Bitter Over Sweet Is HERE, Zoom Launch, Ms. Magazine and an Interview by Dawn Tasaka Steffler

IT’S FINALLY OFFICIAL!! Bitter Over Sweet is out in the world!

Thank you to everyone who have been posting their pics! It makes me so happy! It’s been a long and strange and stressful journey getting to this point and I am grateful to all of you for your support and kindness (and tolerance for my social media spamming).

I hope that you can join me in celebrating Bitter Over Sweet at my book launch with Deesha Philyaw and Avitus B. Carle! Register here!!

I also want to celebrate Bitter Over Sweet’s review in Ms. Magazine!! In November 2025 Reads for the Rest of Us by Karla J. Strand and Violet Pandya - they say:

A winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, this is an engrossing collection of stories by an Indigenous Hawai’ian woman about Indigenous Hawai’ian women. Centering [on] resilient Tita, these short narratives are incandescent and alive with grief, poverty, pain, love, complexity and harmony.

I’m just blown away by these kind words about my book!

I would also like to thank Dawn Tasaka Steffler for her wonderful interview of me for Fractured Lit: “I believe in flash, and I especially believe in microfiction”: An Interview with Melissa Llanes Brownlee.

I hope that you are all doing as well. As always, sending light, love and creativity.