Karissa Chen Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Karissa Chen is a Taiwanese American novelist best known for her novel Homeseeking. However, that is not the only thing she has written as she has put out editorial contributions, and essays showcasing her deep knowledge and engagement with motifs of personal history, culture, and identity. The author was born in the US in 1982 and went to Sarah Lawrence College where she graduated with an MFA in fiction. It was from her formal education that she got the foundation to start honing her craft and begin writing some complex narratives that combine her Taiwanese heritage and her American upbringing. Karissa would then go into media and become a notable editor. Chen has worked at The Rumpus where she served as a Senior Fiction Editor and is credited with changing the publication’s literary voice. She has also worked at Hyphen magazine as an Editor in Chief, where she delved even deeper into Asian American experiences, the focus of the publication. She was charged with curating content that explored narratives from the Asian American community so that they could be presented alongside other underrepresented voices.

Chen is recognized as one of the best voices putting forth narratives about the Asian American community. Her commitment to storytelling which has been evident in her editorial roles and her creative fiction is what has opened so many doors for her. Chen’s works have been featured in some of the most prestigious publications in the US. Some of these publications include: Guernica, The Atlantic Eater, Gulf Coast, The Cut, Catapult, NBC News THINK!, PEN America, and Longreads. Her works often explore themes of the immigrant experience, personal history, and cultural identity, which have made them resonant with wide audiences. Karissa Chen’s collection of short stories and poetry in Meditations on My Name showcases her exceptional talent in weaving complex narratives that are a reflection of collective and personal identities. In January 2025, Chen published Homeseeking her debut novel. The work would garner her critical acclaim for how it explored themes of heartbreak, love, history, and music. Spanning several decades, the novel is a wide-spanning tale examining the enduring impact of familial and romantic relationships across distance and time. Given its appeal to a broad readership and its cultural significance, Homeseeking was a GMA Book Club Pick.

As an author, Karissa Chen is one of the most dedicated people and this has led to her earning various residencies and fellowships. In 2015, she won the Fulbright Fellowship and spent two years in Taiwan which had a lot of influence on her writing and made the connection with her heritage even deeper. Additionally, she has also gotten fellowships from VONA/Voices and Kundiman which usually support writers of color. In 2019, the New Jersey State Council granted her an artist fellowship. Karissa Chen has also been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. Shuttling between Taipei and New Jersey, her storytelling is often enriched by bicultural living. Her Experiences in Southeast Asia and the US inform the nuance in the portrayal of setting and character in her novels as she provides some deep insights into the intricacies of cultural duality. Using her multifaceted roles as cultural commentator, editor, and author, she has made significant contributions to modern literature as she provides insights that inspire, inform, and challenge her readers.
As for the genesis of her blockbuster novel Homeseeking, it all started in 2005. Her grandfather had just passed on and going through his things, Chen found a picture of the man distraught at his mother’s grave. For Chen, her grandfather was the epitome of Asian stoicism and to see him so distraught was haunting. She knew that he had been separated from his family at 19 but the context was missing and this was what drove her curiosity. She began her investigations into her heritage and along the way, she learned about the military conflict that was the Chinese Civil War between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party during the 1940s. Her grandfather happened to be among the 2 million young adults who fled to Taiwan to help set up a new government by the Nationalists hoping to soon take back the mainland in a few months or years. Most of these young people stayed in Taiwan for decades frustrated and having to deal with the pain of missing their wives, families, lovers, children, and parents. The more she came to understand, the more she started researching the stories of people similar to her grandfather.

It took Karissa Chen more than a decade of focused research before she put pen to paper as she had casually begun doing her research as early as 2011. Chen actively started writing in the first quarter of 2017 and was done by late 2023. However, this was not her first novel, as she has at least one manuscript gathering dust in her hard drive in addition to several other half-written novels she has never got around to finishing. What set Homeseeking apart was that she cared enough about it that she just had to finish writing it. She was very lucky that she was working with Michelle Brower as an agent. The latter knew which editors to approach and it was not long before she had an offer from Tara Singh Carlson.

Homeseeeking is an intimate and epic story of a couple that illuminates what it means to find a home thousands of miles from the place you call home. The lead in the novel is Haiwen, who was buying some groceries at a market in LA when he looked up and saw Suchi, a woman he last set eyes on six decades ago. Haiwen thinks it is fate that brought her to him even though Suchi has no interest in looking back. They had met in a Shanghai neighborhood when he was seven and she loved how he played the violin. They would then have a childhood friendship that turned into love before Haiwen enlisted for the Kuomintang to save his brother, leaving behind his violin and a note asking for her forgiveness. The work follows the two through sixty years of the chaos of history as opportunity, famine, and war as they got from the bustling streets of New York, the military encampments of Taiwan, and the song halls of Hong Kong as it tells of their lives from childhood to the current day. Throughout, Haiwen refuses to let go of his memories, even as Suchi only looks forward with great effort. It is a story of loyalty, sacrifice, family, and the power of love, which usually endures beyond time and distance.