Daniel Tam-Claiborne with Anne Liu Kellor — Transplants

Third Place Books is pleased to welcome Hugo House program director of partnerships and events Daniel Tam-Claiborne for the release of his debut novel, Transplants, a harrowing and poignant novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship. Daniel is joined in conversation by Anne Liu Kellor, author of Heart Radical.

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About Transplants. .

A harrowing and poignant novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery who yearn to survive in a world that doesn’t know where either of them belong.

On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a Chinese student closer to her menagerie of pets than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death. They’re each met with hostility—Lin by her classmates, who mock her for dating a white foreigner; Liz by her fellow English teachers, who exploit their privilege—and forge an unlikely friendship.

After a startling betrayal that results in Lin’s expulsion, they swap places. Lin becomes convinced to pursue her degree at a community college near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz searches for answers as to what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. But when a global catastrophe deepens the fissures between modern-day China and an increasingly fractured United States, Lin and Liz—far from home and estranged from themselves—are forced to confront both the familiar and the strange in each other.

Unspooling over the course of a single extraordinary year in our not-yet-distant past and in small towns from Dandong to Deadwood, Transplants is a piercing story of migration, belonging, and the parts of ourselves that get lost in translation. Alternating between Liz and Lin’s perspectives, it is a lyrical and moving exploration of race, love, power, and freedom that illuminates the limits and possibilities of what can happen when we open ourselves to the unknown and reveals how even our fiercest differences may bring us closer than we might ever imagine.

Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, HuffPost, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received support from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Kundiman, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and others. Daniel holds degrees from Oberlin College, Yale University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle.

Anne Liu Kellor is a mixed-race Chinese American writer, editor, and teacher based in Seattle. Her memoir, Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging, was a 2021 IPPY Winner and Washington State Book Award finalist. Anne facilitates online creative nonfiction workshops and a yearlong manuscript program that centers the voices of women and people of color. Her next book, Both/And: A Mixed-Race Manifesto (forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2026), collects the voices of 33 writers exploring their identities, ancestries, and nonbinary ways of being.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events