Wendy Chin-Tanner

2025 LOUISIANA LITERARY AWARD WINNER - BEST BOOK OF SUMMER 2023: The Boston Globe, Deep South Magazine, Ms. Magazine, BookRiot - TOP 20 BOOKS OF 2023: BookBrowse "Brilliant, absorbing, and powerfully moving." --Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild " A] gripping and tenderly executed drama." --The New York Times A novel about family, love, and belonging, set against the backdrops of 1950s New York City and Louisiana, following one young man's quest to survive an often misunderstood disease, and find love, music, and himself, in the process. Victor Chin's life is turned upside down at the tender age of 15. Diagnosed with Hansen's disease, otherwise known as leprosy, he's forced to leave the familiar confines of his father's laundry business in the Bronx - the only home he's known since emigrating from China with his older brother - to quarantine alongside patients from all over the country at a federal institution in Carville. At first, Victor is scared not only of the disease, but of the confinement, and wants nothing more than to flee. Between treatments he dreams of escape and imagines his life as a fugitive. But soon he finds a new sense of freedom far from home - one without the pull of obligations to his family, the laundry business, or his mother back in China. Here, in the company of an unforgettable cast of characters, Victor finds refuge in music and experiences first love, jealousy, betrayal, and even tragedy. But with the promise of a life-changing cure on the horizon, Victor's time at Carville is running out, and he has some difficult choices to make. A page turning work of historical fiction, King of the Armadillos announces Wendy Chin-Tanner as an extraordinary new voice. Inspired by her father's experience as a young patient at Carville, this tender novel is a captivating and lyrical exploration of the power of art.

"Inspiring, disturbing, and triumphant." -- FOREWORDEmbedded with an eco-terrorist group hellbent on explosive direct action, investigative journalist Owen Graham is enmeshed in a dangerous culture on the political fringe. Ordinary citizens, frustrated by inequality and oppression and a bureaucracy’s resistance to change, are starting to go off the grid and disrupt the status quo. But the fringe is poised to go mainstream, and Owen’s days as a passive observer are running short. While a series of escalating misunderstandings land an idealistic public school teacher in the middle of a hostage situation and the sights of an overeager federal agent who has been trailing Owen for months, he intervenes in a desperate split-second decision. Owen’s old life is gone forever. Now he’s on the run with a trio of fellow crusaders, all fighting for a better world but now labeled as terrorists by the government. Disparate people on all sides, each convinced they’re right – and doing the right thing -- are now spinning towards each other in an inexorable spiral of violence.AMERICAN TERRORIST is a high-speed chase across the country in search of radical solutions to injustice, inspiring a movement that may be snuffed out before it starts.

Poetry. How do we forgive? How do we evolve? What makes us human? TURN wrestles with our ideas of race, gender, abuse, love, sex, motherhood, and death. Sensual and philosophical, personal and universal, these poems rejoice in the contradictions of living.