Mark Panek, Professor of English
Professor Panek has contributed significantly to the local canon with two peer-reviewed and award-winning works published by University of Hawai‘i Press.
Posted Oct. 17, 2012. Updated May 11, 2018, and June 20, 2024.
Mark Panek is an professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. He specializes in creative writing and composition and teaches a variety of interactive writing courses.
Panek has contributed significantly to the local canon with two peer-reviewed and award-winning works published by University of Hawaiʻi Press: Gaijin Yokozuna: A Biography of Chad Rowan (2007), and Big Happiness: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior (2011), a biography of “quintessential local boy” Percy Kipapa.
In 2013, Lōʻihi Press published Panekʻs Hawaiʻi: A Novel, reviewed by island author Chris McKinney as “a much-needed contemporary answer to James Michener’s Hawaii, [it] takes Michener’s ‘golden men’ vision of racial harmony out back and beats it.”
Accolades
The Japan Times called Gaijin Yokozuna, the story of Rowan’s rise from Waimānalo to the top ranking in Japan’s national sport, “the best sumo biography in English,” adding that “few books in English or in Japanese can match it in bringing sumo and one sumotori to vivid, compulsively readable life.”
Gaijin Yokozuna was nominated for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize, the 2007 Los Angeles Times Biography of the Year Award, and the Hawaiʻi Book Publisher’s Association’s 2007 Ka Palapa Poʻokela Award for nonfiction.
Big Happiness was published to wide acclaim. Honolulu magazine called the story of Waikāne’s Percy Kipapa, “An eloquent biography, not only of [Kipapa] . . . but of the local Waiāhole-Waikāne community in which he lived,” and “a deeply researched, insightful look at the many problems facing Hawaiʻi’s poor and rural neighborhoods.”
New York magazine blogger Dan Kois found Big Happiness a “smartly written tale” that “mixes the personal and the political to create a portrait of the Hawai’i tourists never see.” The Japan Times called it “as eloquent as any mystery novel.”
Big Happiness was named the winner of the 2012 Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association’s Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. The judges described it as follows:
Mark Panek’s masterpiece is a harrowing account of the life and death of a quintessential local boy — Waikāne’s Percy Kipapa. More than this, the book delves deep into the root causes of Kipapa’s eventual slide and murder, shedding a brilliant light on the systemic problems that plague Hawaiians in contemporary society. Part loving tribute to a great friend and man, and part damning look at the long-term cultural failures of “New Hawai‘i,” Mark Panek’s captivating book gracefully weaves together a truly local narrative connecting the death of Percy Kipapa with Hawaiʻi’s shady history of unchecked land development, political corruption, the ice epidemic, and the slow erosion of local values.
The book focuses on the life of Percy Kipapa, a man who was so “full of aloha,” that his given sumo name, Daiki, translates into Big Happiness. By inserting himself into the story, Panek allows us to enter into Percy’s world, creating an emotional bond not only with this modern Hawaiian warrior, but with everything that he represents — his family, the ʻāina, and his local, Hawaiian values. At the same time, Panek’s investigative journalism is well-documented and logically constructed, providing the reader with important questions and rationally answering them without making grand speculative claims, culminating in an excellently transcribed and climactic murder trial.
By interlacing detailed investigation and analysis, first-hand experiences, and masterful writing, Mark Panek’s Big Happiness proves to be one of the most socially important and poignant books to come out of Hawaiʻi in recent memory.
“Even more than how they praise the book, I found these words particularly gratifying because of the way they define the value of humanities scholarship,” says Panek.
Personal connections, stories within stories
“Although the second book, Big Happiness, is about a retired sumo wrestler, sumo isn’t really the topic of that book,” says Panek. “BH uses Percy’s life story to draw attention to the consequences of rampant development in Hawai’i, mainly since statehood.”
Gaijin Yokozuna, on the other hand, says Panek, although it tries to use Chad Rowan’s story as a window into Japanese culture, is indeed a book about sumo.
“My interest in the sport began when I first lived in Japan not long after finishing my undergrad degree in history,” he says. “Rowan’s story came up as a natural topic in the first graduate seminar I ever took, at UH Mānoa, only months after he’d become the first non-Japanese to reach their national sport’s top rank. The project began as a paper for that class. His family, and later Rowan himself, was so receptive that I made it the subject of my eventual MA thesis, and later my dissertation, which finally evolved into the book.”
Along the way, Panek met Percy Kipapa, who was a source for Gaijin Yokozuna because he had lived and trained with Rowan for seven years in Japan.
“I’d met Percy’s mom years ago when I was a grad assistant at UH Mānoa and he brought me to Waikāne to look at a used car he was selling,” says Panek. “I next saw her in the reception line at Percy’s funeral over four years later.”
At the funeral, Kipapa’s mother remembered Panek and told him, “Someone should have written a book about Percy, but now it’s too late.”
“Many of us were angry at the circumstances surrounding Percy’s murder,” says Panek. “Subsequent research revealed that far more was involved than the man who actually stabbed Percy. Mainly, Hawaiʻi’s rush to develop land for outsiders at the expense — indirectly, but there is certainly a correlation — of Hawaiians like Percy, and even the man who killed him, who is now serving a life sentence in Arizona.”
Teaching
Professor Panek teaches a variety of highly interactive writing courses ranging from introductory composition to senior-level courses in creative writing, nonfiction writing, and composition pedagogy. His peer-reviewed scholarship on the unique concerns associated with teaching in Hawaiʻi has been published in Composition Studies.
The professor takes time to meet individually with every student on every paper — a service he extends to his students for life, whether they are enrolled in future courses with him or not. He tells the story of student Emil DeAndreis, who was in Panek’s English 100 class seven years ago and showed the professor a memoir he’d been working on about his senior year in high school.
“Right then I convinced him to double major in English,” says Panek. “We worked on the memoir, put him through the paces in our other classes. He in fact helped evaluate an early draft of Big Happiness. He graduated in 2008 and moved back to San Francisco, where he worked as a substitute teacher so he could focus on his writing.”
Since then DeAndreis has had several stories accepted for publication, including one he’d written for Panek’s class, “The Pigs of Hilo,” that won Bamboo Ridge’s Editor’s Choice Award for Best New Writer. This fall, DeAndreis is beginning his first semester in San Francisco University’s Master in Fine Arts program in creative writing, and has just had his first book accepted for publication.
“He’ll be here at the end of the month visiting and will deliver our October Brown Bag lecture,” says Panek. (Update: Now a published author based in his home state of California, DeAndreis was guest speaker at an English Club event in 2023.)
Education and accolades
Panek received his master of arts in 1999 and doctor of philosophy in 2004 from UH Mānoa. He was awarded the 2002 Francis Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching as a doctoral candidate at UH Mānoa. He was awarded the UH Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching in 2008.
By Susan Enright, public information specialist, Office of the Chancellor.
