Please join us at Loyalty Books for a virtual event with authors Alexander Chee and Joseph Trinidad to celebrate Trinidad's award winning essay collection, Lucky Creatures, out now from favorite Independent Press Saraband Books.

This gorgeous essay collection brings together family obligation, joyful memory, and the scary next adventures with a level of heart and humor rare in a debut collection.

Winner of the inaugural 2024 Sarabande Prize in the Essay, selected by Alexander Chee and excerpted in Adi Magazine

Lucky Creatures is a bold and playful collection about rebuilding life after migration, queerness and the transnational experience for readers of Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness

In his debut essay collection, award-winning Filipino-Kiwi essayist Joseph Trinidad explores the lessons of his grandmother's chicken farm and his grandfather's lucky fish, Ara the golden arowana; the vibrancy of his home country and its rites of passage such as tuli, beauty pageants, and national Boy Scout jamborees; the contradictions of Aotearoa-New Zealand, his adopted country, which demands his family's labour and insists that they leave their mother tongues at the border; and his own journey of coming out, along with the hard work of actualization that follows as he and his partner grapple with the desire to have a baby.
Inspired by the creatures of Filipino folktales and immigrant touchstones such as FaceTime and "that one cousin from the States," Lucky Creatures answers every immigrant's question: "Was the move worth it?" Each resulting essay is an unforgettable exploration of life as a queer, Brown, transnational hybrid--filled with warmth, grace, and humour of the lucky creatures who can hear the call of home.

Joseph Trinidad is a Filipino writer who lives in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington. Lucky Creatures, his debut essay collection, was selected by Alexander Chee as winner of the inaugural 2024 Sarabande Prize in the Essay. His work has been featured in Landfall, North & South, Te Papa, The Spinoff, Turbine | Kapohau, and Migrant Zine Collective. He is the winner of the 2023 Adam Foundation Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters and the 2023 Asian Ink from Playmarket.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Mariner Books. A contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022. He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.

Joseph Trinidad & Alexander Chee for Lucky Creatures