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June 1 Mouth to Mouth Open Mic: Jeff Yang and Trevor Zhou | June 7 Vijay Prashad's Uncle Swami | June 21 Xu Xi and Tania James | June 28 Editorial Launch Party | Past Events

 

Nearly 10 years ago Vijay Prashad’s groundbreaking work The Karma of Brown Folk served as an inspired response to W.E.B Dubois’s classic The Souls of Black Folk. If DuBois examined how American racial politics named black Americans as the “problem,” Prashad examines how they also rendered South Asians as the “solution”—an alternate brown model minority. Vijay Prashad’s latest, Uncle Swami, continues the critique of the model minority myth by challenging the master narrative of South Asian American identity formation. Prashad confronts post 9/11 Islamophobia and charts the burgeoning world of South Asian American political identity, from the birth of political activism among second-generation immigrants to the meteoric rise of South Asian American politicians. By illuminating these dynamic communities whose identities are all too often lumped together, Uncle Swami celebrates the possibilities for South Asian American resistance, as well as the potential for cross-racial solidarity in struggles for justice. Himanshu Suri of Das Racist says “I remember where I was when my bandmate Ashok lent me his copy of The Karma of Brown Folk. I felt like I found a handbook to explain my identity issues. A couple of months later, 9/11 happened down the block from that same high school and we knew things would be different. Uncle Swami picks up there and leads people through life as a South Asian in the wake of 9/11.” Join us as we proudly present one of the leading voices on cultural and racial politics in America at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of The Karma of Brown Folk and The Darker Nations (The New Press); the latter was chosen as a Best Nonfiction Book of the year by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize. A well-known journalist and commentator, Prashad writes for Frontline (a column "Letter from America" and occasional reported stories) and for Asia Times. He is a contributing editor for the Kathmandu-based Himal and an editor for the Lahore-based magazine Bol. He is a regular writer for Counterpunch, a magazine edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

@Brecht Forum
451 West Street, New York
$5 suggested admission

This event is co-sponsored by the South Asian Journalists Association and the South Asian Solidarity Initiative.

 

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Past Events

 

Take a load off and join special guests Nora Chau and Cihan Kaan at our next rib-tickling Mouth to Mouth event. Nora Chau- Ma-Yi Writer's Lab member and ABC/Disney New Talent Screenwriting grant recipient- will mystify you with her unique brand of vaudevillian storytelling 'til your jaw drops and your eyes bulge. Award-winning video artist and author Cihan Kaan will recite laugh-tastic monologues. He’ll read selections from his wickedly humorous short-story collection, Halal Pork, in which hijabi girls are cast as punk rock dervishes, Muslims and Jews eat fake bacon, and wealthy boys pay to be Muslim for a day. Prepare yourself for revelry and indulgence!

Mouth to Mouth is AAWW’s monthly open mic, hosted by performer Jen Kwok and novelist Ed Lin, that brings together literary writers, stand-up comedians and you.

Nora Chau loves a good story. She is a member of the Ma-Yi Writer's Lab, a former ABC/Disney Grant Recipient for New Talent in Screenwriting, an ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship finalist, and a Women’s Project Lab finalist. Her short plays have been published by Smith & Kraus and you can see her crazy web serial at prettypreciousunicorns.com. She is currently working on her first novel and attempting to write a graphic novel with her artist husband - that is, if he doesn't kick her off the project. Check out Nora at norachau.com.

Cihan (pronounced Je'han) Kaan is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-raised writer and filmmaker. His first work of video art premiered as part of an ensemble show at MoMA at the age of 17. By 21, Kaan had directed several music videos in rotation on MTV. His short films She's Got an Atomic Bomb and Shuffle Mode have won multiple awards. His book, Halal Pork and Other Stories, can be described as a collection of urban Sufi myths from the streets of New York City.

@Asian American Writer's Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

Sign up for Open Mic slots at 7:30PM

 

Join us for our inaugural edition of Bricolage, our salon-style multimedia show-n-tell, where your favorite authors and artists present the images that have been haunting their writing. We have an incredible line- up of critically-acclaimed artists to kick off the first Bricolage. You’ll be serenaded by cowboy ballads, nostalgic for beloved villains, and dazzled by experimental theatre.

Nationally acclaimed poet Cathy Park Hong will read from Engine Empire, a poetic guide through the fictionalized boomtowns of the Californian old west, present-day industrialized China, and the digital future. David Mitchell deemed it “a brainy, glinting triptych about what powers 'progress,' what its human costs are, and where it might be taking our species.” National Book Award finalist Monica Youn will read from her latest book of poetry, Ignatz, based on George Herriman’s comic strip Krazy Kat. The New York Times called Young Jean Lee “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation.” She’ll will present clips of her latest play Untitled Feminist Show, in which a nude burlesque star, cabaret artist and modern dancer take you for a whirlwind of comic vignettes, synchronized breathing, and provocative choreography.

Cathy Park Hong is the author of Translating Mo'um and Dance Dance Revolution, the winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Hong is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the Van Lier prize of the AAWW.

Young Jean Lee is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2010 Winner of American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. She is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Monica Youn is the author of Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. A board member of the AAWW, she has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress and has received residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation / Bellagio.

@Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

 

Join us for our first ever husband-and-wife reading to celebrate the release of One Red Bastard, the novel. Ed Lin's sequel to the highly acclaimed Snakes Can’t Run and the latest installment of the Robert Chow series about the travails of a Chinatown beat cop in 1976 New York City. Actress Cindy Cheung will accompany Lin in performing a dramatic rendition of Detective Chow’s latest mission, as he is swept into Chinatown’s darkest recesses to clear his loved one’s name in a murder case. As Taiwan and China compete in a diplomatic rumble for western recognition, word comes that the late Mao Zedong’s daughter is seeking asylum in America. Chow’s street-savvy investigation forces him between colorful agitators from the dueling regimes, such as Lincoln Chen, (aka “Mr. Revolution” and “Anti-Chinese Chinaman”) in this engrossing thriller. Lin is on the vanguard of an emerging genre of Asian American crime fiction-one that you’ll be eager to get a piece of, but as SJ Rozan wrote, “I’m claiming the discovery of Ed Lin and you’re all going to have to fight me for him.”

Cindy Cheung’s theater credits include The Sugarhouse at the Edge of the Wilderness (Ma-Yi), Middletown (The Vineyard), The Seagull and Antigone, (NAATCO), Goodbye Cruel World (Roundtable), Sides: The Fear Is Real… (Ma-Yi/Miyagi), Masha No Home (E.S.T.), W;t (Florida Studio Theater), The First Picture Show (A.C.T.), A Christmas Carol (South Coast Rep), Sweeney Todd and Into The Woods (East West Players). Film and TV credits include: Children of Invention (Sundance 2009), Lady In The Water, Robot Stories, “Bored To Death,” “White Collar,” “Fringe,” “Law and Order,” “L&O:SVU,” “L&O: Criminal Intent,” “One Life To Live” and “Sex and the City”. She holds an MFA from A.C.T. and continues to develop her solo show SPEAK UP CONNIE, directed by BD Wong.

Ed Lin is the author of several books and is an all-around standup kinda guy. Waylaid and This Is a Bust were both published by Kaya Press in 2002 and 2007, respectively, and both were widely praised. Both also won the Members’ Choice Awards in the Asian American Literary Awards. His third book, Snakes Can’t Run, was published by Minotaur Books in April 2010; it was loved by many and also won an Asian American Literary Award. Lin, who is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. His latest book, One Red Bastard, will be published by Minotaur in April 2012.

This event is co- sponsored by OCA.

@Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

 

CultureStrike coordinator Favianna Rodriguez teams up with other creative minds for UndocuNation: An Artistic Response to the Immigration Crisis. With talks, food, revelry and rabble-rousing, the event offers “an evening of culture jamming, visual art, and performances addressing the devastating consequences of our country’s broken immigration system.” Sponsored by CultureStrike, Center for New Community, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), UndocuNation will use various media platforms to raise consciousness about the struggle for immigrant rights: music, installation art, readings and personal testimony–all “working to shift the national imagination on race, migration, and what ‘America’ should look like.” The program will feature innovators and change makers like hip hop historian Jeff Chang, author Daniel Alarcón, and the conscious comedians of Laughter Against the Machine. For a full list of artists and performers, check out CultureStrike.

@Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission St (Mission & 3rd) in San Francisco
Free and open to the public

 

Join us for a night of ambient poetics with three experimental writers who probe the relationship between art- making and found technologies from parking garage reverberations to the neon glow of TV broadcasts. Treat your ears to Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt, Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Underground National. Williams College professor Dorothy Wang will moderate and Triple-Canopy Editor, Lucy Ives, will live-blog the event at Montevidayo.

The recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant and a Warhol Foundation Writing Grant, Tan Lin is the author of Seven Controlled Vocabularies, lauded by Warren Liu as “an utterly, compellingly boring film--I've already forgotten it in the best way unimaginable." In Tan Lin’s latest work, Insomnia and the Aunt, a young man’s memories of visiting his Chinese aunt at her motel, recalled almost as if written by their TV set. The aunt's memory ghosts her nephew's television screen, their shared past-time. The aunt “resembles the biography of a dead person where the dead person has somehow forgotten to die. She speaks casually, like the speech of a language without a speaker.” Lin's experimental novella is indexed by photographs, postcards, and the indicia to an imaginary novel, mimicking the seamless repetition and reproducibility of images on the television. In Lin’s beautiful and wonderfully odd elegy, technology acts as an emotive transmitter engaging the two relatives in erotic simulacra.

Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot profiles a noise music band’s search for the ultimate ambient sound and is the follow-up to Pamela: A Novel, an experimental poetry classic and one of SPD’s bestselling books of the 2000’s. They sample revving engines, the parking habits of the rich and famous, and commercial parking spaces. Reading Ambient Parking Lot is comparable to “watching an indie webisode spin-off of ‘Behind the Music,’ as Lu tracks the Ambient Parkers’ absolute mediocrity "in awkwardly-awesome crescendos and geeky-fantastic loops,” says Jai Arun Ravine of Lantern Review Blog.

The author of That Gorgeous Feeling and Underground National, Sueyeun Juliette Lee could be the only poet to write about U.S. intervention in Korea and the dating patterns of K-pop stars. Sueyeun is a transnational collagist who perverts found documents and replaces fixed histories of square footage, geographic boundaries, and global affairs editorials with erasure. In her second book of poetry, Underground National, Lee remixes celebrity suicides, tourism trends, and web splices to put forth a subterranean account of Korean culture.

Dorothy Wang is an assistant professor in the American Studies Program and faculty affiliate in the Department of English at Williams College. Her book, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Lucy Ives is a Triple Canopy senior editor and the author of Anamnesis. She lives in New York City, where she is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at NYU.

This event is co-sponsored by The Poetry Project.

@Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

 

Once known for its majestic snow-capped Himalayas, Kashmir now hosts a militarized hotbed of insurgency and conflict between India, Pakistan, and China. Join us for an inter-disciplinary dialogue between three guests whose work shed light on Kashmir’s complex identity. You’ll hear stories of pre-partition India, lyrical accounts of village life, and one artist’s juxtaposition of dense urban environment with idyllic vistas. BBC journalist and author Mirza Waheed will read from his novel, The Collaborator, which follows a teenage boy in the remote village of Nowgam on the disputed line of control, the India-Pakistan border in 1990s Kashmir amidst unceasing warfare. Scholar-activist Angana P. Chatterji, who founded the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir, will read from the Verso anthology Kashmir: The Case for Freedom and other works, speaking to Kashmir's culture of grief, the geopolitical impact of the conflict today, and the struggle for peace and justice. Kanishka Raja, the ICA Artist prize recipient who has been featured at the Greenberg Van Doren galley, will project images of his painting’s installation of Kashmir as it was imagined by pre-'80s Bollywood: as the hyper-romantic pastoral settings for the eastern equivalent of The Sound of Music.

Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Srinagar, Kashmir. He moved to Delhi when he was eighteen to study English Literature at the University of Delhi and worked as a journalist in the city for four years. He came to London in 2001 to join the BBC's Urdu Service, where he now works as an editor.

Angana Chatterji is an anthropologist and historian. A public intellectual whose work focuses on cultural survival and social justice in India and South Asia, along with work in the United States, Dr. Chatterji's recent writings include: Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India's Present (Three Essays Collective, 2009) and a co-edited volume, Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present (Zubaan, Due May 2012);She serves on numerous advisory boards, including the Kashmir Initiative at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University.

Kanishka Raja was born in Calcutta, India and lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States, India, and Europe. Raja is a recipient of the 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation award in painting. In 2004, he received the ICA/Digitas Artist Prize from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. His work is included in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA and the Meadows Art Museum, Dallas, TX.

@Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

 

Come join us for an Asian American all-star comedy festival! AAWW favorite Jen Kwok, the velvety voice that brought you Date an Asian and Ballad of the Tiger Mom, will bring her ukulele and extraordinary talent. Relish the sharp stylings of Sheng Wang, who won top honors at NBC Universal's Stand Up For Diversity. Enjoy the brains and beauty behind Nerdcore Rising, producer Negin Farsad, who has been named one of the top 50 funniest women by The Huffington Post. You'll be treated to three rousing belly-aching sets followed by a moderated discussion.

The event is a part of Neighborhood Word, our programming series that brings Asian American writers to the outer boroughs.

Negin Farsad is the director/executive producer of Nerdcore Rising (a documentary about Nerdcore hip hop). She recently developed and wrote the MTV broadcast pilot and web series, "Detox." She also directed/produced the Comedy Central series, The Watch List. Her solo show Bootleg Islam, which she wrote and performed, has appeared in multiple comedy festivals around the country.

Jen Kwok is a writer and performer whose comedic exploits have been featured on CNN, PBS, MTV, The New York Times and Rolling Stone Magazine. Jen's distinct act - a sparkling combination of ukulele, wit and sass! - has made her a favorite on the NYC performance scene. Jen was also a finalist in NBC Stand-Up for Diversity.

Sheng Wang is a Taiwanese Texan who developed his comedy in the thriving stand-up community of the San Francisco Bay Area. He has toured with the Comedians of Comedy and American Eagle's "Campus Comedy Challenge" He has also appeared on Comedy Central's "Live at Gotham" and attended the "Just for Laughs" comedy festival in Montreal. His half-hour "Comedy Central Presents" will air this season.

This event is co-sponsored by Queens College.

@Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library
Queens College (directions)
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing, NY 11367-1597
$5 suggested donation
Open to the public

 

A discussion with Robert Casper, Ken Chen, Mya Spalter, Patrick Ryan, and Sarah LaPolla.

Robert Casper is the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. He is also publisher of the literary magazine jubilat and co-founder of the jubilat/Jones Reading Series in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Ken Chen’s debut collection of poems, Juvenilia, was selected for the Yale Series of Young Poets competition in 2009. Chen is the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. His work has been published or recognized in Best American Essays 2006, Best American Essays 2007, and the Boston Review of Books. He is a graduate of Yale Law School.

Mya Spalter has worked as an assistant editor at Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House. She received her BA in Liberal Arts from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts.

Patrick Ryan is the author of Send Me, Saints of Augustine, and In Mike We Trust. His work has appeared in the Yale Review and was included in Best American Short Stories 2006. Ryan is an assistant editor at Granta.

Sarah LaPolla is a literary agent with Curtis Brown, Ltd. Her publishing interests include literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, science fiction, literary horror, and young adult fiction. LaPolla is a graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the New School.

Moderated by Tiphanie Yanique, associate professor in the School of Writing.

This event is co-sponsored by The New School.

@Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building (The New School)
65 West 11th Street, 5th floor
(enter at 66 West 12th Street)

 

We know- we can't believe it's time for another one of our lavishly funny Open Mics! This month we are delighted to host talented singer/songwriter Chris Grace as well as sassy documentarian ManSee Kong. Chris's seductive vocals will knock you flat and ManSee Kong’s sharp chops will glue you to your seat. Our favorites and yours, comedienne Jen Kwok and novelist Ed Lin will be MC'ing and pumping you up! Booze, books and you; our perfect Friday night!

Chris Grace is a familiar face on Cold Soda, The Faculty, Starkey & Grace, Hello, and Baby Wants Candy. He’s a contributor for College Humor and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. In days of yore, he was a founding member of the PIT house teams Boldfaced LIAR and Fancy Dragon and went to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

ManSee Kong: Currently an MFA Film Candidate at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, ManSee Kong is best known for her documentary, Here to Stay, which portrays the effects of Manhattan Chinatown's gentrification through the lens of tenants awaiting the results of an anti-eviction lawsuit. Mansee aims to create films that expose the struggles and beauty of underrepresented communities as well as the inspirational commitment of organizers fighting for justice.

@Asian American Writer's Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

Sign up for Open Mic slots at 7:30PM

 

Krys Lee’s debut short story collection, Drifting House, explores the heartbreaking forgings of Korean identity in the wake of war and economic collapse. Haunted their tragic past, Lee’s cast of characters include a spurned wife who seeks to rescue her kidnapped daughter in America and a tenant who believes his mother has been reincarnated in his pet goose. The much heralded Drifting House is a portrait of the enduring grief of contemporary Korea and its diaspora. Krys will appear in conversation with Whiting Award winning novelist Alexander Chee, the blogger behind Koreanish.

Krys Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, raised in California and Washington, and studied in the United States and England. She was a finalist for Best New American Voices, received a special mention in the 2012 Pushcart Prize XXXVI, and her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, The Guardian, The New Statesman, and Condé Nast Traveller, UK (forthcoming). She lives in Seoul with intervals in San Francisco.

Alexander Chee was born in Rhode Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony , the VCCA, Ledig House, the Hermitage and Civitella Ranieri . His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

 

Join us for our sixth annual collaboration between Asian American Writers' Workshop and Cave Canem featuring the dynamic talent from four all-star female poets! Winner of two American Book Awards, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge molds language with her keen sensibility for visual art. Characteristic of her style is a lush mix of abstract language, collaged images, cultural and political investigation, and unexpected shifts between the meditative and the particular. Tamiko Beyer’s work work engages with ideas of gender, motherhood, conception, and nature, towards a "queer eco-poetics." Robin Coste Lewis’s work explores political trauma, migration, fragmentation, and the resilience and loss of the body. A poet, visual artist, story maker and scholar, Metta Sáma's poetry collections explore themes ranging from parasitic invasions and the nature of bodily disintegration as poetic practice, to the loves and lives of African Americans in the 1930s-1960s.

This event is co-hosted and co-curated by Kyla Marshall and Muriel Leung.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Empathy (Station Hill Press), Nest (Kelsey Street Press) and I Love Artists, New and Selected Poems (University of California Press). A collaboration about weather with artist Kiki Smith is forthcoming from Lelong Gallery and a collaboration with her husband Richard Tuttle about communicating with plants will open in Munich, fall 2012. She lives in New York City and northern New Mexico.

Tamiko Beyer is the author of We Come Elemental, winner of the 2011 Kinereth Gensler Award and forthcoming from Alice James Books, and bough breaks from Meritage Press. She received her M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis where she was awarded a Chancellor’s Fellowship. She is a former Kundiman Fellow, a contributing editor to Drunken Boat, and the Advocacy Writer at Corporate Accountability International. She lives in Cambridge, MA. Find her online at wonderinghome.com.

Robin Coste Lewis's work has appeared in various journals, including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, GCN, The Pocket Myth Series, and anthologized in Black Silk and The Encyclopedia Project, F-K. She was a finalist for both the War Poetry Prize in 2010, and the National Rita Dove Prize in 2004. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships by the Caldera Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, and others. Currently, she is a Goldwater Fellow at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. Born in Compton, California, her family is from New Orleans.

Metta Sáma is author of South of Here (New Issues Press, 2005). Her chapbook, Where Ghosts Camp, is forthcoming from YesYesBooks as both ebook and print. Her poems & book reviews have been published or forthcoming in Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Diner, Esque, hercircle, Paterson Literary Review, Verse, Vinyl, Zone 3, among others. She is the fiction editor at ragazine.cc. She teaches African American & Women’s Literature at Lehman & Hunter Colleges in NYC.

@Cave Canem
20 Jay Street, Suite 310-A
Brooklyn, NY 11201

 

Join us in celebration of Lysley Tenorio's Monstress, a dazzling debut short-story collection featuring lepers, healers, and celebrities going incognito. Monstress alternates between the Philippines and San Francisco, where we encounter a Filipino B-movie horror actress from the 1960s striving for chance at stardom, a transgender sibling’s revelation at his father’s funeral, and former fans in Manila conspiring to murder The Beatles. In Monstress, identity is a constant experiment in performance, an elaborate masquerade that unveils monstrous personas like “Bat-Winged Pygmy Queen” and the half-Korean boy with mutant abilities. Prepare to be whisked away into Tenorio’s hall of mirrors, where the grotesque, simulated, and beautiful duke it out in dragalicious role-play.

Tenorio is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Award, an NEA fellowship, and the Whiting Writer’s Award. Make sure to check out Tenorio’s spicy interview with the Paris Review.

Lysley Tenorio's stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A Whiting Writer's Award winner and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin, Phillips Exeter Academy, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born during an earthquake in Olongapo City, Philippines, he currently lives in San Francisco, and is an associate professor at Saint Mary's College of California.

Nita Noveno was born and raised in Southeast Alaska. A graduate of the New School MFA Creative Writing Program in Creative Nonfiction, she is the the founder and co-host of Sunday Salon (www.sundaysalon.com), a monthly prose reading series in its ninth year in NYC. She teaches English Composition at LaGuardia Community College and lives in Astoria, Queens. Her essay, "A Bird's Life," about her mother of re-invention, will be published in the May issue of Kweli Journal.

@The Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 dollar suggested donation

 

Featuring: SOPHIA CHANG (A Better Tomorrow), CAROLINA GONZÁLEZ (WNYC), DREAM HAMPTON (Jay-Z’s Decoded), VIJAY PRASHAD (Trinity), RINKU SEN (Applied Research Center), JOHN KUO-WEI TCHEN (NYU)

Exhibits: Wu-Tang Clan, “Heritage Holidays,” Gender + Hip Hop

DJ hit replay! Or shall we manually rewind this nostalgic cassette tape with a discerning finger to your favorite awkward 1990s multiculti blunders? The '90s gave us “Sister Souljah moments,” the OJ Simpson hearings, the rise of xenophobic legislation (Prop 187 and 209) and homophobic punditry on national television (Jerry Falwell vs the Teletubbies). Carolina González (WNYC, Nueva York: the Complete Guide to Latino Life in the Five Boroughs) discusses the rise of “The Crossover,” by which ethnic pop products migrate to the mainstream. Music producer Sophia Chang talks Wu-Tang Clan and John Kuo-Wei Tchen (New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture) sits us down for the origin stories of “heritage holidays” and “multiculturalism centers.” Vijay Prashad (The Karma of the Brown Folk) gives a short talk on how the demise of multiculturalism has left racism alive and kicking in colorblind Obama-America. Prashad joins a panel conversation with dream hampton, Vibe contributing writer and collaborating author of Jay-Z's Decoded, and Rinku Sen (Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization), president of the Applied Research Center and publisher of Colorlines. See www.aaww.org/1989 for more details. 

A project of The Asian American Writers' Workshop, where we're inventing the future of Asian American intellectual culture.

@Brecht Forum
451 West Street, New York
$6 Admission at the door

 

How can poets mobilize poetry as a change agent? These poets demonstrate the ways that the arts can contribute to the defense of the environment, workers, and oppose war. Philip Metres will discuss the ways in which projects such as Peace Show (Cleveland) and the “Stories of War and Peace oral narratives project” have become counternarratives to war. Jonathan Skinner will present how engaged poets have responded to environmental catastrophe, in particular, poets' responses to the 2010 BP deepwater well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Jennifer Karmin will present images from her street performances Revolutionary Optimism and 4000 Words 4000 Dead. Ken Chen will talk about his activism and work around the Asian-American Writers Workshop. Finally, Mark Nowak’s "Revolution in the service of poetry" will address how the World Poetry Festival in Caracas, Venezuela, negotiates poetic praxis in the context of the revolutionary state. Finally, Mark Nowak’s "Imaginative Militancy and Trade Union Poetics" will examine his collaborations with global trade unions in recalibrating the role of the poetry workshop.

@Split This Rock
True Reformer Building, Board Room
1200 U Street NW
Washington, DC

 

Featuring: LISA ARRASTIA (principal at United Nations International School), PAUL BEATTY (White Boy Shuffle, Tuff), ANNE CHENG (African American Studies, Princeton University), EDDIE HUANG (Cooking Channel), NICHOLAS LEMANN (The Big Test), WESLEY YANG (New York Magazine)

Exhibits: “Those Asian American Whiz Kids," "Meritocracy," "The Chinese Take-Out Joint"

We all think we know the answer to this question--Asians are not black, right? But in the nineteenth century, one California court actually determined that Chinese Americans were black--since they were not, after all, white. This panel--titled after Janine Young Kim’s seminal essay, itself a ‘90s product--discusses how Asians and Blacks have been positioned as not just different, but set against each other, whether in the L.A. Riots or college admissions. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the LA Riots/LA Uprising/Sa-i-gu, but what’s often unremarked upon is how quickly a Black-White conflict (the LAPD vs King) transformed into a multiracial one, enfolding Latino residents and Korean shop owners. Novelist Paul Beatty (White Boy Shuffle) and AAWW’s Kai Ma (former editor of Koream Journal) present about the Riots, as we show video footage from Visual Communications. Blacks and Asians were also pitted against each other during the ‘90s debates over college admissions, consisting of attacks on affirmative action (Prop. 209) and right-wing tracts (The Bell Curve and The End of Racism) that set blacks against an Asian American model minority stereotype. These will be discussed by educator Lisa Arrastia (author of Starting Up: Critical Lessons from 10 New Schools), Columbia Journalism school dean Nicholas Lemann (The Big Test: The Secret History of American Meritocracy) and Wesley Yang (New York Magazine). Chef Eddie Huang (Baohaus, Cheap Bites on the Cooking channel) talks about Chinese take-out joints, name-checked by Jadakiss, as a site of black-Asian interactions. See aaww.org/1989 for details.

@ Museum of the Chinese in Americas (MOCA)
215 Centre Street, New York, NY
$5 admission. Tickets for sale at door.

 

Featuring: KAZEMBE BALAGUN (Brecht Forum), ELIZABETH MENDEZ BERRY (The Nation), JEFF CHANG (Can’t Stop Won’t Stop), HUA HSU (Grantland), HIRAM PEREZ (Vassar College), JAY SMOOTH (Ill Doctrine), SALAMISHAH TILLET (A Long Walk Home)

Exhibits: Family Matters, “We are Tiger Woods,” “Selling Out”

Two decades ago, Rodney King famously asked, “Why can’t we all just get along?” The question might as well have served as the defining question of the multicultural moment, in which the US attempted to dream about what a pluralistic society would look like--from GOP Family Values to the black middle-class aplomb of Family Matters, whether in elite college admissions or Star Trek: The Next Generation. Hua Hsu (Grantland, The Atlantic Monthly) revisits the notion of “selling out,” that street cred-sapping compromising of authenticity that would be completely unintelligible to a contemporary artist. Kazembe Balagun (Brecht Forum) discusses Family Matters and black kitsch.  Hiram Perez (Vassar College) interprets the universal “Cablinasian” identity of Tiger Woods. Salamishah Tillet (UPenn, co-founder of A Long Walk Home) talks feminism and the legacy of Anita Hill. We conclude with a roundtable with cultural critic Jeff Chang (Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation), journalist Elizabeth Mendez Berry (cited as an inspiration by Jay-Z) and DJ Jay Smooth (Ill Doctrine) to answer the decades-old question, “Why can’t we all just get along?”. The event takes place at MoCADA’s show, THE BOX THAT ROCKS: 30 Years of Video Music Box and the Rise of Hip Hop Music & Culture. See www.aaww.org/1989 for more details. 

A project of The Asian American Writers' Workshop, where we're inventing the future of Asian American intellectual culture.

@ Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art
80 Hanson Place
Brooklyn, NY

 

Torn between poetry and fiction? Wandering in a world of metaphors and similes? Aching to capture your family's stories, but just can't make it "write"? Join us and National Book Award winner Thanhha Lai, for an in depth look at prose poetry. Lai is the author of Inside Out and Back Again, which was described by Kirkus Review as "an enlightening, poignant and unexpectedly funny novel in verse" and is based on her own journey, from a comfortable home in war torn Vietnam to the unfriendly classrooms of Alabama. She will walk you through the crafting process and read from her award winning work (and did we mention there'll be ice cream?).

This is a free workshop open to ALL interested New York City high school and college students (and parents!). Please contact our youth programming coordinator, Tara Sarath at tsarath[at]aaww.org or (212) 494-0061 to reserve a space. Or you can RSVP to this event from our Facebook Fan page at http://www.facebook.com/lyceum.ideas. This program is made possible by the generosity of the Ford Foundation.

Thanhha Lai was born in Vietnam and moved to Alabama in 1975. Before pursuing her MFA at New York University, Thanhha covered the cop beat for the Orange County Register in California. She lives in New York City with her family and teaches writing at Parsons School of Design. Inside Out & Back Again is her first book. Visit her author website at Harper Collins for more about Thanhha and to read an excerpt from her work.

@Teachers and Writers Collaborative
520 Eighth Avenue, Suite 2020
New York, NY 10018
near Penn Station A/C/E and Times Sq 1/2/3/7

 

Featuring: DAN CHARNAS (The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip Hop), CHRISTIAN LANDER (Stuff White People Like), DAVID ROEDIGER (Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class), REIHAN SALAM (Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream)

Exhibits: Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” Grunge, Sassy Magazine, Multiracial White Identity, The White Audience

Titled after Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which identity politics reaches its reductio ad absurdum in a Hitler Studies department, our second AFTER 1989 installment explores the curious phenomenon of white ethnic identity in the 1990s. Think back to a time when Bill Clinton was called the “first African American President,” when Samuel Huntington claimed we were in a “Clash of Civilizations,” when the militia movement erupted in the Waco shootout and the Oklahoma City bombings--and when Asian Americans were positioned as “honorary whites” in the affirmative action debates. We’ve asked influential US labor historian and pioneer of critical whiteness studies, David Roediger (Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, University of Illinois), to join Christian Lander, the mind behind the meme and NY Times bestselling book Stuff White People Like, and National Review Contributing Editor Reihan Salam to talk about white racial formation. Dan Charnas explains what Vanilla Ice can tell us about race. American Book Award-winner Neela Vaswani, a multiracial author of Indian and Irish descent, talks about her white ethnic heritage. Jamia Wilson (CSPAN, CBS News, Good Magazine) talks Sassy Magazine and Negin Farsad (Nerdcore Rising, The Watch List on Comedy Central) talks about doing stand-up for white audiences. See www.aaww.org/1989 for more details. 

A project of The Asian American Writers' Workshop, where we're inventing the future of Asian American intellectual culture.

@CUNY Graduate Center
The Proshansky Auditorium
365 5th Avenue
New York, NY

Free and open to the public

 

Last month, authors Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar caused an international controversy. They did so by reading aloud from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. The book is banned in India for its controversial portrayal of Muslims, and Rushdie himself had called off a visit to the Jaipur Literary Festival in India when he received death threats. Upon hearing this news, Kunzru and Kumar decided to convert their festival panel into a reading of their favorite passages from The Satanic Verses. What was the response? The two authors were promptly told to leave both the festival and the country. Their show of solidarity--which has been profiled in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and across the Indian press--has prompted campaigns across India to change the censorship laws and left them fighting possibly years of legal battles. See Kunzru's own essay about the event here.

Please join us in supporting two wonderful writers and Workshop friends, Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar, and come celebrate the release of Kunzru's new novel, Gods Without Men. Named by Granta as one of the top forty British writers under forty, Kunzru is the author of My Revolutions, The Impressionist, and Transmission. His latest novel, Gods Without Men, is an exhilarating "countercultural mind-expanding quest" through a world of extraterrestrial cults and U.S. Marine Corps simulations through the Mojave desert, a landscape of absolute nothing--of God without men.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

 

Featuring: HAROLD AUGENBRAUM (National Book Foundation), ROBERTO BEDOYA (Tucson Pima Arts Council), SACHA JENKINS (Ego Trip Magazine), ASHOK KONDABOLU (Das Racist), JEFFERSON MAO (Ego Trip Magazine), LATOYA PETERSON (Racialicious), HIMANSHU SURI (Das Racist), THUY LINH TU (NYU), VICTOR VAZQUEZ (Das Racist)

Exhibits: The Canon, NEA Litigation 

Much of ‘90s multiculturalism was less about race than inventing polite ways to talk about racial taboos. Terms like “diversity” and “political correctness” blunted the unsavory aspects of dealing with racism, even as the right struggled to make English the national language and tamp down transgressive art, multicultural threats to the canon, and Ebonics. To kick off AFTER 1989, Ego Trip Magazine, the folks who gave us The Big Book of Racism, curates a slideshow of racialized advertisements--with call and response by hip hop trio Das Racist, who will judges the caliber of the images from quirky, race-conscious to downright, “Yo, that’s racist!” National Book Foundation Executive Director Harold Augenbraum, early proponent of Latino and Asian American literature, discusses the canon. Roberto Bedoya will discuss the litigation between artist Karen Finley and the National Endowment for the Arts at the height of the Culture Wars--for which he was co-plaintiff. NYU Professor Thuy Linh Tu interviews Latoya Peterson, editor of Racialicious--the preeminent blog at the intersection of race and pop culture--to break down how the Internet has unleashed the Pandora’s Box of racial discourse. See www.aaww.org/1989 for more details.  

A project of The Asian American Writers' Workshop, where we're inventing the future of Asian American intellectual culture.

@ powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Free and open to the public

 

Marilyn Chin said: ‘Our poetry is not a static enterprise but a thriving, historical progression.’ As we look at Asian American poetry today, much as changed, yet much has stayed the same. This panel will feature a group of diverse literary critics, anthologists, and poets in a vibrant discussion to grapple with questions such as: What is Asian American poetry, Where have we been, Where are we now, and what lies ahead in the future?

@AWP
The Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor, Private Dining Room 2
720 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605

 

Don Lee, Ken Chen, Prageeta Sharma, and Nami Mun read new work and the life behind their literature: private writing rituals; relationships with mentors and peers; favorite books, songs on iTunes repeat and performance-enhancing alcoholic drinks; social media and other procrastination devices. Ask nicely and they’ll talk about writing as Asian Americans when only 5% of the authors reviewed in the New York Times are writers of color. Presented by The Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

@AWP
The Hilton Chicago Hotel, 3rd Floor
720 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605

 

The next installment of our blindingly fun Mouth to Mouth Open Mic is here! Brave the mad March weather to hear Leah Winkler and Annie Choi at our monthly party. Leah, a current member of youngblood theater company, is a talented playwright and director. The New York Times praised her most recent play, The Internet, saying it "effectively skewers the false personas and banal self-descriptions on dating Web sites while underscoring the longing". A novelist and comedienne, Annie has received glowing reviews for her memoir, Happy Birthday or Whatever. It's so funny even her Tiger Mom approves! Annie also writes everything from "fauxbituaries" of famous architects to chair blogs. Join us for the Ed Lin and Jen Kwok hosted variety night, complete with ukulele, puns, and birthday hats.

Annie Choi is the author of Happy Birthday of Whatever: Track Suits, Kim Chee, and Other Family Disasters (HarperCollins). Her work has appeared in White Zinfandel, Pidgin Magazine, Architecture Digest (China), and the New Museum's The Last Newspaper. She received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA in writing from Columbia University. Her current Amazon reviewer ranking is 28,739. Visit her blog at annietown.com.

Leah Nanako Winkler is from Kamakura Japan and Lexington, KY. Her plays have been produced at venues like The Brick Theater, The Incubator Arts Project/Ontological Hysteric Theater, and Ars Nova as well as places in Philly, Ft. Lauderdale, Indianapolis, and Washington, DC. She is a Terra Nova Collective Groundbreakrs alum, current member of youngblood, a founding member of Everywhere Theatre Group, and has worked with companies like Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and the Asian American Arts Alliance. Her essays on hapa identity were commissioned by the Japanese American National Museum's Discover Nikkei Project. www.leahwinkler.org.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzz 600
$5 suggested donation

Come at 7:30 PM to sign up for an Open Mic slot!

 

Bringing together the best of two worlds -- poetry and noraebang --"Real Karaoke People" is a literary reading/karaoke event that will harmonize, shake, split, and excavate the deeper musical notes of diasporic narratives centered on community, family, the romantic, and immigration. Inspired by Ed Bok Lee’s Real Karaoke People, this event will feature readings by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Grace Cho, followed by a line-up of works gathered through a submissions process. Come to simply flaunt your mastery of a song from Boa’s Id; Peace B or submit a poem of heartbreak followed by your tear jerker rendition of Sinead O’Conner’s Nothing Compares.

The event is a part of Neighborhood Word, our programming series that brings Asian American writers to the outer boroughs.

Grace M. Cho is author of Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, which won the 2010 book award from the American Portions of her memoir are in Gastronomica and bourdainmediumraw.com, where an essay of hers was selected as a finalist in Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw essay contest. Grace is the owner of Brown Butter Brooklyn, an artisan baking company and an Associate Professor at the City University of New York.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is assistant professor of English and director of American Racial and Multicultural Studies at St. Olaf College. Her debut collection, Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press 2007), received the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Book Award. A Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network grant recipient, she is currently researching unwed mothers' narratives and writing a second poetry book.

This event is co-sponsored by Nodutdol.

@ Place @ Main KTV Bar & Lounge
36-45 Main St. 2nd Fl.
Flushing NY 11355

 

Does your knowledge about the Ramayana come entirely from comics your mom brought you from Jackson Heights? Or are you a comic book fan interested in engaging with one of the bestselling comics in both Asia and the world? Party down with the Workshop’s tribute to Amar Chitra Katha, the beloved Indian comic that’s sold more than 90 million copies, often featuring lovelorn maidens, fearless saints, and mythical kings romping around a half-toned South Asian fantasia, tinted yellow, blue and green.

Special guests include New York Times Best-Selling author Monica Ferrell and Himanshu “Heems” Suri of Das Racist, whose been making collage art with Amar Chitra Katha, airplane manuals, and baseball cards. They will be joined by Chitra Ganesh, an acclaimed visual artist whose work--which has been shown at MOMA, The Asia Society, and White Columns--appropriates Amar Chitra Katha, Bollywood and anime. We’ll also be celebrating Keshni Kashyap’s new graphic novel Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary, a compulsively readable comic about a young girl and her pen pal Jean Paul Sartre—-the Onion A.V. Club has called it "slangy and funny and honest, like a mix of John Hughes, J.D. Salinger and Marjane Satrapi."

Monica Ferrell is the author of a collection of poems, Beasts for the Chase, which won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and the novel, The Answer is Always Yes (The Dial Press/Random House), which was named a Borders Original Voices Selection and one of Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Novels of 2008. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Discovery/The Nation prizewinner, she directs the creative writing program at Purchase College.

Chitra Ganesh’s drawing based practice integrating comics, site-specific installation, and graphic visual forms, seeks to excavate buried narratives typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants in 2010 from the Art Matters Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation for Painting and Sculpture. Her work is represented in collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Devi Art Foundation, Deutsche Bank, the Saatchi and Burger Collections. Upcoming shows include a solo exhibition at the Gotenburg Kunsthalle in Sweden, as well as at Jack Tilton Gallery in New York. (www.chitraganesh.com/)

Keshni Kashyap is a filmmaker whose five short films have been screened in more than forty festivals around the world, and is the author of Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The graphic novel was named on Entertainment Weekly’s Must See list and praised by the Wall Street Journal, SF Chronicle and Booklist, which gave it a starred review.

Himanshu Suri, better known as Heems, is an Indian-American artist and writer from Queens, NY. Suri is a member of the alternative rap group Das Racist. Founded in 2008 Das Racist has headlined shows across the US, Canada, Mexico, Korea, China, Europe, Australia and more. In 2010 they performed in an exhibit at the Whitney Museum's Biennial and were nominated for Best Narrative Short at the Sundance Film Festival for their video "Who's That Brooown!?". Suri manages the group and has also released their first album, Relax, on his record label Greedhead Music distributed by Sony. He has also written about music and all things South Asian for Village Voice, Death and Taxes, Fuse, Stereogum and Alternet. Suri is an alumnus of Wesleyan University and New York's Stuyvesant High School. He has also studied at London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

 

Does Valentine’s Day have you all atwitter? Ease into your “mahal kita” with an afternoon of stellar performances from acclaimed Filipino poets and writers. The featured performances from Hossannah Asuncion, Joseph O. Legaspi, Nita Noveno, Bino Realuyo, Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, and Lara Stapleton, as well as performances from Filipino community members, immigrants, and Fil-Am youth to celebrate love stories, Philippine Independence, and the thriving Filipino-American community in Queens. There will be fiction, poetry, hip-hop, and more. Join us for a rollicking afternoon of storytelling, camaraderie, and mouth-watering Filipino food!

This event is part of Neighborhood Word, AAWW’s programming series that brings Asian American writers and artists to Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx -- the boroughs most Asian American New Yorkers call home.

Hossannah Asuncion grew up near the 710 freeway in Los Angeles and currently lives near an F/G stop in Brooklyn. Her work has been published by The Poetry Society of America, Tuesday; An Art Project, The Collagist, and other fine places. This is what she notices: http://notarie.tumblr.com/.

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago, a poetry collection, from CavanKerry Press. Born in the Philippines, he immigrated to LA with his family at the age of twelve. He holds degrees from Loyola Marymount University and the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Currently, he lives in Manhattan and works at Columbia University. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Gulf Coast, Bloomsbury Review, Puerto Del Sol, Seneca Review, The Literary Review, Gay & Lesbian Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bamboo Ridge, and the anthologies Contemporary Voices of the Eastern World, PinoyPoetics, and Titling the Continent. He received a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets.

Nita Noveno was born and raised in Southeast Alaska. She is a graduate of the New School MFA Creative Writing Program in Creative Nonfiction, and is the founder and co-host of Sunday Salon (www.sundaysalon.com), a monthly prose reading series in its ninth year in NYC. Her writing has appeared in The MacGuffin and Ducts.org, amongst other places. She lives in Astoria, Queens.

Bino Realuyo was born and raised in Manila Philippines. He is the son of a survivor of the Death March and Japanese concentration camp in the Philippines during World War II. Realuyo is also an educator in under-served communities and author of the award-winning books, The Umbrella Country and The Gods We Worship Live Next Door. His poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines including The Nation, The Literary Review, The Kenyon Review, New Letters, and in the recent anthology, Fire in the Soul: 100 Poets for Human Rights. He was a co-founder of the Asian American Writers Workshop and is on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s international MFA program in Creative Writing.

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco has published fiction and essays in The North American Review, Memorious, and Joyland, and the anthologies Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (Coffeehouse Press), Growing Up Filipino (Philippine American Literary House), and Walang Hiya: Literature Taking Risks Toward Liberatory Practice (Carayan Press), among others. He received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and taught writing at Boston College. He currently works at Prep for Prep in New York City and is completing a novel.

Lara Stapleton was raised primarily in East Lansing, Michigan, with some time in Manila in the Philippines, where her mother is from. New York City is now her home. She is the author of The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing (Aunt Lute) a Pen Open Book Committee Selection, and an Independent Booksellers' Selection and the editor of two anthologies: Thirdest World (Factory School) and Juncture (Soft Skull).

This event is co-sponsored by Philippine Forum. For more information, contact Ricco Siasoco (rsiasoco[at]gmail.com) or Melanie Dulfo (mdulfo[at]philippineforum.org).

@ Bayanihan Filipino Community Center
40-21 69th Street
Woodside, NY 11377

Free and open to the public.

 

Add power to your poetic punches and fleetness to your formal footwork. These classes will focus on adding techniques, tension, and twists to your expressive toolbox. Specific classes will focus on landing leaps, torquing turns, and the uses and abuses of certain voids. There will be a weekly writing assignment and workshop as well as assigned readings from contemporary poets and other artists offering varied approaches to the week's topic. Prepare to stretch and tone your mental muscles and learn how to "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant."

Please bring a packet of 3 to 5 short poems (no more than 5 pages) to the first class.

Monica Youn is the author of Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. She has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies including Fence, The Paris Review, and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress and has received residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation / Bellagio. She has taught creative writing at Pratt Institute and Columbia University, and is currently the Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at NYU Law School.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

Fee: $200 General/$180 Members
Deposit: $32 General Deposit/$30Members

 

Are you a high school or college student who wants to be a writer? Or just someone who’s ever wanted to grab the mic? Come join two incredible artists as they show you the ropes of performance and spoken word poetry. YaliniDream artfully weaves her spoken word with music and dance, while Kilusan Bautista mixes hip hop and theater using his poetry and martial arts skills. They will be your guides as you find the artist in yourself, raise your voice, and make your words shine.

This is a FREE workshop open to all high school students. All are welcome, so bring a friend! Snacks will be served!

Originally from San Francisco, CA, and currently based in New York City, Kilusan Bautista combines the performance elements of theater, spoken word poetry, martial arts and interpretive movement. Kilusan’s new work, Universal Filipino, has toured throughout the United States of North America with the purpose of building cross cultural unity and personal healing through the performance arts.

YaliniDream is a Sri Lankan Tamil who conjures spirit through her unique blend of poetry, theater, song, and dance. YaliniDream has toured nationally throughout the US, Canada, Europe, and Sri Lanka and has performed at renowned venues from the Dance Theater Workshop and the Lincoln Center to subway cars to schools.

@Asian American/Asian Research Institute, CUNY
25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor
(Between 5th and 6th Avenues)

 

Not ready for the New Year festivities to end just yet? Celebrate the Lunar New Year with hosts Ed Lin and Jen Kwok at our first open mic of 2012, featuring the brilliantly funny sketch comedian Angel Yau, who has performed at the NYC Underground Comedy Festival and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, and playwright, poet, and 2g's artistic director Carla Ching, who will be performing brand spanking new work in honor of the new year.

And why not join the party and share your own New Year’s resolutions?! Sign-ups for 5-minute performance slots begin at 7:30PM.

Angel Yau, a NYC based sketch comedian and storyteller. She started her comedy career unintentionally when she ran for a high school election and sang a song with her guitar... even though she can't sing or play guitar... AND she was extremely shy. Her performances got her into the Seattle Sketchfest, NYC Underground Comedy Festival, NC Comedy Arts Festival, etc. She performs at all over NYC such as the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, SketchBlock and Mortified! where she reenacts that high school election speech. Her side job as a filmmaker has recently gotten her in a UCB Beta Team.

Carla Ching's work in NY theater started back at AAWW with Peeling over 10 years ago down on St. Mark's Place. Her plays have since been workshopped or produced by 2g, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Partial Comfort, Vampire Cowboys, Red Fern, Desipina, Lark Play Development Center, and The Women's Project among others. She's currently part of Meeting of the Minds at the Lark and a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. She is working on Fast Company, an EST/Sloan commission play about a family of con artists and also serves as artistic director for 2g.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation
sign-up at 7:30PM for 5 minute slot

 

Are you in dire need of a bon voyage? Come hear three acclaimed writers read works set in the places usually at the periphery of the map. Alice Albinia re-imagines the Mahabharata in urban Delhi in her debut novel of manners, Leela’s Book. A character-packed page-turner, Leela’s Book is a fable about family and storytelling and a "rollercoaster romp through the centuries, accompanied by a disgruntled Ganesh” (Kishwar Desai, India Today). PEN Faulkner winner Sabina Murray chronicles four thousand years of the bravest and most sadistic men who ever lived: the colonial pioneers of the Age of Exploration. Her short story collection Tales of the New World is jam-packed with "Italian noblemen, Africa chiefs, Russian prisoners, Australian Aborigines, even Aztec kings" and talks of "times and places, horrors and joys; of oceans, deserts, starvation—of quite simply everything—very beautifully, bringing it all close to us, to here, to now" (New York Times Book Review). American Book Award winner Neela Vaswani offers her readers a glimpse into what it is to live--and be--"in-between" in her mixed-genre work You Have Given Me a Country. The work, which is "part history, part memoir, and part social commentary," is at its heart, "the story of family, and how love can hold it together in the face of obstacles.” (ForeWord)

Alice Albinia is the author of Empires of the Indus, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Authors’ Club Dolman Travel Award, and the Jerwood/Royal Society of Literature Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian and the Financial Times. She lives in England.

At the age of two, Sabina Murray and her family moved from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to Perth, Australia and in 1980, the family moved again to Manila. She did not return to live in the States until she attended college. She "is an explorer – someone with a hankering to visit places others tend to avoid" (New York Times). She is the author of Slow Burn, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, Forgery and The Caprices. She is also writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, released in 2005. Murray is professor of English and teaches in the MFA/Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Neela Vaswani is author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends, and a memoir, You Have Given Me a Country. She is also co-author of the Young Adult novel in letters, Same Sun Here. Her work has received the American Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, the ForeWord Book of the Year gold medal, an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and many other honors. She has a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, lives in New York City, and teaches at Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program. She is founder and curator of the Storylines Project with the New York Public Library.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

 

Fort Greene, Park Slope, and Dumbo...we know. The lit babies love Brooklyn, but ever wonder about the literary world of Queens? Join us as three writers from Queens Noir discuss their craft and relationship to New York's largest and most diverse borough by taking us on a tour of some of Queen's most iconic neighborhoods. Shailly Agnihotri introduces us to a Jackson Heights matrimonial agency, Ken Wishnia asks us to peer behind a bodega in Corona, and Denis Hamill brings us to the Bayside riverfront. Tejas Desai, an Adult Services Librarian at the Bayside Community Library, leads the conversation.

Copies of Queens Noir are available at the library for checkout with a Queens Library card and we'll have food and drink on hand.

This event is part of the biweekly Writer's Workshop at Bayside Library and Neighborhood Word, an AAWW programming series that brings Asian American writers and artists to Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx -- the boroughs most Asian-American New Yorkers call home.

Shailly Agnihotri is an award-winning independent filmmaker living and working in New York. Her feature-length documentary examining the suicide rate among American troops in Iraq, Three Soldiers, was a Fancast "Movie of the Week" and played in festivals throughout the United States. Ms. Agnihotri is a practicing public defense attorney. Her newest project is full length play about her experiences in the criminal justice system, entitled American Tune.

Kenneth Wishnia teaches writing, literature and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College on Long Island. His novels include 23 Shades of Black, an Edgar Allan Poe Award and Anthony Award finalist; Soft Money, a Library Journal Best Mystery of the Year; Red House, a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year; and The Fifth Servant, an Indie Notable selection, winner of a Premio Letterario ADEI-WIZO, and a finalist for the Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Award (Macavity Awards). His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Queens Noir, Long Island Noir, Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail, and elsewhere.

Denis Hamill was born and raised in Brooklyn. He attended public high schools and CUNY. He has written for The Village Voice, NY Newsday, and currently writes a column twice a week for the NY Daily News. He has appeared on Conan O’Brien, The O’Reilly Factor, Good Day New York, Sam Roberts, The Early Show, The History Chanel, and Leonard Lopate. He is the author of ten novels, most recently Sins of Two Fathers, Empty Stockings, and Ten Spot. An original screenplay he wrote, “Under New Management”, is currently airing on Showtime. He lives in Queens.

Tejas Desai is an Adult Services Librarian and conducts the Writer's Workshop at the Bayside Community Library in Queens. He holds a MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from CUNY-Queens College and has won the Wesleyan Fiction Award. He writes novels, short stories, and plays and acted in the film version of Tao Lin's surreal novel Eeeee eee eeee. Though he travels frequently, he was born, raised, and lives in Queens.

@Bayside Community Library in Queens, Meeting Room
214-20 Northern Boulevard
Bayside, NY 11361

 

Hyphen and The Asian American Writers’ Workshop have selected Timothy Tau as the 2011 Asian American Short Story Contest winner for “The Understudy,” a story about an Asian American actor trying to make it in Hollywood. "Full of vibrating energy, ‘The Understudy’ is an exciting story to read; better, the excitement does not fizz off but makes a reader think afterward," says contest judge Yiyun Li, a 2010 MacArthur Fellow and award winning author.

We'll celebrate this contest with readings from Tau, 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest winner Sunil Yapa, 2011 contest runner-up William Shih, and 2011 contest finalists Sameer Pandya and Shymala Dason. Mosey on down to the Workshop to hear from the next big things in Asian American literature.

About the contest: The Asian American Short Story Contest -- now in its fourth year -- is held in partnership between Hyphen and The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the nation’s premiere nonprofit dedicated to great writing by Asian Americans. Open to all writers of Asian descent living in the United States and Canada, the contest continues to be the only one of its kind and aims to highlight the diverse voices and literary strength coming out of the Asian American community.

Shymala Dason grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, came to the US at nineteen to study literature at Bennington College, wound up with a major in physics and a stealth minor in lit, compounded the confusion by going to grad school in math at the University of Maryland and then spending ten years doing atmospheric science (mostly Martian) at NASA while scribbling about immigration, family, identity, culture and place in every spare moment. Her writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, the Swarthmore Review, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Topography of War, et al. Other hats include creative industries consultant and photographer.

Sameer Pandya has published fiction in Narrative, Other Voices, Epiphany, and Ozone Park Journal and his non-fiction in Sports Illustrated, The New York Daily News, and Miller-McCune. He teaches creative writing and literature in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

William Shih is a native of New York City. His stories have been awarded Honorable Mentions in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, as well as the 80th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Story Competition in the category of Literary Fiction. He has also been a multiple finalist for Glimmer Train Press’s Short Story Award. William is a graduate of New York University. Currently, he is working on a collection of short stories, while attending graduate school at NYU, where he is also an adjunct instructor of organic chemistry. William studies with author, Gay Walley.

Timothy Tau is a Writer and Filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles, California. His short story, "The Understudy" won Grand Prize in the 2011 Hyphen/AAWW Asian American Short Story Contest and is published in the Winter 2011 Issue of Hyphen Magazine. His short story "Land of Origin" won Second Prize in the 2010 Playboy College Fiction Contest. His short films and music videos have appeared in various film festivals worldwide. He has been recently selected as a 2011-2012 Visual Communications Armed With A Camera Fellow. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.

Sunil Yapa is a graduate of the Hunter College MFA program in Fiction, where he was selected for two Hertog Fellowships and the Alumni Scholarship awarded to one fiction student every three years. He has received scholarships to the Norman Mailer Writers’ Center, The New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. The son of a father from Sri Lanka and a mother from Montana, he has lived and traveled in forty-eight states and thirty-five countries. He is currently finishing a novel set during one day of anti-corporate protests in Seattle, November 1999. He is the winner of the 2010 Hyphen/AAWW Asian American Short Story Contest.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation

 

Prolific American jazz musician, writer, and social activist Fred Ho celebrates the release of his new memoir, Diary of A Radical Cancer Warrior, with performances, readings, and tributes from some of his closest friends. Acclaimed poets Quincy Troupe (first official poet laureate of California), Robert Kocik (The Prosodic Body), Magdalena Gómez (artistic director of Teatro Vida), and Tiokasin Ghosthorse (First Voices Indigenous Radio) share recent work to honor Fred. Comedian Jennifer Kidwell roasts the guest of honor, performer Youn Jung Kim incorporates dance, song, and poetry, and Pua Ali'i 'Ilima o Nuioka will perform the hula.

Fred reads sections from his new memoir, Diary of a Radical Cancer Warrior, which chronicles his battles against cancer and ultimately, his triumphs against it, in an exploration of what it means to truly heal. Join us as we celebrate this legendary figure in Asian American political organizing and American music.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse (“Ghosthorse” “Spirit Coming In” “He Places the People First”) is from the Cheyenne River Lakota (Sioux) Nation of South Dakota. He holds a Masters Degree in Native American Studies and Communications. He is a storyteller, poet, university lecturer, scholar, essayist, cultural interpreter, and a peace and Mother Earth rights activist. Tiokasin has been described as “a spiritual agitator, natural rights organizer, Indigenous thinking process educator and a community activator.” He is the host of First Voices Indigenous Radio and is also a master musician, having played and a teacher of magical, ancient and modern sounds.

Magdalena Gómez, editor, is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, and was designated a Master Artist by National Endowment for the Arts presenters, Pregones Theater, NYC. She is a multi-disciplinary artist, columnist, educator, and national keynote speaker. Magdalena is also a commentator with National Public Radio (WFCR.FM). Her publishing credits include The Progressive; The Berkshire Review; Ollantay Theater Journal; Palabra: A Magazine of Chicano and Latino Literary Art, and the Los Angeles Times. She has performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Vanderbilt University, and the Department of Social and Health Services. Her plays for children and adults have been presented nationally, including Off-broadway and in countless schools. She is a regular collaborator with composer and baritone saxophonist, Fred Ho. Learn more at www.latinapoet.net and www.teatrovida.com.

Fred Ho is an American jazz baritone saxophonist, composer, bandleader, playwright, writer, and social activist. He holds a BA degree in sociology from Harvard University. He is credited with co-founding several Asian American civic groups, such as the East Coast Asian Students Union while a student at Harvard, the Asian American Arts Alliance in New York City, the Asian American Resource Center in Boston, and the Asian Improv record label. He is currently battling colon cancer and practicing an extreme raw food lifestyle, which he writes about in his forthcoming book The Extreme Raw Manifesto (Skyhorse Publishing 2012). He lives in Brooklyn.

Pua Ali‘i ‘Ilima (The Royal ‘Ilima Blossom) is the hālau hula (school of traditional Hawaiian dance) founded by Vicky Holt Takamine in 1977. The hālau participates in cultural festivals and events throughout Hawai‘i and the world. Our hula ‘ohana, or family, is a diverse community of people that embraces Native Hawaiians and non-natives alike. The NYC branch of halau, Pua Ali‘i ‘Ilima o Nuioka, was formed in early 2010.

Jennifer Kidwell is a performer who has benefited from the experience of collaborating with a host of talents, including Hoi Polloi and 600 Highwaymen theater companies, Logic Limited, Ltd. clown ensemble, visual artist Joe Scanlan as well as the Afro-Asian Music Ensemble. She is currently enrolled in the inaugural class of Pig Iron Theater Company's Advanced Performance Training Program.

Youn Jung Kim is an actor, performer, and singer who is currently in her final year of M.F.A at Sarah Lawrence College Theater program. She holds B.A at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Theatre and Drama. Youn Jung has been collaborating with Fred Ho including Fred Ho & The Afro Asian Music Ensemble at BAM cafe and Fred Ho & The Afro Asian Music Ensemble at UW-Madison. Youn Jung also recently appeared as Gertrude in the production of Hamyul; Korean Hamlet at La MaMa ETC. Her work is mostly based on her Korean background and the identity. Currently she is working on projects about Comfort Women, and Food and Difference.

Quincy Troupe is the author of 18 books and ten volumes of poetry. His last book of poems, The Architecture of Language was recipient of the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego and was the first official Poet Laureate of the State of California. Troupe has been awarded three American Book Awards and a 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award for Sustained Literary Excellence. He is also the author of Miles and me, the co-author of The Pursuit of Happyness, with Chris Gardner, and the editor of James Baldwin: The Legacy. Currently, he is the Editor of Black Renaissance Noire, published at The Institute of African-American Affairs at New York University. His new book of poems, Errançities will be published in February 2012.

Co-sponsored by The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU

@The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
41-51 East 11th Street,7th Floor
Between University Place and Broadway

Tickets will be available for sale at the door: $15, includes a free CD

 

Still sitting on that manuscript? You know, the one you spent five years laboring over? Haven't had much luck with publishers and wondering what the heck you're going to do next? At this roundtable, co-presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance, we'll discuss new, innovative ways to reach a modern audience of readers. Emily Rubin will share how her novel Stalina became a huge success after she submitted her manuscript to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest. Ram Devineni (editor and publisher at Rattapallax), Inbal Gould and Joshua Gould (co-founders of Writers Out), and Daniel Machlin (Executive Editor at Futurepoem Books) will comment on Emily's experience and trends in e-publishing, and Andrea Louie, Executive Director of the Asian American Arts Alliance, board member of the AAWW, and author of Moon Cakes, will moderate the conversation.

Emily Rubin submitted the manuscript of her novel Stalina to a competition at Amazon and it was electronically published soon after. Due to the success of the novel, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has recently picked it up for hard-copy publication. (http://emilyrubin.net)

Andrea Louie, aside from being the Executive Director at A4 and author of Moon Cakes, is also a board member here at The Asian American Writers' Workshop.

Ram Devineni is editor and publisher of Rattapallax Press, which publishes its own literary magazine, along with poetry books and a webseries.

Inbal Gould & Joshua Gould are co-founders of Writers Out, a non-exclusive service allowing writers of all subject matter to self-publish their work within a social network, building a fan base and maintaining a close connection with their audience. The so-called MySpace of literature, Writers Out makes it easy to share your work with friends, strangers, and other writers.

Daniel Machlin is the Executive Editor at Futurepoem Books, a publishing collaborative dedicated to presenting innovative works of contemporary poetry and prose by both emerging and important, underrepresented writers.

Co-presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

Tickets: $10 General Admission
free for Workshop and Alliance members

 

Is hindsight really 20/20? If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your 20-year-old self? At this year's last Mouth to Mouth Open Mic: 20/20, we'll ponder such questions in honor of the Workshop's 20th birthday (can you believe it?!). Actor-writer-director Nandita Shenoy tells stories about the joys (and woes) of being 20 and all Asian improv group InvAsian will....well...improv and make up stuff on the spot, taking inspiration from you, our glorious audience. As always, sign-ups for 5-minute slots begin at 7:30PM and the lovely Jen Kwok and rambunctious Ed Lin hold down the fort and the mics. We'll have noisemakers, birthday hats, and booze. Join us as we long for the days of our youth and toast to the next twenty years!

Nandita Shenoy is an actor-writer-director living in New York City and working all over the country. She recently returned from performing in the repertory season at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. She is a member of the Ma-Yi Writers’ Lab and has had plays produced by theHegira, Green Light Productions, New Perspectives Theater, and New Ground Collective. Her plays have also been read at the Kennedy Center, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Salaam Theater, the Bleecker Street Theater, and the Abingdon. As a director, she has worked with Theatreworks/USA, Ma-Yi Theater Company, and Rising Circle Theater Collective where she sits on the Board.

InvAsian! is an all Asian improv team featuring some of the funniest Far Eastern talents from The Peoples Improv Theater, The Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre, and the Magnet Theater. Using nothing more than a suggestion from the audience, InvAsian! will craft some seriously gut-busting comedy on the spot.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation
sign up at 7:30PM for 5 minute slot

 

Join the Workshop as we team up with the NYU Creative Writing Program's Reading Series to showcase two breakout talents in poetry and prose. The afternoon will begin with a reading by Samuel Park, whose debut novel, This Burns My Heart, was a Kirkus Reviews' Editor's Pick and an Amazon Best Book of the Month. Janine Oshiro, recent winner of the first annual Kundiman Poetry Prize, will follow with select pieces from her first collection, Pier. Concluding the event will be special guest Jessica Hagedorn, who was recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Asian American Writers' Workshop, and was also the guest of honor at last month's PAGE TURNER Literary Festival.

Originally born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Korean-American author Samuel Park graduated from Stanford University and USC, where he earned his doctorate in English. He is the author of This Burns My Heart, which was chosen as an Amazon Best Book of the Month, a People magazine “Great Reads in Fiction,” and one of the Today Show’s “Favorite Things.” This Burns My Heart was also a Kirkus Reviews’ Editor’s Pick, and an Indie Next List Notable Book. Samuel’s other work includes the novella Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the short film of the same name, which he wrote and directed. He lives in Chicago, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at Columbia College.

Janine Oshiro holds degrees from Whitworth College (now Whitworth University), Portland State University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of a poetry fellowship from Oregon’s Literary Arts. She lives in Hawaii and teaches at Windward Community College. She is the winner of the inaugural Kundiman Poetry Prize, which was founded in 2010 and is an annual book publication prize open to emerging and established poets of Asian American descent. The prize is offered through partnership between Alice James Books and Kundiman, a nonprofit organization devoted to the preservation and promotion of Asian American poetry.

Novelist, playwright, poet, early supporter of the Workshop, and former punk band leader, Jessica Hagedorn is the recipient of the Workshop’s 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the author of several books, including the new novel Toxicology, a Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week, and Dogeaters, a National Book Award nominated instant classic, which The New York Times Book Review described as a “fast, frequently hair-raising first novel... that maps the ruin at the heart of Philippine society in the last four decades.” Hagedorn also edited the landmark two-volume collection Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Asian American Fiction, which showcased two generations of writers, many of them published there for the first time. More recently, she traveled to the Arizona border as part of the Asian American Writers' Workshop's CultureStrike delegation. As the novelist Russell Banks has said, “Jessica Hagedorn is one of the best of a generation of writers who are making the American language new and who in the process are creating a New American Literature.”

The event is co-sponsored Kundiman and the NYU Creative Program's Reading Series.

@NYU Creative Writing Program
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
58 West 10th Street
(Between 5th and 6th Avenues)

open to the public

 

Four Way Books teams up with the Workshop to present an all-star poetry line-up featuring Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang, National Book Award finalist Monica Youn, and award-winning author Claire Kageyama- Ramakrishnan. In Ignatz, Monica Youn tackles George Harriman's legendary Krazy Kat comic to extract Ignatz the mouse and expand upon his role as the defiant object of Krazy's pursuit. What emerges is both sharp and sad -- a collection of the ways desire shapes the beloved and makes him unearthly. Tina Chang will read from her new book of poems, Of Gods & Strangers, which poet Tracy K. Smith calls a "large-scale epic, sifting through the embers and emblems of outlived eras, and carrying what it finds back toward the future." The evening will close with a reading by Claire Kageyama- Ramakrishnan debuting her second, highly-anticipated work Bear, Diamonds and Crane in which she recounts, in a voice Blas Falconer calls "familiar and fresh, heartbreaking [...] and humorous," the legacy of Manzanar and the struggle of individuals measuring their place in history. Peggy Lee, a poet and Open City fellow, will introduce the readers and lead a post-reading conversation. Join us as we sift through what constitutes present identities, with wine (it helps).

Tina Chang was raised in New York City. The current Brooklyn Poet Laureate, she is the author of Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books), Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books) and co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton). Her poems have been published in American Poet, Indiana Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, and Sonora Review, among others. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Van Lier Foundation, among others. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.

Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan was born in Santa Monica and raised in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. in English from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, earned an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and completed her M.A. in literature at the University of California at Berkeley. At the University of Houston she was a Cambor Fellow and earned a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing. She is a full-time instructor at Houston Community College, Central Campus. She lives in Houston with her husband, Raj, a scientist specializing in HIV/AIDS research at Baylor College of Medicine, and their three cats. She continues to grow her hair and donate 8 inch locks to create wigs for cancer patients.

Monica Youn is the author of Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. She has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies including Fence, The Paris Review, and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress and has received residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation / Bellagio. She has taught creative writing at Pratt Institute and Columbia University, and is currently the Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at NYU Law School.

Peggy Lee is a writer, independent scholar, and youth worker residing and working in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. She was a 2010-2011 Open City Asian American Writer's Workshop Fellow and worked on a creative writing project about urban change in the three NYC Chinatowns which led her into karaoke bars and barber shops. She has performed in venues on the East and West coasts, from Bluestockings Bookstore to UCLA and is currently working on a poetry manuscript. She has a piece forthcoming in Drunken Boat- Spring 2012. She received her Master’s in Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and graduated with her B.A. in Women’s Studies in 2008 from UC Santa Barbara.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation

 

Come rub elbows and knock knees with your favorite writers at one of Brooklyn’s best alternative literary festivals: the third annual PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival. Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the festival features a Korean taco trunk, two stand-up comedians, five National Book Award finalists, seven Guggenheim Fellows, a killer afterparty with the best playlist of all time, and you!

• An all-star line-up featuring: Junot Díaz, Amitav Ghosh, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Hari Kunzru, Jayne Anne Phillips, Suketu Mehta, Min Jin Lee, Mark Nowak, Amitava Kumar, Granta editor John Freeman, and Guernica editor Joel Whitney.
• Your favorite new voices: Teju Cole (author of Open City), Danielle Evans (NBA 5 Under 35 winner), Booker finalist Hisham Matar, Pen Faulkner winner Sabina Murray, Whiting Award winner Alexander Chee, Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang, National Book Award finalist Monica Youn, and NBCC finalist Brenda Shaughnessy.
• Multi-dimensional program includes: a staged reading directed by Ralph Peña; artist Wangechi Mutu (MOMA, Guggenheim) talking about immigration; an open mic featuring Jen Kwok (Date an Asian), Negin Farsad (Nerdcore Rising) and others; stories from twenty years of the Workshop; and hard-hitting conversations about Occupy Wall Street, Islam and the West, the rise of China and India, and the national crackdown on immigration.

Co-sponsored by Melville House, powerHouse Arena, Verso Books, MTV, Guernica, and Granta.

*** Day-passes and tickets will be available for sale at the door. If you have already purchased a ticket, your name will be at the door.

@powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street, Brooklyn
@Melville House
145 Plymouth St, Brooklyn
$5 per event / $20 All-Day Pass / $30 All-Day Pass (w/ Afterword Party)

 

The Saturday before Halloween join us for music, drinks, dancing, and fine company for the raucous afterparty for the Page Turner Literary Festival. We’ll have a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline at night, a killer playlist for your dancing shoes, cake, noisemakers, glitter, a giant piñata, and infinite quantities of beer and wine. Special guests include former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee and two special guest DJs: Baohaus celebrity chef Eddie Huang, star of upcoming show TV Dinners, and Sujatha Fernandes, author of Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Verso), a book Jeff Chang calls "a classic of hip hop writing." 

Additional playlist selected by some of New York's hottest cultural figures: Kris Chen (head of XL Recordings in America, the label of Vampire Weekend, the XX, Sigur Ros), hip hop trio Das Racist, sports blogger Nathaniel Friedman (The Classical, Free Darko), literary enfant terrible Tao Lin, Jefferson “Chairman” Mao (Ego Trip NYC), writer Luc Sante (author of Low Life, Factory of Facts), novelist Lynne Tillman, music journalist Dave Tompkins (author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach), Michael Vazquez (Senior Editor, Bidoun magazine), music critic and DJ Oliver “O-Dub” Wang (soul-sides.com). Before the dancing starts, we’ll also honor the winners of the Fourteenth Annual Asian American Literary Awards: Amitava Kumar, winner of our nonfiction award which will be presented by past honoree Suketu Mehta, and Kimiko Hahn, our poetry award-winner. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, one of the country’s premiere literary arts spaces, is throwing the party to end all parties. We want you there. Celebrate our twentieth anniversary and reserve your space today. Co-sponsored by MTV World, Verso, Granta, Guernica, Beerlao, and NoveRoma wines.

*** Day-passes and tickets will be available for sale at the door. If you have already purchased a ticket, your name will be at the door.

@Verso Press
20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn
$10; $30 for 4; $30 with Festival day pass

 

Celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Workshop at an intimate dinner honoring legendary writer Jessica Hagedorn with our 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award. (Read why Ishmael Reed, Maxine Hong Kingston and David Henry Hwang think she deserves thie award here.) She'll be honored by Bob Holman, founder of downtown New York spoken word mecca the Bowery Poetry Club and host on MTV's "Spoken Word Unplugged."

Maharlika Filipino Moderno, a hip East Village foodie hotspot, has created a special three-course menu of arrozcaldo, a special main course and dessert. Praised by New York Magazine and Time Out New York, chef Miguel Trinidad trained not just from the culinary establishment, but also with “moms and grandmothers” in the Philippines. Event sponsored by NoveRoma wines, a family-run winery located in Lodi, California with a goal to produce and support artisan wines, local art, and sustainable food. Tickets include PAGE TURNER festival and Afterword party.

If you can’t join us, we encourage you to donate in absentia to honor Jessica and invest in one of the hottest cultural events in New York. You’ll be investing in workshops for underserved youth, scholarships for high school students, and an ambitious web-magazine set to launch this spring.(Photograph of Hagedorn courtesy of Marion Ettlinger.)

@Maharlika Filipino Moderno
111 1st Ave, New York
$250 Dinner ticket, $1000 for five SOLD OUT

 

A multimedia performance featuring photographs, prints, film, live music and a reading by Afghan Americans on the 10th anniversary of the American war in Afghanistan. The works explore the tangled history of Afghanistan and the U.S. as it relates to themes of culture, identity, and war. Featuring Naheed Elyasi, Mariam Ghani, Yusuf Misdaq, Sahar Muradi, Najila Naderi, Laimah Osman, Wazhmah Osman, Zohra Saed, Gazelle Samizay, Zakarya Sherzad, and Helena Zeweri.

The event is part of Neighborhood Word, an AAWW programming series that brings Asian American writers and artists to Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx -- the boroughs most Asian American New Yorkers call home.

Naheed Elyasi was born in Afghanistan and her family fled soon after the invasion of the Soviet Union. She grew up in North Carolina until her love for fashion brought her to New York in 1999. She eventually left fashion to pursue a career in the nonprofit sector, joining School of Hope, an organization that raised funds for education in Afghanistan. Naheed recently finished her first novel and has previously been published in One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemorary Afghan American Literature. She has been a contributing writer for Zeba Magazine, the first lifestyle magazine for the Afghan Diaspora, and is also founder of burqa and stilettos, an online community to empower Middle Eastern and South Asian women.

Mariam Ghani is a Brooklyn-based artist whose works in video, installation and photography has been exhibited and screened across the U.S. and internationally. Her critical writing on disappearance, warm data, and networked archives has been featured in FUSE, Samar, the Radical History Review, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and the artist newspapers Common Possibilities and Arts and Leisure. Index of the Disappeared, her collaboration with Chitra Ganesh, has also been discussed in a number of academic journals, dissertations, essays and books. Ghani also lectures widely and organizes/moderates exhibitions, workshops, and discussions. .

Yusuf Yoshi Misdaq is a purple bird from inner space. While on Earth he has three written novels, six poetry books and released three LP's of music, all fueled by magic wind and weightless wings. He speaks through subtitled hieroglyphics transmitted via sign language, dubbed for the hearing impaired. He aspires to discover the existence of hitherto unknown worlds through elliptical dance. He was raised by a flock of Afghans by the sea in England.

Sahar Muradi is a writer and performer born in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature and an Organizing Fellow for the Open City Project, a community-based writing project through the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her writing has been featured in literary journals and on public radio. Her theatre credits include a devised adaptation of “Masque of the Red Death” through HiveMind Theatre and a production of “Undocumented” through Unboxed Voices. She is currently a copywriter living in New York City. 

Najila Naderi, originally from Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, grew up in Flushing, NY. She received her BA in English from Stony Brook University in 2006. Najila currently works at Columbia University while pursuing her MA in English Literature at Queens College and her Postbaccalaureate Studies at Columbia University. Though she has been writing for almost 20 years, she has only recently started doing public readings. Najila writes about the Afghan-American diaspora, and community and family relations.

Laimah Osman is a Brooklyn-based multi-media artist who explores politics of representation as it ties to culture, race and gender. In her current work, Laimah appropriates pictures from newspapers, primarily depicting The War On Terror. She manipulates pictures from the ongoing wars in Central Asia, reframing images to form new narratives. She states: “I don’t process these as having fixed messages but look for the ‘surplus value’ seeping outside the frame. On a basic level, pictures are a way for me to connect to Afghanistan, my country of birth. They are a way for me to bridge the great physical distance between my current home and my past. I search the picture and look for clues that trigger memories and my imagination. Physical distance is hard, an absolute, but psychological distance is soft and can travel great distances and time.”

Wazhmah Osman is a writer and filmmaker who travels frequently between NYC and Kabul. As a PhD candidate in New York University’s department of Media, Culture, and Communication, she is allegedly finishing her dissertation “Thinking Outside the Box: Television and the Afghan Culture Wars”. She is definitely not engaging in timely artistic, activist, and political pursuits such as this one. Her short film Buried Alive: Afghan Women Under the Taliban was widely circulated by human rights organizations and her critically acclaimed feature, Postcards from Tora Bora, has screened in film festivals nationally and internationally. For more information please visit postcardsfromtorabora.com.

Zohra Saed is a Brooklyn-based poet, academic and editor. She holds an M.F.A in Poetry from Brooklyn College and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in English at The City University of New York Graduate Center. Her poetry and essays have been published in numerous anthologies and journals. She has performed as part of the cast of the theater director Ping Chong’s “Undesirable Elements” in 2000 and in 2007, where the ensemble cast performed at the first National Asian American Theater Festival. Her academic work focuses on Central Asian & Middle Eastern American literature, film and video art. Zohra most recently co-edited One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Afghan American Literature with Sahar Muradi.

Gazelle Samizay was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and now resides in the US. Using video and photography she explores the intersection of her Afghan heritage and American upbringing through her status as a woman in both spaces. Samizay’s photographs and videos have been exhibited across the US and internationally. She has taught courses in Afghanistan, Jordan and the US, and her writing has been published in One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature. Samizay is a recipient of the Princess Grace Experimental Film Honoraria, the 1885 Graduate Fellowship in Arts and Humanities, and the Northern Trust Enrichment Award. Samizay is represented in the Middle East by Lawrie Shabibi Gallery (Dubai).

Helena Zeweri was born in Flushing, New York and has been living in the city for about seven years. Currently, Helena is working on a chapter for an edited volume, which explores how Muslim American women’s online groups contribute to the production and circulation of new forms of knowledge to destabilize mainstream notions of gender, class, and politics. Some of Helena’s research is published in Encyclopedia of Asian American Folklore and Folklife. Helena is also the Director of Research for Femin Ijtihad, an organization that aims to share analyses of academic scholarship on Muslim women’s rights with activists working at the grassroots level. On the side, Helena also works as a Program Assistant at Global Language Project, a non-profit that aims to offer foreign language instruction in NYC public schools.

Co-sponsored by the Afghan American Artists & Writers Association and 10 Years And Counting

@Mandragoras
3601 36th Avenue
3rd Floor North
Long Island City, Queens

free to the public

 

Join us as we celebrate the release of new books by Ed Bok Lee and Patrick Rosal, both past winners of the Asian American Literary Award Members' Choice Award, and announce this year's Asian American Literary Award finalists. Best known for the groundbreaking and award-winning volume Real Karaoke People, Ed Bok Lee will read from his new poetry collection Whorled, which poet Dobby Gibson promises, "will piss you off, crack you up, and leave you haunted by one of the most soulful love letters to language itself that you will ever read." Patrick Rosal reads from his highly anticipated poetry collection, Boneshepherds, which Terrence Hayes praises as, "[l]aced with a hopefulness born not just of Patrick Rosal's tremendous gifts as a poet, but of his humanity."

Both poets negotiate the often violent intersections of the personal, the political, and the profane to incendiary results, and we are pleased to launch their new collections to what will most certainly be future acclaimed. Speaking of which, we will also be announcing the finalists of the Fourteenth Annual Asian American Literary Awards in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, so come out, let loose, and we'll juxtapose all night.

Ed Bok Lee was raised in South Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota. A former bartender, phys ed instructor, journalist, and translator, he studied in the U.S., South Korea, Kazakhstan, and Russia, earning an MFA from Brown University. Lee has shared his work in journals and anthologies, and on public radio and MTV, and teaches part time at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul. Lee is the author of Real Karaoke People, which was the winner of an Asian American Literary Award (Members’ Choice) and the PEN Open Book Award, and most recently, Whorled.

Patrick Rosal is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Boneshepherds, My American Kundiman, and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tin House, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Drunken Boat, and Language for a New Century. He has won, among other honors, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, the Global Filipino Literary Award, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. He is a member of the Creative Writing faculty at Rutgers University-Camden and the core faculty of Drew University’s low-residency MFA.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation

 

"Words are movement," writes Leah Stein in A Lily Lilies, a book of poems and dance theory, which she co-authored with poet Josey Foo. We invite you to join us for a night where poetry is rendered visceral through the moving body. Mong-Lan will read new works based on her residence in Buenos Aires and from her bilingual collection Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art (Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos). Accompanied by tango dancer Stefan Zawistowski, she will give a sizzling Argentine tango dance performance. Leah Stein, along with a group of her dancers, will move to the words of Josey Foo. Opening the night's festivities will be Kundiman fellow and performer Shayok (Misha) Chowdhury, who will read while Nabanita (Neeta) Pal performs a classical Indian dance piece inspired by his poetry. Misha and Neeta are the event's featured FUTURE FAMOUS WRITERS—an initiative to highlight emerging talent at all of our programs.

Mong-Lan left her native Vietnam on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. Since then she has gone to publish numerous award-winning books of poetry, receive both a Stegner and Fulbright fellowship, and complete her MFA from the University of Arizona. Her poetry has been anthologized in various publications, including the Pushcart Book of Poetry: Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize, as well as leading American literary journals. Her book Force of the Heart: Tango, Art is forthcoming. A visual artist who has had her paintings and photographs exhibited in galleries across the United States, Mong-Lan has proven herself to be a versatile and dynamic individual. Having taught at Stanford University and the University of Arizona, she is currently working on a novel, a book of poetry, a book of her artwork, and, of course, dancing. Visit: www.monglan.com.

Josey Foo is the writer of Endou and Tomie's Chair and a 2001 NEA Lit Fellowship recipient. A former undocumented alien working in carpentry, service and retail, she has a Vassar BA, Brown MFA (Writing), and University of Pennsylvania JD. She has worked for the Navajo Nation in Arizona and New Mexico for 11 years.

Leah Stein is the award-winning artistic director of the Leah Stein Dance Company in Philadelphia, staging dances in train garages, open fields, parking lots, and other sites internationally. She has a Wesleyan BA and teaches at Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore Colleges. A Lily Lilies—a cross-genre work of poetry and dance is the result of an 8-year Foo-Stein collaboration.

Nabanita (Neeta) Pal is an Indian Classical Odissi dancer. A recent Fullbright Creative Arts Fellow who trained at the Orissa Dance Academy in Bhubaneswar, Inda under the direction of Guru Aruna Mohanty, she is an emerging dancer interested in presenting Odissi in a way that highlights the hybridity of its many mediums—movement, poetry, and theater. Recognizing that the Indian classical dances are continually re-created as much as they are inherited, she hopes to channel Odissi's evocative power to access individual and collective experiences.

Shayok (Misha) Chowdhury is a queer Bangali poet, singer, and performer. He received his mantra, "Story comes first," in a suburban high school theater rehearsal; he has been living his responsibility to story ever since. Misha is a Kundiman Fellow, and he recently returned from a Fullbright Creative Writing Fellowship in Calcutta, his city of origin, under the auspices of which a collection of new poems was born. His poems have recently been published in journals such as Hayden's Ferry Review, The Portland Review, and Lantern Review. Currenlty, he teaches humanities and theater at a small progressive school in Boston.

Stefan "El Polaco" Zawistowski has been dancing Argentine tango since 1997. His most memorable performances include partnering with legendary Rosa Collantes, in a three-night appearance on stage with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra where the couple received standing ovations. Zawistowski is the author of novel The Petite Queen, decribed by literary critics as, "a spiritual treasure map with a tanguero beat....a true literary gem.” He can be seen frequently at the local milongas in New York City.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation

 

Long before 24 hour news pundits figured out how to pronounce Abbotobad, prolific historian Manan Ahmed was investigating Pakistani politics on his blog, Chapati Mystery. He challenges the tired ideology of the “Afpak problem," turning a critical and always clever eye on popular imaginings of Pakistan on both sides of the ocean. His blog entries have been collected in a provocative and eloquent new book, Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination, which Juan Cole, author of Engaging the Muslim World, has described as "a lethally witty response to the casual sadism of empire." Vijay Prashad, author of the acclaimed The Karma of Brown Folk and Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting, will broaden the geography of the conversation, discussing his views on the Arab Spring. Prashad will also share exclusive pieces from his forthcoming book on Libya. Professor Amitava Kumar, author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm, A Tiny Bomb, whose journalistic bent encompasses the international war on terror, will guide the discussion.

Manan Ahmed is an essayist of coruscating wit and verve who is also a historian of Islam in South Asia. In 2004, he started Chapati Mystery as a space for culturally and historically situated commentary on Pakistan. The blog rapidly acquired a broad community of readers, critics, informed observers—all of them, people with a deep commitment to the political, the social, and the humorous. (Creating and sustaining that community is, Ahmed believes, his proudest achievement.) He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2008 and currently teaches at Freie Universität in Berlin. His essays have appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Pakistan Today, The Caravan (New Delhi), and many online sites.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He is the author of eleven books, most recently The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, that won the Asian American Literary Award for non-fiction in 2008 and Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. He has two books forthcoming in 2011.

Amitava Kumar is the author, most recently, of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm, a Tiny Bomb: A Writer’s Report on the Global War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Vassar College. He was born in Bihar in India, once called "the subcontinent's area of darkness." Professor Kumar is also the author of Husband of a Fanatic, an "Editors' Choice" book at the New York Times, Bombay-London-New York, Passport Photos, and a novel, Home Products, which has now been published in the US under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. A prolific writer in diverse formats, Kumar is also the editor of five scholarly books and has published non-fiction, poetry, and academic essays in prominent journals.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation

 

From the Middle East to the Midwest, revolution is spreading. Women have joined radicals in solidarity, even as their own rights come under fire by conservative elements. Some of these women are able to tell their stories from Madison, Sanaa, and Tahrir Square. Others are silenced, devalued, or (in the infamous case of a blogger in Syria) invented. Fact or fiction, real or imagined, told from the inside or the outside, narratives provoke, explore, critique, and—in some cases—prevent revolution. This literary festival is an exploration of the role of stories in political change.

On Friday, September 23 at 7PM authors Thrity Umrigar (The Weight of Heaven, The Space Between Us) and Tahmima Anam (A Golden Age, The Good Muslim) will read from their most recent novels at Revolution Books. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Monisha Bajaj, Marina Budhos, Sunu Chandy, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Neesha Meminger, Priyanka Motaparthy, Yesha Naik, Maniza Naqvi, Zohra Saed, Purvi Shah, Jyotsna Sreenivasan, and Nisha Varia discuss writing about human rights, politics in young adult literature, and social justice at home on Saturday, September 24 from1-4:30PM. The festival will close with a Rapid-Fire Reading featuring a line-up of South Asian women performing poetry, fiction, and spoken-word on the themes of rights, radicalism, and revolution at Bar 13.

Co-sponsored by Revolution Books, NYU’s Wagner International Students Society (WISS), and International Public Service Association (IPSA).

For full schedule, tickets, and location details, visit http://www.sawcc.org/openfire/.

 

If you missed the laughs, tears, and thrills at July's Mouth to Mouth: MOM MIC, you're gonna wanna come out on Friday, September 23 at 8PM to hear Asian American parents (and kids!) speak the truth. Award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction, and YA literature, Marina Budhos will share her mom-related insights and read from her latest book, Tell Us We're Home, which follows the stories of three immigrant girls--and, yes, their mamas--who find each other in a wealthy suburban town. The child of immigrations, political theater artist and writer D'LO performs humorous musings on growing up queer in a strict household, and actress Cindy Cheung shares mom-inspired excerpts from her new solo show. Hosts Jen Kwok and Ed Lin will entertain you with ukelele strums and jokes between performances.

We also invite YOU to share your parental woes, reveal funny/traumatic childhood moments, laugh at mama and papa—and do it all in front of an audience. And as if this couldn't get any better, we'll be serving treats generously provided by Chinatown Ice Cream Factory!

D'Lo is a queer Tamil Sri L.A.nkan-American, political theater artist/writer, director, comedian, and music producer. D'Lo's work has been published in various anthologies and academic journals, most recently: Desi Rap: Hip Hop and South Asia America and Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic (co-edited by Sharon Bridgforth). Aside from touring the university/college circuit with D'FaQto Life (pronounced defacto), D'Lo tours Rambe-Ations: A One D'Lo Show (dir. Adelina Anthony) which received the NPN Creation Fund Grant. Currently, D'Lo is doing sound design for Cherrie Moraga's new play New Fire, touring excerpts from his latest solo theater show Minor D'Tales and his full stand-up storytelling show D'FunQT (pronunced defunct). D'Lo's 2nd play Boys That Pray is going into development at Brava Theater in San Francisco with its world premiere in June 2012.

Marina Budhos is an author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction, and a mom. She is the author of the young adult novel, Tell Us We’re Home, praised by the New York Times as “elevated by writing that is intelligent and earnestly passionate" and Ask Me No Questions, an ALA Notable and winner of the first James Cook Teen Book Award. The novel is currently being developed as a feature film. Budhos's latest book, Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom & Science, co-authored with her husband Marc Aronson, is a 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist. Her short stories, articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared in publications such as The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Literary Review, The Nation, Dissent, Marie Claire, Redbook, Travel & Leisure, Ms., Los Angeles Times, and in numerous anthologies.

Cindy Cheung will be seen next in Ma-Yi’s Theater Company’s production of Sugar House At The Edge of the Wilderness, running 11/8-12/4 at the Connelly, followed by her solo show SPEAK UP CONNIE, directed by BD Wong and running 12/15-18 at Stage Left. Film and TV credits include: Children of Invention (Sundance 2009), Lady In The Water, Robot Stories, Bored To Death, White Collar, Fringe, the Law and Order triad, One Life To Live and Sex and the City. Theater credits include Middletown (The Vineyard), The Seagull (NAATCO), Sides: The Fear Is Real… (Ma-Yi/Miyagi), Masha No Home (E.S.T.), W;t (Florida Studio Theater), Sweeney Todd and Into The Woods (East West Players). She has an MFA from ACT and lives in NYC with her husband, novelist Ed Lin.

This event is supported by the Asian Women Giving Circle.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation
sign up at 7:30PM for 5 minute slot
free admission if you are a mom or bring your mom

 

In Arizona? Join us for the CultureStrike festival: a series of free public arts workshops followed by a free outdoor festival featuring writers and artists from the CultureStrike delegation. Hailing from California, New York, D.C. and, of course, Arizona, the CultureStrike delegation includes two National Book Award finalists, two MacArthur “Genius” Fellows, two American Book Award winners, and one of The New Yorker’s top 20 writers under 40. Readers include novelist Daniel Alarcón, cultural historian Jeff Biggers, poet Sherwin Bitsui, novelist Jessica Hagedorn, activist Alfredo Gutierrez, poet Ken Chen, San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion James Kass, journalist Roberto Lovato, Tucson spoken word poet Logan Phillips, and nonfiction writer Rinku Sen. Other members of the delegation include novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, Teju Cole, scholar Mike Davis, and poet Alberto Rios.

It’s all part of CultureStrike, an innovative art intervention that’s convening more than writers and artists to learn firsthand what’s happening in the state that’s attracted so much national attention on issues of immigration and citizenship. We want to change the national dialogue on immigration by drawing on the voices of writers and artists. We believe that immigration is one of the most pressing national issues and that Arizona is the ground zero of a major civil rights battle of our time.

Hosted by writer Roberto Bedoya and Asian American Writers’ Workshop Executive Director Ken Chen, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. For more information, visit http://www.wordstrike.net

@Mercado San Augustin
100 S. Avenida Del Convento
Tucson, AZ

free to the public

 

Reading Kazim Ali, Leslie C. Chang, and Srikanth Reddy in concert is like discovering a door in the floor that leads to the ceiling, like pulling apart one universe to discover another seven tented over it. Kazim Ali's Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice is really two books in one: the first a blog from a recent fasting cycle, the second a private fasting journal written a few years prior. In Things That No Longer Delight Me, Leslie C. Chang presents an almost cinematic collection of poems exploring family and memory through aid of objects. Srikanth Reddy borrows text from Secretary General of the UN and former Nazi SS officer Kurt Waldheim's controversial memoir, appropriating and returning the original text in three sections in his new collection, Voyager.

Come out to travel with these acclaimed poets, along the edges of wooden blocks purchased in ancestral Suzhou, to bittersweet reunion in post-war Austria, to the interiors of the fasting mind in Oberlin College. Cathy Linh Che, the evening's featured FUTURE FAMOUS WRITER (our new initiative to highlight emerging talent at our programs), will open the event by reading from new work. Novelist and playwright Wena Poon will lead the poets in a post-reading conversation.

Kazim Ali has worked as a political organizer, lobbyist, and yoga instructor. His books include three volumes of poetry: The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, and the mixed genre Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities; two novels: Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth; and two collections of essays, Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. Founding Editor of Nightboat Books, he teaches in the Creative Writing and Comparative Literature programs at Oberlin College. In 2009 he received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.

Leslie C. Chang's poems have appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Literary Imagination, and other publications. She was the winner of the 2008-2009 Poets Out Loud Prize. Chang lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Cathy Linh Che is a graduate of New York University's Creative Writing MFA Program. She has received fellowships from Poets & Writers, The Center for Book Arts, Kundiman, Hedgebrook, and The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown. She is currently editing an anthology of poetry and prose by the children of the Vietnam War called Inheriting the War and this past summer, she co-taught a teen poetry and photography workshop at the Asian American Writers' Workshop called Double Exposures: Documenting War at Home.

Srikanth Reddy is the author of two books of poetry – Facts for Visitors, which received the Asian American Literary Award, and Voyager – both published by the University of California Press. A scholarly study, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press as well. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, Reddy is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago.

Singapore-born American novelist Wena Poon is the author of Lions in Winter, The Proper Care of Foxes, The Biophilia Omnibus and Alex y Robert. Her work has been serialised by BBC Radio 4 and performed in a Roman amphitheater in France. Her first play will be staged by the Bush Theatre at Westminster Abbey in London. She won the 2010 Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize and has been nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Singapore Literature Prize and the Bridport Prize for Poetry.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation

 

Start the countdown to the nation's biggest Asian and Pacific Islander talent competition at Kollaboration New York's official launch party, hosted by The Asian American Writers' Workshop. Funny woman Jen Kwok will be the master of ceremonies between performances by indie dance-pop band Paperdoll (KNY5 Grand Prize Winner), comedian Sheng Wang, electrohop trio Triangle Offense, singer-songwriter Meghna Prasad, and singer and piano wiz Elijah Park.

 

Steaming up the dance-rock scene from Shanghai to New York, PaperDoll's high-octane shows are gathering them friends from all over the globe. Vocalist/keyboardist Teresa Lee, guitarist Patrick Moloney, bassist Steve Paelet, and drummer Chip Thomas can be heard in NIKE, Dayquil, Good Day New York, MTV, Blender, Gotham, and a slew of films including critically acclaimed The People I've Slept With. The four-piece tour-de-force started in the dirty perdy Lower East Side of New York City. PaperDoll has been compared to No Doubt, The Cure, and Muse. Their unique blend of rock, pop, and good old-fashioned dance-till-you-drop shows have made them a must-see in the live music scene.

Sheng Wang is a Taiwanese Texan who developed and honed his comedy in the thriving standup community of the San Francisco Bay Area. He performs jokes based on personal experiences and addresses common non-sense with honesty and ill logic. His refreshingly affable stage presence combined with a healthy penchant for absurdity and self-deprecation make his act universally accessible and hilarious. He has toured with the Comedians of Comedy and American Eagle's Campus Comedy Challenge. He has also appeared on Comedy Central's Live at Gotham and attended Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. His half hour Comedy Central special aired in January. NBC recently awarded him with a one year holding deal in 2011. Sheng Wang pays rent in New York City.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$10 suggested donation

 

It’s Independence Days! Celebrate the end of colonial rule in South Asia with the third annual UNIFICATION, curated by BROWNSTAR. Showcasing the talents of prominent and rising South Asian American artists, poets, and comedians, UNIFICATION will feature comedian D’Lo, classical Sufi musician Arooj Aftab, spoken-word duo BROWNSTAR, writer and poet Bushra Rehman, urban cowboy-duo Sunny Ali and the Kid, multi-genre performance artist YaliniDream with JenDog Lonewolf, and indie alternative/rock band Zerobridge. Beginning on August 14 and ending after midnight on August 15, UNIFICATION 2011 literally unites the Independence Days of the two most populous nations in South Asia, Pakistan and India, and serves as a demonstration for peace across the region.

UNIFICATION 2011 is proud to support South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT)’s “An America for All of Us” campaign, an initiative that marks the 10-year anniversary of September 11 through documentation, policy initiatives, and community mobilization.

D’Lo is a queer Tamil Sri L.A.nkan-American, political theatre artist/writer, director, comedian and music producer. D’Lo has performed and/or facilitated performance and writing workshops in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Sri Lanka and India. Aside from touring the university/college circuit with D’FaQTo Life (pronounced defacto), D’Lo tours Ramble-Ations: A One D’Lo Show (dir. Adelina Anthony) which received the NPN Creation Fund Grant inclusive of residencies in 8 US cities and additional support from the Durfee Foundation Grant.

Arooj Aftab innovates off classical Sufi music for a sound that is fresh, graceful, and musically complex. Arooj will be releasing her debut album in September as part of Rebuild Pakistan, an initiative to promote a vision of peace and healing for Pakistan, as part of a larger movement for political solidarity through art and creativity.

BROWNSTAR bursts forth from the pens of poet-performers Pushkar “NORTH STAR” Sharma and Sathya “SOUTH STAR” Sridharan. Described by founder of the Boston Progress Arts Collective, Giles Li, as “carrying on the legacy of the great storytellers across generations,” their work merges high-energy comedy, personal memoir, and science fiction to ignite a discourse about the South Asian American experience. Their stage show FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF WHITE premiered at the New York City International Fringe Theatre Festival in August 2010. BROWNSTAR has worked with the likes of David Fincher and Anupam Kher, and shared the stage with Def Poets Beau Sia, Kelly Tsai, and Shihan.

Bushra Rehman was born and raised in New York City, but has also lived in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. She is the co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Seal Press, 2002), and author of the collection of poetry, Marianna's Beauty Salon (Vagabond Press, 2001). In her work, Bushra tells stories of her immigrant upbringing in Queens, the aunties, bodegas, stray dogs, and street life of children with both humor and sincerity. She performs her poetry regularly around the country and has traveled with the Asian American Literary Caravan, a group of artists whose goal is to bring Asian American literature to all parts of America. Bushra has been featured on BBC Radio 4, WBAI, The Brian Lehrer show, as well as The New York Times and NY Newsday.

Sunny Ali & the Kid, a Pakistani American urban cowboy-duo, are based in Philadelphia, PA. The band is comprised of Abdullah Saeed and Hassan Malik who were born in the U.S. to Pakistani parents and have been influenced by the punk Islam Movemement.

YaliniDream is a Sri Lankan Tamil who conjures spirit through her unique blend of poetry, theater, song, and dance. YaliniDream has toured nationally throughout the US, Canada, Europe, and Sri Lanka and has performed at renowned venues from the Dance Theater Workshop and the The Lincoln Center to subway cars to street protests to schools to experimental theaters to the hottest clubs in NYCs underground. YaliniDream has also served as the director of Mango Tribe’s NYC run of Sisters in the Smoke and the Creation Myth Project as well as Interim Artistic Director of the group.

Zerobridge is a New York-based indie alternative/rock band formed in 2001. Lead singer/guitarist and songwriter Mubashir Mohi-ud-Din ("Din") and drummer Mohsin Mohi-ud-Din ("Mo") are two brothers, whose parents are from the disputed territory of Kashmir, nestled between northern India and Pakistan. Greg Eckelman, seasoned NYC bass player (Orange 9mm, The Phoids), keyboardist Paolo Arao (CatJaw), round out the four piece band who have been playing their own unique brand of melodic, guitar driven rock n' roll for the last five years. Zerobridge has three independent releases behind them, including their latest EP entitled, There We Were, Now here We Are.

This event is sponsored by the The Indo-American Arts Council, Naan Sense Radio, PakUSonline, SALGA-NYC, and Subcontinental Drift NYC

@the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
236 East 3rd Street (between Avenue B & C)
New York, NY

open to the public
Tickets: $25 in advance, $30 at the door

 

Don't want the summer to end? Neither do we! Come make friends with Filipino American comedian Air Tabigue, who has been featured on NBC, FOX, and PBS, and Moth Slam winning storyteller, writer, and blogger Saurabh Tak. As usual, novelist Ed Lin and stand-up comedian Jen Kwok will be handling hosting duties from our lovely green couch. Wanna get in on the action? Come ready with your own work and sign-up for a 5-minute slot at 7:30PM.

Air Tabigue is a Filipino-American comedian who was born and raised in Long Island, NY. Throughout his life he has had a natural ability to make people laugh at any given moment. Now as a comedian, he is quickly rising in the comedy world performing at clubs and colleges around NYC and throughout the country. In 2004, Air won the Eastern Division of the First Asian American Stand Up Comedy Competition held by Takeout Comedy. He has hosted Asian America on PBS, covering talented Asian-American artists in entertainment. He also co-hosts and produces the popular monthly show Jammin Asian at the Laugh Lounge NYC. Air jokes about and pokes fun at almost everything in everyday life. Afterall, everybody needs “Air” in their lives!

A Moth Slam winner, Saurabh Tak has been featured as a storyteller at several venues including Columbia University in New York, Speakeasy DC in Washington and Un-cabaret in Los Angeles. Most recently, he won the approval of both the critics and audiences for his gig in The Sin Show, the top-selling show at the annual Capital Fringe Festival in Washington. His brief opinions have also been published in The Washington Post and The Moderate voice. You may find out more about him at takofthetown.com/

 

“Art for art’s sake?” Not for these artists slash community organizers! Support the OCA (Organization of Chinese Americans) and our OPEN CITY Fellow, Jerome Chou, as he explores the role of art in Asian American movement-building during OCA's 2011 National Convention. The panelists on "Arts as an Advocacy Tool" will share how they blend creativity and activism to transform community, and examine how artistic expression is an instrument of advocacy and social change. Learn how you can be a part of this too.

The OCA is a national organization dedicated to the social, political, and economic advancement of Asian Pacific Americans. The theme of this year’s national convention is Advocacy through Compassion – A New York State of Mind, focusing on philanthropy and activism within the APA community. OPEN CITY: Blogging Urban Change is an multimedia blog and community project, collecting images, oral histories, and narratives of three diverse New York City neighborhoods undergoing urban change and gentrification.

Jerome Chou is the Director of Programs at the Design Trust for Public Space, a nonprofit dedicated to improving New York City’s public realm. Prior to joining the Design Trust, Jerome worked at Field Operations as a project manager on Freshkills Park; as a community planner for Baltimore City Department of Planning; as an organizer for ACORN and the Working Families Party; and as an assistant editor with the nonprofit publisher The New Press. He has degrees in Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Jerome has organized and produced numerous public space interventions. Most recently, in response to budget cuts in 2009 that eliminated Sunday public library services throughout Brooklyn, he helped create Branch, a temporary Sunday library in a parking lot in Fort Greene.

@The Grand Hyatt
109 East 42nd Street (between Lexington and Park Ave)
at Grand Central Terminal

registration required
Check out the OCA website for more information

 

One of the very first motion picture machines invented was called the zoopraxiscope, which (translated into English) means "the wheel of life." Really good films no matter what length, no matter what genre, do not just transport us--they transform us.

Join us for a panel discussion featuring the most visionary Asian American filmmakers in the country. Tze Chun (Children of Invention and Windowbreaker), Dai Sil Kim-Gibson (Sa-I-Gu and Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women), Cihan Kaan (She's Got an Atomic Bomb and music videos), Rehana Lew Mirza (Hiding Divya and Quarter Life Crisis), Risa Morimoto (Wings of Defeat), Derek Nguyen (The Potential Wives of Norman Mao), Andrew Pang (Works of Art), and Brian Yang (Hawaii Five-0) will give you their expert tips. Turn that traumatic childhood trip to the circus into the next hot mockumentary. Dust off that manuscript, because if you miss this, you may find that "next year" easily becomes "never."

Tze (pronounced "Z") Chun is a filmmaker working out of New York City. He was born in Chicago and raised outside of Boston, and received his bachelor's degree in film studies at Columbia University. In the summer of 2007, Chun was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film." His debut feature Children of Invention premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and went on to be one of the most-awarded and best-reviewed films of the year. Chun also works as a painter and visual artist. He is represented at CVZContemporary gallery in Soho, and has commissioned portraits in private residences in numerous cities. Chun also painted the original artwork for the poster of Academy-Award nominated Half Nelson (THINKFilm) as well as the children's book drawings used in the film.

Cihan Kaan is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-raised writer, filmmaker and musician. His short film She’s Got an Atomic Bomb (2004) won Best Short Film for the Evil City Festival and toured at numerous underground film festivals. His second short film, Shuffle Mode (2006) won Best Short Film at the Sin Cine NYC Erotic Film Festival. He also directed a trilogy of music videos the aired on MTV. His book of short stories, Halal Pork and Other Stories, was released in Spring 2011 by UpSet Press.

Rehana Mirza is an award-winning filmmaker and playwright. Her first feature film, Hiding Divya, starring Madhur Jaffrey and Pooja Kumar, had a limited theatrical release in six US cities in late 2010 and was nominated for a 2011 VOICE Award. She has been an IFP Emerging Narrative participant, Sundance Feature Film Lab finalist, a Page International semi-finalist and a Scriptapalooza semi-finalist and has written seven feature film scripts. She is currently touring Hiding Divya to colleges and co-writing scripts for both TV and film with her husband, Michael Lew. More info at www.rehanamirza.com.

Risa Morimoto is a director and producer for film, television (Animal Planet, A&E Networks) and the Internet (NY Post). Her award-winning documentary about surviving Kamikaze pilots, Wings of Defeat, aired nationally on PBS' Independent Lens and in over 17 countries worldwide in 2008-09. President of Edgewood Pictures, Risa received her Master’s degree in film and education from New York University in 1999 while serving as the Associate Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute. Risa has lectured and given workshops throughout the U.S. and around the world including Japan, Korea and Singapore. Risa is currently in production on Code Red, a film about how the Internet is transforming Chinese society and Hope Road, a documentary on three women working to eradicate domestic sex trafficking.

Derek Nguyen currently lives in Brookyln, NY and was a 2004 fellow at the Sundance Institute's Screenwriters Lab and a 2004 Screenwriting Fellow at the New York Foundation for the Arts. Recently, Derek wrote and directed a short film entitled The Potential Wives of Norman Mao (2011 Short Film Corner at the Festival de Cannes, 2011 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, etc.), which stars Ed Lin, Tina Chen, Ron Nakahara, Cindy Cheung and was narrated by George Takei. Derek received the 2006 Urban Artist Initiative/NYC fellowship and is working on several film projects as a writer and as a creative consultant. A former Van Lier Playwriting Fellow, Derek's plays include Voices: A Theatrical Quilt (Sherrill C. Corwin Award), Mother's Milk (Mark Taper Forum commission), A Slight Itch (Y2K New Voices Award), and Lee/gendary (three 2009 New York Innovative Theater Awards including Best Production of a Play).

Andrew Pang is a director/actor who grew up in Northern Virginia and graduated from the Yale School of Drama with an MFA in Acting. Roles include appearances on Broadway, as well as on film and television. In 2005, he began working as a colorist/on-line editor. He is a member of the Motion Picture Editors Guild and in 2010 worked as an Assistant Editor on the films Margin Call and Silent House both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. His short film, Works of Art, appeared in 17 Film Festivals in 2010/2011 and received awards at the San Diego Asian Film Festival, Asian Film Festival of Dallas and the Chicago International REEL Shorts Festival.

Producer and actor Brian Yang currently works and lives between several cities in the US and Asia. After studying biology and dramatic arts at the University of California, at Berkeley, Brian has worked as an actor in TV, film, and theater in the United States as well as China. Most recently, he was cast in a recurring role on the CBS TV series Hawaii 5.0. In 2006, Brian helped form 408 Films LLC, a film production and financing company that focuses on fare across the Pacific Rim. His company has thus far produced three feature films, The People I’ve Slept With, Fog, and SuperCapitalist. 408 is currently producing a web series about Jeremy Lin, the first ever Taiwanese-American basketball player to make the NBA and Nightdreamblues, an independent feature film set in LA to be directed by Nadine Truong.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation

 

Throughout history poets have turned their gaze on the world around them and pondered their place in it. They have observed what it means to be a longstanding denizen of a place, or a traveler passing through strange and unfamiliar cities. Tonight four exciting poets—Dilruba Ahmed, Jon Cotner, Farid Matuk and Sandy Tseng—share their unique perspectives on the intimate, joyful, often troublesome relationship between place and identity. Their poems span the globe from the “dusty streets of Kabul” and New York City to little-known neighborhoods in various parts of the world, but more importantly, they shine a light on the lives lived in these places.

Thus, whether taking a Basho-inspired stroll through Manhattan (Cotner), falling in love in Brussels (Ahmed), cruising through Hollywood while ruminating on faraway places like Kabul (Matuk), or negotiating multiple cultures in a time of personal and national crisis (Tseng), these poets illuminate what it means to be simultaneously a global citizen and a rootless wanderer in our modern times.

Dilruba Ahmed’s debut book of poems, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2010 Bakeless Prize for poetry. Ahmed’ s writing has appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, The Normal School, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. A writer with roots in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Bangladesh, Ahmed holds a BPhil in English Writing and an MAT in Instruction and Learning from the University of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’ s MFA Program for Writers and lives near Philadelphia with her husband and her son.

Jon Cotner is the author, with Andy Fitch, of Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). It was chosen as a Best Book of 2010 by The Week, The Millions, Time Out Chicago, and Bookslut. His new collaboration with Fitch is called Conversations over Stolen Food. Cotner lives in Brooklyn, and teaches in Pratt Institute’ s Creative Writing Program.

Farid Matuk's This Is a Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010) was recently named a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Is it the King? (Effing, 2006) and Riverside (Longhouse, 2011). New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 6x6, Esque, Third Coast, and Mandorla. Matuk serves on the editorial team at FENCE and, with the nonprofit WordSpace, helps bring writers to Dallas for readings and talks. He lives in East Dallas with the poet Susan Briante and their daughter.

Sandy Tseng is a New Jersey native, currently living in Denver, Colorado. She is author of Sediment, a collection of poetry published by Four Way Books in October 2009. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Fugue, Hunger Mountain, The Nation, Third Coast, and other journals. Her poems have been anthologized in Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves (Deep Bowl Press, 2008). Her awards include The Nation's 2006 Discovery Award, the Louis Untermeyer scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Vira I. Heinz Foundation scholarship, among others. She has held residencies from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

Cassim Shepard is the founding editor of Urban Omnibus, an online publication of The Architectural League of New York. He also produces non-fiction media about the design, planning and experience of cities, buildings and places. He has lectured at New York University; Parsons, the New School for Design; the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India; and the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics. And he has exhibited work at the Musee de la civilisation, Quebec; the Cineteca di Bologna; the Salone del Mobile, Milan; and the Venice Architecture Biennale 2006. Shepard studied filmmaking at Harvard University, urban geography at the University of London and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently an adjunct assistant professor of architecture at Columbia University, a Poiesis Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, and hard at work on a video installation about informal settlements around the world that will premiere at the UN this fall as part of the Cooper Hewitt exhibition, Design With Other 90% : CITIES.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation

 

In response to the recent media coverage on Amy Chua's polarizing Tiger Mom, Mouth to Mouth: MOM MIC will feature the real stories and voices of Asian American moms. Blending comedy, spoken word, hip hop, and electronica, Kate Rigg, lead singer of Slanty Eyed Mama, will have you out of your seat. Bust Magazine lauds Slanty Eyed Mama as “hell bent on exploding Asian stereotypes with the blunt force of their lyrical flow." Actress, writer, and mom, Natalie Kim will entertain you with hilarious clips from her superhero duo-web series SuperTwins!

Come early to sign-up to share your own mom-inspired stories. Whether you are a mother, have a mother, know a mother -- we want to hear from you! Free admission if you are a mom (or if you bring your mama)! Stay tuned for details on the second installment of Mouth to Mouth: MOM MIC, taking place on August 12 (Thursday).

Kate Rigg is an iconoclasic Amerasian culture vulture and lead singer for Slanty Eyed Mama. Artist in residence at the Smithsonian Institute, Comedy Central Theater, and the Mark Taper Forum, Kate Rigg has made a career with a mix of stand up comedy, spoken word, and potty mouth political rants focused on pop culture represent-Asian.

Actress and writer Natalie Kim was born in Harlem, New York and raised in Centereach, New York. Her credits include HBO's Bored to Death, independent film West 32nd Street, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Recently, Natalie completed a successful run of her solo show, YO GIRL! at 59e59 Street Theater and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She just wrapped up SuperTwins!, a comedic web series about fraternal twin superheros, which also stars Trevor Zhou.

This program is funded by the Asian Women Giving Circle.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation
free admission if you are a mom or bring your mom

 

Even as New York becomes the largest state to legalize same sex marriage, the queer body remains a point of contention in public policy and literature. In writing the queer body, its desires and representations, literary borders manifest themselves not only as gender, sexuality, and race, but also voice, form, and genre. To discuss queer approaches to writing, we invite Ronaldo Wilson, Rahul Mehta, Kit Yan, and Ching-In Chen to share their work and border-crossings.

Avant-garde poet Ronaldo Wilson will read from Poems of the Black Object, detailing the nitty-gritty of bodily fluids, illicit subcultures, and dream states to critique the objectification of the black queer body. Short story writer Rahul Mehta will take us across continents, uncomfortable family gatherings, and bitter generational rifts to reveal the growing pains of being gay + Indian American in Quarantine. Multi-genre poet Ching-In Chen will play with form and theatrical jazz aesthetics in her latest work. While spoken word artist Kit Yan will render all those things into soulful confessions and laugh-out-loud humor. Don’t miss these readings and performances, followed by a Q+A discussion moderated by Trevor Lee.

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press). She is a Kundiman and Lambda Fellow and part of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. She has worked in the San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston Asian American communities. Ching-In currently lives in Milwaukee and is involved in union organizing and direct action against the draconian proposals of Governor Scott Walker. Her work is lauded by veteran poet Juan Felipe Herrera, as Chinese classic poet “Cho Wen-Chün on fire—with a punk mohawk cut.”

Rahul Mehta earned his MFA at Syracuse University and is the author of the short story collection Quarantine (HarperPerennial). Portions of Quarantine, already a runaway success in India, have appeared in New Stories from the South, The Kenyon Review, The Sun, Epoch, NOON, Fourteen Hills and Storyville. His essays have appeared most recently in OUT Magazine, Marie Claire India, and The Telegraph (Kolkata). Born and raised in Parkersburg, West Virginia, he currently lives in Alfred, New York, and teaches at Alfred University. Quarantine is described as “A rich study of family ties, romantic failings and cultural disconnection told in crisp, clean prose,” (Kirkus).

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books), winner of the 2010 Asian American Literary Awards. He is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, and holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. Wilson has won numerous fellowships to include the National Research Council Ford Foundations, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Djerassi, and Yaddo. A co-founder of the Black Took Collective, he currently teaches creative writing, literature, and African American poetics at Mount Holyoke College. Publishers Weekly calls Poems of the Black Object as “erotic verse about gay sexuality, demolition jobs directed at racial stereotypes, and plenty of genre-busting, metafictional, forward-looking hybrid forms.”

Kit Yan tells stories through slam poetry from the lens of a transgender Asian American from Hawaii now lost in the big city of New York. Through touching love poems, dirty sex accounts, and comedic tales of his childhood–Kit takes you on a journey that is raw, heart-wrenching, and unforgettable. Kit’s work has been taught at universities coast to coast. He spoke to over 200,000 from the stage of the 2009 National Equality March, performed on the San Francisco Pride main stage, and is a nationally ranking slam poet. Kit Yan is the first ever and reigning Mr. Transman 2010. “The eloquence of Kit’s spoken-word delivery lies in the anti-racist, anti-homophobic, gender-inclusive, language that ties his lyrics together,” (Bitch Magazine).

Trevor Lee is a Ph.D Candidate in English at the City University of New York. His research focuses on Asian American and Pacific Island literature, post-colonial studies, and queer diasporas. He currently serves as a member of the GAPIMNY steering committee and a research fellow for the Asian American/Asian Research Institute at CUNY. His working dissertation looks at ways in which early 20th century Asian American writers actively engaged with intersecting issues of immigrant citizenship/exclusion, global feminisms, and queer identities.

This event is co-sponsored by the Gay Asian and Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY)

@ The Asian American Writers’ Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation

 

New York Time's best-selling author Lisa See celebrates the release of her new novel Dreams of Joy with a cocktail party fundraiser and reading for the Asian American Writers' Workshop. The novel tells the story of Joy, a young girl who runs away from Los Angeles to search for her her father in the People's Republic of China in the midst of the Great Leap Forward, Mao's attempt to industrialize the countrysides from 1958 to 1961, leading to widespread famines and as many as 45 million fatalities. This multi-dimensional family narrative allows "ample opportunity to explore the People's Republic from an unlikely perspective," as Joy ventures through Shanghai streets and the famine-stricken countryside of agrarian China (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A sequel of sorts to See's Shanghai Girls, Dreams of Joy provides a shattering, atmospheric journey through one of the most devastating eras in 20th Century Chinese history.

Please join us for a cocktail party celebrating See's new book and a reading followed by a moderated discussion with Workshop Executive Director Ken Chen. We'll also screen of the trailer for the film adaptation of See’s critically-acclaimed international bestseller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.

This event is co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU

@ The King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, New York University
53 Washington Square South
open to the public

Ticketing information:
7 PM Cocktails $45 (includes Dreams of Joy & reading admission)
8-9PM Reading, talk & signing $10

Online ticket sales are closed. Tickets will be available for sale at the door.

 

There has never been a movement for social change without art and culture being central to that movement. When it comes to immigrants, much of the public dialogue is laced with myths, stereotypes, and fear. At the sixth annual gathering of Netroots Nation, which amplifies progressive voices by providing an online and in-person campus for exchanging ideas and strategies to influence the public debate, artist-activists, writers, and cultural leaders Ken Chen, Javier Gonzales, Gaby Pacheco, and Favianna Rodriguez will discuss how artists are teaming up with immigrant rights groups to affect social change. For more information, click here.

@Minneapolis Convention Center
1301 2nd Ave S
Minneapolis, Minnesota register here

 

Ed Lin and Jen Kwok are at it again. At June's Mouth to Mouth Open Mic, they'll introduce you to novelist Thad Rutkowski, whose fiction has been described as "tough and funny and touching and harrowing." His deadpan prose will be complemented by the work of experimental theater artist Kristine Haruna Lee, the 2010-2012 recipient of the New Dramatist Van Lier Fellowship. Snacks, dark humor, and interdisciplinary art--what else could you ask for on a Friday night?

We'll be getting the party started a bit earlier--sign-up for a 5-minute slot at 7:30PM to show what you're made of. The magic begins at 8PM.

Kristine Haruna Lee lives in Brooklyn, NY. She is an interdisciplinary artist practicing performance, writing, directing, and musical composition. She has collaborated with artists such as Taylor Mac, NAATCO, The Talking Band, 2g, Jim Neu, The Mettawee River Theater Company, and Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hardknocks. Her work has been produced by Ars Nova, Dixon Place, Joe’s Pub as part of The Movement Theater Co., Le Poisson Rouge, Walkerspace and HERE as part of 2g, The Tank, and 45th Street Theatre. Her plays include A Fisherman's Dream, These Robes, Those Robes, She's Sleep, Red Moon Appearing, and Matsuri/Festival. Lee is a recipient of the New Dramatists Van Lier Fellowship.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of three novels: Tetched (Behler Publications), chosen as one of the best books reviewed in 2006 by Chronogram magazine, Roughhouse (Kaya Press), and Haywire (Starcherone Books). His stories and poems have been nominated six times for the Pushcart Prize, and his work is anthologized in several collections, including The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Rutkowski is also a two-time winner of the Poetry Versus Comedy slam at the Bowery Poetry Club and a one-time winner of the Nuyorican Poets Café Friday slam.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

open to the public
$5 suggested donation

 

Are you a recent MFA graduate trying to figure out how to turn your manuscript into a novel? Or a a journalist who dreams of publishing the next Maximum City? Or maybe you're writing short stories on the side and looking to craft a collection.

At whatever stage you may be, these prominent writers, esteemed editors, and ace agents will walk you through the process of getting your book published. From rising above the slush pile to choosing an agent, Juliet Grames (Senior Editor at Soho Press), Kirby Kim (William Morris Endeavor agent), Wendy Lee (author of Happy Family and editor at HarperCollins), Ed Park (author of Personal Days and editor of The Believer), Zohra Saed (editor at UpSet Press), and Monique Truong (author of The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth) will share their insights, experience, and expertise. Jin Auh (The Wylie Agency) will moderate the panel discussion and Q&A session. Jointly presented with the New York chapter of the Asian American Journalists' Association.

Juliet Grames is Senior Editor at Soho Press, an independent book publisher distributed by Random House. Juliet acquires and edits literary fiction, international crime, and memoir for Soho. She has previously worked at The Overlook Press on literary fiction and nonfiction, John Wiley & Sons on trade nonfiction, the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency, and Borders, where she was a bookseller for five years.

Kirby Kim is a literary agent at William Morris Endeavor, where he represents fiction for children and adults, memoir, pop culture, and general nonfiction. Kirby is originally from California, where he attended Pomona College in Claremont and Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

Wendy Lee is a graduate of Stanford University and New York University’s Creative Writing Program. Her first novel, Happy Family, was named one of the top ten debut novels of the year by Booklist and was awarded an honorable mention from the Association of Asian American Studies. The recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo, she lives with her husband in New York City, where she is an assistant editor at HarperCollins Publishers.

Ed Park is the author of the novel Personal Days, which was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Foundation Award and one of Time's top 10 fiction books of the year. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and teaches creative writing at Columbia. He was a senior editor and writer for The Village Voice, where he edited the Voice Literary Supplement, and an associate editor for poetryfoundation.org. A short story of his appears in Open City's anthology, They're at It Again, and he has written for the New York Times, Time, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Bookforum.

Zohra Saed is an editor at UpSet Press Inc. an independent, not-for-profit, tax-exempt (501c3) small press based in Brooklyn, New York.
The mission of the press is to support and showcase innovative and progressive work by emerging writers (first/second books), as well as to restore to print rare and out-of-print works. Zohra is also co-editor, along with Sahar Muradi, of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press, 2010).

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1968, Monique Truong lives now in Brooklyn, New York. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a 25 Best Fiction Books of the year by Barnes & Noble and a 10 Best Fiction Books by Hudson Booksellers. Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, and the recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award, an Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award, and an Asian American Literary Award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Truong co-edited Watermark: An Anthology of Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998). She was a PEN/Robert Bingham Fellow, a Princeton University’s Hodder Fellow, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow.

Jin Auh was born in Seoul, Korea and attended school in Virginia. She attended her first AAWW event in 1994, which led to her internship at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She has been with The Wylie Agency, an international literary agency with offices in New York and London, since 1995. A full author list can be found on: www.wylieagency.com. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
open to the public
$5 suggested donation, free to members of AAJA and AAWW

 

In one of the busiest street markets in Myanmar, Chaw Ei Thein and artist Htein Lin created a performance protesting inflated prices under the current Burmese government. They were arrested for the simple gesture of selling small items like candy and ribbons for miniscule amounts of money. Exiled from her country for criticizing the government, Thein now continues her work as a performance artist and painter in the US, where she has applied for political asylum. Following a brief performance, Thein will discuss the limitations on civil rights and freedom of speech that drove her to seek asylum from Burma, where 2000 political prisoners are serving decades-long sentences for speaking out. World Policy Institute Senior Fellow Todd Lester will join her in conversation. Co-sponsored by the World Policy Institute and freeDimensional

Chaw Ei Thein, a painter and performance artist, was selected for the New York Foundation for the Arts Mentoring Program for Immigrants Artists through a partnership with freeDimensional. Her work has been widely covered in the international arts press including Asian Art Now, Asian Art Achieve, Artforum, Art Asia Pacific, Yishu, C-Arts, The Strait Times and The New York Times. Co-founder and Director of the Sunflower Art Gallery in Yangon, she organized special exhibitions for children’s art in Myanmar and Cambodia, and has taught art to children for 15+ years. Living in New York, she has exhibited new works at the Point B Gallery, Da Gallery, Fardom Gallery, Puffin Room, SoapBox Gallery, United Nations Plaza and the International Studio and Curatorial Programme (ISCP) Open Studios, Grace Exhibition Art Space in United States.

World Policy Institute Senior Fellow Todd Lester is the founder of freeDimensional (fD) and more recently the Creative Resistance Fund. Previously, he served as Communications Officer for Reporters sans frontières in New York City, and Information & Advocacy Manager for the International Rescue Committee in Khartoum, Sudan. An adjunct instructor in Media Studies at The New School for Social Research, Todd actively advises several residencies, artist-led projects and networks: Res Artis, Sangam House, Pirogue Collective of Gorée Institute, Guapamacátaro Interdisciplinary Residency in Art and Ecology, HomeBase Project and the Flux Factory. In 2006, Todd received the Peace Corps Fund Award for starting freeDimensional and was named 'Architect of the Future' by the Waldzell Institute in 2008.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
open to the public

Free for AAWW, fD and WPI Members. RSVP to events@worldpolicy.org, or by calling (212). 481-5005, Option 2.

Regular admission: $15
Nonprofit professionals, academics, and media admission: $10
Student admission: $5
Non-members: Register and pay online here

 

In 1993, a freighter named the Golden Venture, ran aground in Rockaway, Queens carrying 286 people smuggled from China's Fujian Province. In the following months and years, many of the passengers were deported or detained while trying to claim political asylum. Their case and struggle became a symbol of the broken U.S. immigration policy. "To Recognize All those Who Enter America," INTO EAST RIVER(S) PROJECT presents an evening of dialog, supper, and poetry with Meena Alexander, Ken Chen, Jennifer Hayashida, Andrew Hsiao, Audrea Lim, Lisa Chen, Angelina Lee, Mai Mang, and Russell C. Leong. For the full program and to register, visit AAARI.info.

THE INTO EAST RIVER(S) PROJECT is an ongoing collaborative research project and cultural dialogue developed by Russell C. Leong, the CUNY visiting Dr. Thomas Tam scholar, and Dr. Yibing Huang (Mai Mang), poet and professor of Chinese at Connecticut College (New London) that germinated ten years ago along the river passages and water sources of many locales-along the dried riverbanks of the Los Angeles River, against the shores of New London's Atlantic, along New York's East River, and linked by a number of cities served by water above and below ground including Beijing, Hong Kong and Los Angeles.

Supported by CUNY Asian American/Asian Research Institute and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center

@Asian American/Asian Research Institute
25 West 43rd Street, 19th Floor
Between 5th and 6th Avenues
New York, NY
registration required

 

 

For more past events, click here!