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Executive Director
Ken Chen
Ken Chen is the 2009 recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. His debut poetry collection Juvenilia, which will come out in April 2010, was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Gluck.
A graduate of Yale Law School, Mr. Chen abandoned a promising career at a Wall Street law firm to become the Executive Director of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop (aaww.org), the most prominent literary arts nonprofit in support of Asian American literature. Most recently, he curated PAGE TURNER, a two-day Brooklyn literary festival that featured more than forty writers, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje, and David Henry Hwang.
While an attorney, Mr. Chen successfully represented the asylum claim of a Guinean teenager who had been detained by the Department of Homeland Security. The case was named one of the top ten most significant pro bono cases of 2007 by American Lawyer and profiled by The New York Post, Essence, and The New York Times.
His work has been published in Best American Essays 2006 and was recently recognized in Best American Essays 2007. His work is published or forthcoming in The Boston Review of Books, The Yale Anthology of American Poetry, Fence, Jubilat, Film International, C-Theory, Radical Society, and Art Asia Pacific.
Mr. Chen started Satellite: The Berkeley Magazine of News + Culture and also helped found Arts & Letters Daily, a cultural website described by The New York Times as “required reading for the global intelligentsia” and called the “best website in the world” by the Guardian. Mr. Chen has been featured in World Journal, the most prominent international Chinese language newspaper, and China Crosstalk TV. His work on Asia and Asian American affairs has been published in The Boston Review of Books, Manoa, The Kyoto Journal and nationally syndicated Asian American PBS show Pacific Time.
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Managing Director
Solmaz Sharif
Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds a BA in Sociology and Women of Color Writers from U.C. Berkeley and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her first published poem, included in A World Between, was written at the age of 13. Since then, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Diagram, Atlanta Review, and PBS’s Tehran Bureau. Between 2002-2006, Sharif studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. She has taught creative writing at U.C. Berkeley, New York University, Goldwater Hospital, and Berkeley High School. In 2009, she was a semifinalist for the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She has been the managing director of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop since January 2010.
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Administrative Director
Jenny Pinera
Jenny Pinera is the new Administrative Director of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Originally from Southern California, she moved to New York City with her partner, Brian. At The Workshop, Jenny balances the books and helps keeps things organized. She is very excited to be a part of the most prestigious Asian American literary arts organization in the United States. Jenny holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Women’s Studies from the University of California, at Irvine.
Programs
Assistant
Zabrina Collazo
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