do you have for new writers?
Write however you need to write until the story is told.
Title: THE DIAMOND EXPLORER
Author: Kao Kalia Yang
Release Date: September 17, 2024
Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers
ISBN-10: 1984816330
ISBN-13: 9781984816337
Genre: Middle Grade Fiction
Age Range: 10 and up
~ Giveaway Details ~
Three (3) winners will receive a copy of THE DIAMOND EXPLORER (Kao Kalia Yang) ~US Only!
*Click the Rafflecopter link below to enter the giveaway*
