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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

...Have I mentioned the humor? Because despite tackling heavy topics, this thoughtful and well researched book is delightfully engaging, and one I highly recommend readers check out.”

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

“[USoR] really isn’t only one of the best books I’ve read this year, but it’s also one of the most important. It’s about personal and political rejection, the impact that has on individuals and groups of people, and challenges the narrative that rejection makes us resilient....

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Thanks SO MUCH to @chicagorevbooks.bsky.social for including UNITED STATES OF REJECTION on its “Our Favorite Books of 2026 (So Far)” list!!! Thanks for reading it with such care! Link below: chireviewofbooks.com/2026/07/07/o...

“[USoR] really isn’t only one of the best books I’ve read this year, but it’s also one of the most important. It’s about personal and political rejection, the impact that has on individuals and groups of people, and challenges the narrative that rejection makes us resilient. Have I mentioned the humor? Because despite tackling heavy topics, this thoughtful and well researched book is delightfully engaging, and one I highly recommend readers check out.”

Chicago Review of Books: "Our Favorite Books of 2026 (So Far)"
By Editorial Staff
July 7, 2026
At the halfway point of the year, CHIRB editors pick their favorite books so far

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

So sorry about the inconvenience, especially to Green Apple and to the other writers, who were going to be fantastic.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I'm so sorry to have to cancel what was going to be a great reading with amazing writers at Green Apple Books in San Francisco on Monday! I've been sick for a few weeks, but the last few days have been horrible, and I can't sit in an airport, let alone fly.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Next week in San Francisco, a group reading to celebrate the launch of my book UNITED STATES OF REJECTION with @tdorabji.bsky.social @xtinehlee.bsky.social @gracelp.bsky.social & Joyce E. Young! Tuesday, June 30 (7pm) Green Apple @booksonthepark.bsky.social , 1231 9th Ave. RSVP link below!

Green Apple Books presents: Alison Kinney, UNITED STATES OF REJECTION, featuring: Tara Dorabji, Christine H. Lee, Grace Loh Prasad & Joyce E. Young. Tuesday, June 30, 7pm. 1231 9th Ave (Inner Sunset). RSVP at Greenapplebooks.com

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Reposted by Alison Kinney

KQED Forum @kqedforum.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

🎙️ON AIR: We're talking to @alisonkinney.bsky.social about the power dynamic behind rejection. Her new book is “United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope." ❓Have you experienced a rejection that felt unjust or political? 📻 Listen:

buff.ly

It’s Not Personal: When Rejection Gets Political | KQED

Beyond the personal experience of rejection is a power dynamic worth interrogating, argues author Alison Kinney.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

online and in real life bc there's my body and then there's your body, and I don't think anybody's coming over tonight."

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Keeps rum rumming It's summer, I think, and I hate nature bc every poem is like Poplars and Bunch Grasses and Peonies and shit, but the East River is ambling outside my window like holding hands with Stevie Nicks: so beautiful right, but also deafening, and kinda scary, and I feel small

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

I especially loved this section pointing to his next book: "There is a barb of feathers caught in the February of my throat. It's summer, I think. The bird calls in my belly vibrate to smoke, and snuff. I want to be normal enough to fuck. Muse stops texting, the B43 hits a pothole

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Having loved Tommy Pico's NATURE POEM, I went back to read his first book, IRL. I highlighted so many moments (odyssey across Williamsburg, horrid bar conversation, Brooklyn backyard fireworks party that yields moonwalking and his grandmother and the residential schools).

Cover of Tommy Pico's IRL with award stickers and photo collage portrait?

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Reposted by Alison Kinney

Gabriel Liston @lastwater.net · 06/10/2025

Was painting. Got sidetracked by pastels and kaiju.

A rough, bright pastel sketch of trump from a video, mouth open, palms out, probably saying something about Portland burning, as the inflatable-suit frog from the Portland ICE protests looms up close behind him.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

With that said, if you want to be reminded that the two little serviceberry trees in your backyard are not only vibrant and alive, but also part of a whole community in which you're participating, you'll be glad. Thanks as always to Quinn who introduced me to Kimmerer's work!

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

For those who haven't read her work yet, start with one of the full-length books! SERVICEBERRY is an expansion of her thoughts on Indigenous-led environmental stewardship, anti-capitalism, and gift economy, but it's building on, not introducing.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Kimmerer's BRAIDING SWEETGRASS is the book that's made the most profound change in the past ten years of my life, shifting me from a passive to engaged environmentalist, causing me to start working on rebuilding my own built environment, and inspiring me to start my plant biology classes.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

"It is a cannibal, whose hunger is never sated, eating through the world. Windigo thinking jeopardizes the survival of the community by incentivizing individual accumulation far beyond the satisfaction of 'enoughness.'"

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

"The Indigenous philosophy of the gift economy, based in our responsibility to pass on those gifts, has no tolerance for creating artificial scarcity through hoarding. In fact, the 'monster' in Potawatomi culture is Windigo, who suffers from the illness of taking too much and sharing too little....

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

I thought I'd posted about reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's THE SERVICEBERRY, but I hadn't, so just in time for Indigenous Peoples' Day, here was the first book I read this past summer, as soon as I could rest from other obligations!

cover of Robin Wall Kimmerer's book the serviceberry: ecru rough paper with illustration of cedar waxwings eating ripe berries on branches.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

"To stretch as far as I can go and relish what is satisfying rather than what is sad. Building a strong and elegant pathway toward transition."

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

"But in their place, another kind of power is growing, tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing. An open-eyed assessment and appreciation of what I can and do accomplish, using who I am and who I most wish myself to be.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

"Living with cancer has forced me to consciously jettison the myth of omnipotence, of believing—or loosely asserting—that I can do anything, along with any dangerous illusion of immortality. Neither of these unscrutinized defenses is a solid base for either political activism or personal struggle.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

I also wanted them to be able to recognize and critique the co-optation of self-care for capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, divorcing it from community, service, and action. Lorde's vision of self-care was: "I am saving my life by using my life in the service of what must be done."

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Today in book joy: For years I've been assigning Audre Lorde's epilogue to her collection, A BURST OF LIGHT AND OTHER ESSAYS; I wanted my students to know who first defined self-care--"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."

cover of "A Burst of Light and Other Essays," a color drawing portrait of Audre Lorde

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Eggs. Pencils. Undershirts of very soft cotton. Ribbons. Radios. Shining flashlights. Handmade clay plates. Chocolates. Really soft pillows. Baskets. Bracelets. Running shoes."

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

or nicer? I have no idea. But sometimes I wonder what 38 billion dollars could buy, instead of weapons aimed against us and this is what comes to mind:

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

"It’s hard to grasp very big numbers and distant concepts. Like imagining what all our thoughts might have been if we lived 300 years ago. Would they be centered on a goat or six rocks piled together or would they be wide as they are now? In those long-ago days, would people be meaner to one another

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

"Why can't they see how beautiful we are? The saddest part? We all could have had twice as many friends." If you can keep reading after that, then there's this, a reminder that the systemic denigration and devaluation of Palestinian people's lives began long before the most recent war.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Today in book joy (and heartbreak): It's hard to choose among all the heartbreaks in Naomi Shihab Nye's 2019 THE TINY JOURNALIST. In the poem "Janna," "At 7, making videos. /At 10, raising the truth flag," Nye writes in the voice of the eponymous tiny journalist:

Book cover for Naomi Shihab Nye's THE TINY JOURNALIST: POEMS: an impressionistic cityscape, maybe Mediterranean, maybe, who knows, Texan?

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

"This is my motherhood legacy. "I will never be a mother. But I will always be my grandmother's child."

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

"She encouraged my writing long before I ever published a single word. Granny taught me compassion and how to care for others--whether I birthed them or not; whether they are related to me by blood or not. Her mothering prepared me to mother her when she developed Alzheimer's disease.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

"Granny knew me well, even the parts of me I didn't discuss with her.... She didn't try to scare me into motherhood by telling me I'd regret not having children and wouldn't have anyone to care for me when I'm old. Instead, she championed my educational and professional goals....

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

Savage's memoirs are embedded within clear-eyed arguments and assessments of power, self-definition, and world-building. She makes the work possible through her exact and exacting literary and ethical sensibilities, which she expresses through the equally hard work of complicated love.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

Today in book joy: When I finally read Jodi Savage's essay collection THE DEATH OF A JAYBIRD this summer, I was struck over and over by the craft. The entire work is incisive, witty, unflinchingly honest, and just as unflinchingly, deeply compassionate, without a trace of sentimentality.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

and promised to write, even though we knew we never would, silver mirrors given to us by our mothers, whose last words still rang in our ears. You will see: women are weak, but mothers are strong."

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

dolls we had slept with since we were five, bags of brown sugar with which to buy favors, bright cloth quilts, paper fans, English phrase books, flowered silk sashes, smooth black stones from the river that ran behind our house, a lock of hair from a boy we had once touched, and loved...

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

white silk kimonos for our wedding night, colorful cotton kimonos for everyday wear, plain cotton kimonos for when we grew old, calligraphy brushes, thick black sticks of ink, thin sheets of rice paper on which to write long letters home, tiny brass Buddhas, ivory statues of the fox god...

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

The novel is gorgeous and harrowing (CN for the second chapter, entirely about rape), full of tender and humorous details and trenchant observations of misogyny, violence, white supremacy, xenophobia. "On the boat we carried with us in our trunks all the things we would need for our new lives:

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

I love the first person plural suggestive of so many different kinds of early 20C Japanese American women's experiences, and the bookending of the picture brides' trunks so hopefully packed for new beginnings, with the destruction of communities, with belongings reduced to one suitcase per person.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Today in book joy: I've been teaching the first chapter of Julie Otsuka's THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC in my Bodies of Water course for the first of two units on border crossings and immigration; this summer I devoured the whole novel over two evenings.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

Just an everyday Pedro in the Americas."

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

I let myself throw tantrums on occasion, I overindulge in cartoons, I fantasize and strategize and theorize about the world much like a child would, a child full of enthusiasm, hope, and the profound need to keep on imagining more caring, more thoughtful, worlds.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

I'm no longer *that* boy but I'm still a boy at the end of the day because I want to be, because I have been robbed of my boyhood, of my ability to just be a boy.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

...I am no longer the eight-year-old boy who feels ashamed of who he calls family and where that family originates from. I am no longer the twenty-one-year-old boy who wanted to bleed into the whiteness of twenty-first-century New York City.

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Alison Kinney @alisonkinney.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

Forgetting how these Americas were and are shaped by revolutions and massacres and enslavement and protest and uprisings. Forgetting the local contexts of resistance shaping every corner of this geography, no matter how white, cisgender, heterosexual, or patriarchal they may appear.

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