Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid

Willyce Kim

Foreword by Eunsong Kim

a sa PP hi C novel ahead of its time that delights in queer joy, love, and adventure

Dancer Dawkins is a swift-footed, weed-smoking football stud. Her lover, Jessica, left their place in Los Angeles to join a Napa Valley cult, where she believes she has found salvation. Willie Guthrie, the cigar-smoking, self-proclaimed California Kid, collides with Dancer in San Francisco, and the two join forces to save Jessica from the clutches of cult leader Fatin Satin Aspen. Willyce Kim’s campy, women-centered Western novel is a celebration of queer joy. While her vibrant vignettes are filled with California whimsy through a kaleidoscope of food and sports metaphors, darker political undercurrents of the Vietnam War and the infamous Bohemian Grove inhabit this uncanny adventure. Buckle up for this wild, spunky, and unabashedly queer ride!

Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid stretches the limits of how queer forms and Asian American antagonisms have previously been examined. No politics is declarative, no identity stable. The work asks us to imagine how the Asian American writer may push us toward and against preexisting formations.”

—from the foreword by Eunsong Kim

“Kim’s writing certainly made clear the difference between merely describing lesbian relationships and delighting in them.” —Feminist Bookstore News

Willyce Kim is author of three poetry books, Curtains of Light, Eating Artichokes, Under the Rolling Sky, and two novels. She was an early member of the Women’s Press Collective in Oakland, California. Eunsong Kim is associate professor of English at Northeastern University and author of gospel of regicide and the forthcoming The Aestheticization of Property: Race and the Politics of Collecting