Kona Stories

Kiana Davenport is hapa-haole, of Native Hawaiian and Anglo American descent. Her full-blooded Hawaiian mother's ancestors were Tahitians who first populated Hawai'i about 1600 years ago. Her father was a U.S. Navy sailor from Alabama. Raised and educated in Hawai'i, she is the author of the internationally bestselling novels, Shark Dialogues and Song of the Exile. To date, her novels have been translated into 14 languages. Ms. Davenport's short stories have been anthologized in the O. Henry Awards Prize Stories, 2000, 1999, 1997, and the Pushcart Prize Stories, 1999, 1998. E.L. Doctorow chose her story, "Bones of the Inner Ear" (which was excerpted from HOUSE OF MANY GODS) as one of the Best American Short Stories, 2000. Researching her novels and short stories, she has traveled throughout the Pacific and Asia. Ms. Davenport was a 1992-1993 Bunting Fiction Fellow at Harvard-Radcliffe, the 1997-1998 Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University, and has also taught at the New York Public Library, Chinatown, and lectured at Pali Intermediary, Bangkok, Thailand. She has received writing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and many more. To support herself as a writer, she has worked as a pineapple trimmer, a coffee-cherry picker, a stable hand and fashion model. She lives in New York City and Hawaii.