Next-Gen Editors: Milkteeth Books

Austin Nguyen / Make It Rain: Keep Kaya Press Thriving!

From Alex Bravo, a current Kaya intern: The work of a young professional in the arts is often referred to as “juvenalia,” often a footnote in someone’s larger career, endeared upon but not taken seriously. Many of these works contain a lot of heart but are scrappy due to a lack of funding and industry support, which perpetuates a notion of a young professional’s work not being serious. Seemingly the only way to escape this is by entering the arts with money, and all the things it can buy: connections, taste, an audience. Milkteeth is special in that it opens up these resources otherwise withheld from young voices to the wider diasporic youth, not only as authors but as editors with full creative control. As an imprint, it not only platforms underrepresented and emerging voices seeking to break into the literary industry, but also remains a vital tool for educating the next generation of Asian diasporic editors, that they may continue facilitating this work of proliferating exciting new stories. Milkteeth shows us young people that we are not only worthy of our own art, but that we are worthy of our art being good.

  • $700

    Raised

  • $10,000

    Goal

  • 6

    Supporters

  • 34

    Days Remaining

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About Next-Gen Editors: Milkteeth Books

It’s not often that aspiring editors are not only given the opportunity to have complete authority over their own imprint—to decide what kinds of writings to acquire, how they want to shape that manuscript, and how to present it to the world—they are also given the resources and support to fully and beautifully bring that vision to life. At Kaya Press, we wanted to create a space where our young editors/publishers would have creative agency to build something of their own—a space to learn, to experiment, to fail with intention, and to nurture their own projects from conception to final publication. 

Milkteeth Books is an imprint entirely led by Kaya interns that was born inside Kaya Press and blossomed into the world last year. Stewarded by former Kaya interns who are now Associate Editors, Austin Nguyen and Kaitlin Hsu, Milkteeth kicked off with the publication of Maya Lu’s Double Happiness, a hybrid text that uses archival photographs and poetry to explore what exists between the lost and the inherited. The second Milkteeth title, newname road, is Annakai Hayakawa Geshlider’s hallucinatory poetic incantation to the slow, surreal intimacies that survive in a polluted world and has been praised by Sesshu Foster as recording “the marvelous secret purpose of poetry, the transformation of the poet themselves.”

The third Milkteeth title, selected for publication by current Kaya interns Alex Bravo, Emily Gomez, Jack Miller, Jasmine Kwok, and Luisa Luo is Ashleigh Kennedy’s Digital Logics. Using wry humor to pull from philosophy, language games, and the history of both art and technology, Digital Logics probes the synthetic a priori of transracial adoption. Its insights and formal experimentation are anchored in riffs and pockets of sound with a rolling, improvisational feel that slips into and out of frameworks of consciousness, watching them “appear (disappear) (appear) disappear”. 

Investing in this imprint means investing in the tangible future of literary publishing, ensuring a continuous flow of exhilarating new stories facilitated by a fully-trained, engaged, and empowered generation of editors and authors.

Milkteeth is a place where exciting next generation editors are empowered to experiment with their own publishing styles and ambitions while giving a platform to experimental manuscripts and exciting new writers. 

Help us raise $10,000 by December 31, 2025 to support Milkteeth and keep the excitement going. Seed the creative contagion for future cohorts of Asian American publishing professionals.

This fundraiser is part of Kaya Press's 2025 Make It Rain annual drive, and all donations are tax deductible. At Kaya Press, we believe that books and community help us all thrive. Your support as readers, writers, educators, and customers is the reason we have made it to 31 years as an independent publishing house dedicated to championing avant-garde, experimental, and expectation-busting literature from the Asian Pacific American and Asian diasporas.