“Rarely is a collection written with such veracity and unwavering resolution.”
These seventeen masterfully crafted stories are ones of grit, loss, and sorrow, while also erupting off the page with the unexpected splendor of pōhinahina growing in an ABC Store parking lot. They remind us that despite climate change and development, gentrification and intergenerational trauma, Hawaiʻi is a place of enduring beauty and strength. Donald A. Carreira Ching has written a marvel of a book that commands our attention and obedience.”
—from the judges
Bamboo Ridge Press is overjoyed to announce that Blood Work and Other Stories by Donald A. Carreira Ching has won the 2026 Firecracker Award for Fiction from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).
The Firecracker Awards celebrate independently published books and magazines that make a significant contribution to literary culture, along with the publishers working to bring important voices to readers. This year’s winners were announced on June 25, 2026 during a virtual ceremony.
In naming Blood Work the fiction winner, the judges praised the collection’s “veracity and unwavering resolution” and its masterful portrayal of contemporary lives in Hawaiʻi. They described the book as one of “grit, loss, and sorrow,” brightened by moments of unexpected beauty, including “the unexpected splendor of pōhinahina growing in an ABC Store parking lot.”
Across seventeen stories, Donald renders contemporary life in Hawaiʻi with extraordinary precision. Hawaiʻi is never simply a setting. Place carries history, genealogy, tension, and consequence. His characters emerge from distinct communities and relationships to the islands, and the collection allows those differences to remain complex.
Donald’s use of Pidgin is equally attentive. It shifts from story to story with the speaker, community, and place, revealing the language’s range and living texture.
Receiving the Firecracker Award is a happy milestone for Bamboo Ridge. It speaks to the purpose our founders imagined in 1978: to publish literature shaped by Hawaiʻi’s languages, histories, and communities, and to help that work reach readers well beyond our shores.
Bamboo Ridge first published Donald’s novel Between Sky and Sea: A Family’s Struggle in 2015, followed by Blood Work and Other Stories in 2025. To see this collection receive such significant recognition is a profound joy. The award honors Donald’s artistry while affirming that literature can remain faithful to the particularities of Hawaiʻi and speak powerfully to readers everywhere.
As the judges wrote, Donald has created “a marvel of a book that commands our attention.”
Congratulations to Donald and everyone who helped bring this book out into the world. Blood Work will be featured in a national publicity campaign, with promotional materials distributed through the American Booksellers Association to more than 750 independent booksellers across the country.
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