Winner of the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize 2024, selected by Ng Yi-Sheng. Coming soon from Gaudy Boy in 2025!

On February 1, 2021, Myanmar’s military staged a coup d’etat, imprisoning the country’s democratically elected leaders and declaring a state of emergency. Written during the Spring Revolution, when the people of Myanmar sustained ongoing protest acts in full defiance of the military, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s debut, Fablemaker, weaves together a troubled familial history and a national reckoning.

A sweeping and magical story collection showcasing the mythical creatures of Southeast Asia, including work by two-time Newbery medalist Erin Entrada Kelly and National Book Award finalist Shing Yin Khor

A turtle the size of an island. A cricket that can possess you if swallowed. A giant who turns enemies to stone. The legends of Southeast Asia—or “the lands below the winds,” as explorers used to call it—are populated with a whole menagerie of colorful beasts that inspire awe and fear in equal measure. Yet, passed on as they are through story and song, so many of these stories remain rooted in some long-forgotten past and bound by the borders of the region, creatures of myth and memory and nothing more. Until now.

Welcome to The Beasts Beneath the Winds, a collection of Southeast Asia’s most elusive cryptids by a team of bestselling and award-winning authors. Within these gorgeously illustrated pages, readers will find the stories of seventeen regular kids who encounter these mythical creatures in the here and now, and—fortunately or unfortunately—live to tell the tale.

Contributors include Hanna Alkaf (The Weight of Our Sky, Queen of the Tiles), Nadia Mikail (The Cats We Meet Along The Way), Brandon Hoang (Gloria Buenrostro Is Not My Girlfriend), Mandy Moe Pwint Tu (Monsoon Daughter), Moniza Hossain (Being Ace), V.T. Bidania (Astrid & Apollo and the Happy New Year), Emma Goddard, Dow Phumiruk (One Girl, Maya Lin), Erin Entrada Kelly (Hello Universe, We Dream of Space, The First State of Being), Gail D. Villanueva (My Fate According to Butterfly, Sugar and Spite), Greg van Eekhout (The Boy at the End of the World, COG), Jesse Q. Sutanto (Dial A for Aunties), June CL Tan (Jade Fire Gold), Mae Respicio (The House that Lou Built, Any Day With You), Shing Yin Khor (The Legend of Auntie Po), Van Hoang (Girl Giant & The Monkey King), Veeda Bybee (Courage on Ice, Lily and the Great Quake).

Published by Thirty West Publishing House, May 2022. Wade through the waters that have cascaded out of Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s debut chapbook, Monsoon Daughter. A love letter to the poet’s home country of Myanmar, mixes with condemnation of the ensuing military coup. It also explores family and how their memories refuse to be washed away with the tide.

“In Monsoon Daughter, Mandy Tu is, by turns, weaver of technicolor dreams and speaker of dangerous truths. She deftly carries readers through memories and myths from her childhood in Myanmar and Switzerland to her early womanhood in exile in the States. Central to Tu’s work is grief, “the only miracle [she] knows.” In this collection, she mourns her father’s abuse, his sudden death, and her country’s devastation under postcolonial military violence. But what draws me to Tu’s poetry is its complexity. She calls out violences, broken promises, and internal scars, but she also captures life’s bounty—the neighbor’s mango tree collapsed onto her house in the monsoon wind, the massaging of her mother’s feet, her brother peppering each strand of ramen noodle. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Make tea. Settle in for the storm.”

—Aurora Shimshak, Poet and Memoirist

Selected for the Emerging Poet Series 2022. Published by Newfound, 2023. Unsprung: In a book of witness, indictment, rage, heartache, and grief, Burmese writer M. Tu explores poetic form, like a compass swinging wildly toward north, as a means of examining the indefensible political violence in her home country of Myanmar.

“Unsprung is a collection that offers a powerful vision of what poetry can do in the world. These poems, that range from the small intimate moments of human connection to the large scale of the United Nations, make clear for readers the human costs of war and oppression. M. Tu is a poet with the formal prowess of a young Gwendolyn Brooks and the vast political vision of our best poets of witness. This is a voice to cherish and a poet to watch.”
—Nate Marshall, author of Finna and Wild Hundreds