Allie Tsubota, photo by Keya Goldfein
We are thrilled to announce the recipient of our 2026 Book Prize, selected by guest judge Brandon Shimoda.
Allie Tsubota, Milk Teeth
Departing from a single photograph, Allie Tsubota’s Milk Teeth is a living parallax of latencies and liberations in the spirit of Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal and Incubation, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and, maybe most transformatively, 1:45:15 to 1:48:15 of Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Tsubota unfolds a panorama across which maps—of fractures and fragmentations, racialized captures and migrations, veins of silver mining and mineralogies of pain—continuously imprint themselves. I write from the place of having not yet left this place: the memoir, therefore the dream, of an aperture—an uncovering through which everything passes.
—Brandon Shimoda
Milk Teeth will be released in winter 2028 as part of the Passage Series, devoted to supporting emerging writers and artists whose work manifests in innovative, hybrid, and cross-genre forms that imagine new possibilities and expressions of the poetic, the political, and the social.
About the author
Allie Tsubota is an artist and writer exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Her work joins photography, video, photographic and cinematic archives, and text to examine the role of visual spectatorship across racialized space and historical time. Tsubota’s work has been supported through residencies with Headlands Center for the Arts, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Visual Studies Workshop, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and ARCUS Project. She was a 2026 Artist Publishing Cohort Fellow with at Louis Place. Her projects have been exhibited across the United States and Japan, including, most recently, in a solo exhibition at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York. Her first book, Dead Letter Room, published by The Eriskay Connection, was shortlisted for the 2026 Paris Photo–Aperture First Photobook Award. Tsubota holds an MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, and presently teaches photography at Parsons School of Design.
About the guest judge
Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently The Afterlife Is Letting Go (City Lights, 2024), recipient of the Colorado Book Award; Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023); and The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), recipient of the PEN Open Book Award. He co-edited, with Brynn Saito, the first full-length anthology of Japanese American poetry, The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Books, 2025), which also includes work by Japanese and Okinawan Canadians; and co-edited, with Thom Donovan, To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014). He curates the Hiroshima Library, an itinerant reading room/collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is currently installed at Colorado College, where he also teaches (creative writing and Asian American literature).
Book Prize Finalists
We also wish to recognize this year’s Book Prize finalists.
Delicia Daniels, Abolition Chronicles
Syd Westley, Trans-Electronic Music
basalt hsu, EARTH INTELLIGENCE
Morgan Võ, Wedge World
Haley Lee, Stone Pace Dog Hill