Eric C. Wat is the author of four books, including his Los Angeles Times–bestselling debut novel SWIM (2019). His last book, Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles, won the Outstanding Award in History from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2023. His second novel manuscript, Drive, was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Contest in 2022. Much of his work is drawn from his community activism since the 1990s, especially in struggles for immigrant workers’ rights and HIV/AIDS.
About Daddy Issues: Stories
Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction, Daddy Issues is a collection of moving and complex—yet simply told—stories of queer Asian American experiences. In many of these stories, artists, writers, and activists live on the fringe of survival, attempting to align a life of the imagination with the practical considerations of career and family: a gay father who hasn’t come out to his young son; a social worker, numbed by his clients’ destitution, who finds himself lost in self-destruction; a trans man who returns home to a father with dementia to help his family pack as they are pushed out by gentrification; and a broke writer who learns to love his stories again.