AUTHOR’S PUBLICITY EFFORT: • Utilize blurb by Cheryl Strayed, highlighting it on a revamped website and throughout social media, and asking her to post about it. • Launch an Instagram campaign releasing key quotes from the book, and photos from that era, for 3-6 months prior to publication. • Enlist a street team to help with launch, posting reviews, sharing the book, and spreading buzz. • Create an evocative book trailer. • Continue to teach classes for multiracial people, Asian Americans, and for women in general, utilizing themes from my writing and creating a strong, intimate fan base, person by person. • Seek other blurbs by high-profile Asian American writers such as Alexander Chee, T Kira Madden, Ruth Ozeki, and Maxine Hong Kingston, as well as Iranian American writer Porochista Kharpour and New Yorker travel writer Peter Heller, who is currently living in Chengdu, the main location of the book. • Pitch and run excerpts/reviews in journals where the author has published before or has editor contacts, e.g., Longreads, Catapult, Seventh Wave, International Examiner, Northwest Asian Weekly, South Seattle Emerald, Entropy, etc. • Schedule several launch parties across the Pacific Northwest (pending pandemic restrictions lifting) as well as zoom events, inviting other writer friends to read or be in conversation with author, especially at the Hugo House, where the author is employed. • Utilize connections to book review editors such as Sarah Neilson (who has written for The Seattle Times, BOMB, Seventh Wave, etc.) • Utilize connections to Seattle bookstore event coordinators, i.e. Karen Almaeda at Elliot Bay Bookstore and Dana Gaskin at Third Place Books Ravenna. • Utilize connections to the many Facebook groups the author is active on that cater to Mixed Race people, Women Writers, and more. • Create incentives to pre-order • Create book swag including a Heart Radical T-shirt, mug, journal, and cards/magnets/hand sanitizer to send as thank-yous and along with ARCs. • Hire someone to: revamp website; make a press release; and connect me to more potential interviews, blog tours, feature article opportunities, etc.FN107

Wanting to understand how her path is tied to her mother tongue, Anne, a young, multiracial American woman, travels through China, the country of her mother's birth. Along the way, she tries on different roles - seeker, teacher, student, girlfriend, artist, and daughter - and continually asks herself: Why do I feel called to make this journey? Whether witnessing a Tibetan sky burial, teaching English at a university in Chengdu, visiting her grandmother in LA, or falling in love with a Chinese painter, Anne is always in pursuit of intimacy with others, even as she is all too aware of her silences and separation. For two years, she settles into a comfortable routine in her boyfriend's apartment and regains fluency in Chinese, a language she spoke as a young child but has used less and less as an adult. Eventually, however, her desire to know herself in other ways surfaces again. She misses speaking English, she feels suffocated by urban, polluted China, and she starts to fall for another man. Ultimately, Anne realizes that to live her truth as a mixed-race, bilingual woman she must embrace all of her influences and layers. In a world that often wants us to choose a side or fit an ideal, she learns that she can both belong and not belong wherever she is, and that home is ultimately found within.