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Fall 2009
Events this season sponsored by:
Beerlao and The Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
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Brown Peril / Post-9/11 South Asian Muslim Identity Readings - September 14 & 18, Oct. 3, 2009
As part of The Workshop's mission of presenting great literature and
diverse voices, we proudly present Brown Peril, a three-part literary
series that explores the South Asian Muslim experience after 9/11. Brown
Peril combines both firsthand accounts of detention as well as performance
poetry, both political philosophy and the hardcore voices of Muslim punk
rock.
Becoming the Enemy: H.M. Naqvi, Sarah Husain, Moustafa Bayoumi
Join readings and discussion with H.M Naqvi, Sarah Husain, and Moustafa
Bayoumi, as they reflect on the transformations of life for young
Muslim-Americans after 9/11.
In his 1903 treatise The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B Du Bois asked the
question: "How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?" Moustafa Bayoumi approaches
this question again a century later. His book of the same title presents
striking portraits of young Arab-Americans in Brooklyn facing surveillance
and detentions, workplace discrimination, threats of vigilante violence,
and the disappearance of friends or family--all trials that have faced the
newest population in America to be tagged "problematic." Salon declares
these are "people who might be your neighbors, and Bayoumi delivers them
with urgency, compassion, wryness and hints of poetry."
Sarah Husain is the editor of Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War,
Faith and Sexuality. Born in New York City, spending her childhood in
Hong Kong, Sudan and Pakistan, Sarah is a performance poet whose work
concerns memory, nation, violence, bioterrorism and the female body.
H.M. Naqvi reads from his breakthrough novel Home Boy, tracing three
Pakistani debonairs (AC, a gangsta-rap-spouting academic; Jimbo, a hulking
Pushtun DJ from the streets of Jersey City; and Chuck, a wideeyed kid,
fresh off the boat from the homeland) who find their project of
self-invention shattered in face of an increasing hostile America.
Publisher's Weekly calls the "fast-paced plot, foul-mouthed erudition and
pitch-perfect dialogue" a stellar debut of "an original, electrifying
voice in contemporary fiction."
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Not Post-Racial: Falguni Sheth, Rinku Sen and Kavitha Rajagopalan
Did Obama's election signify a post-racial America? Hampshire professor
Falguni A. Sheth and The Applied Research Center's President and Executive Diretor, Rinku Sen, take the talking heads heralding our color-blind utopias to task.
Timely, controversial, and incisive, Sheth's new book Toward a
Political Philosophy of Race looks uncompromisingly at how a liberal
society enables racism and other forms of discrimination. Drawing on the
examples of the internment of U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese
descent, of Muslim men and women in the contemporary United States, and of
Asian Indians at the turn of the twentieth century, Sheth
argues that racial discrimination and divisions are not accidents in the
history of liberal societies. Race, she contends, is embedded in the law,
which produces racialized populations who are divided against other
groups.
In The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization, Sen chronicles the journey of Moroccan-born waiter Fekkak Mamdouh, whose life was thrown in turmoil after 9/11, when Windows on the World, the restaurant he worked at in the World Trade Center, was destroyed. Immigrants in New York--and all over the United States--faced suspicion and discrimination. Sen intertwines the story of impassioned argument for a new immigration policy, one that would allow everyone to fully share the benefits of globalization. In the end, Sen and Mamdouh argue, native-born and immigrant workers have far more in common than either realizes.
Kavitha Rajagopalan, author of Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories
of Three Immigrant Families in the West, will moderate a discussion after
the reading.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
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Reimagining Family after Parting: Padma Viswanathan, Nitin Deckha, Eugenia
Kim, and Shanthi Sekaran
Temporarily leave your own dysfunctional families to join those of four
novelists' imagination tonight.
Padma Viswanathan reads from her critically acclaimed In Toss of the
Lemon, which illuminates the private world of a Brahmin clan, and the
bonds which hold three generations together through a turbulent
half-century of social and political change. India Today calls it "a
brilliant tour de force."
Eugenia Kim's The Calligrapher's Daughter follows the trials of a
headstrong girl in turn-of-the-century Korea. Love and inter-generational
strife operate against the backdrop of the impending Japanese occupation
and the shadow of the dying monarchy. The Washington Post writes, "Eugenia
Kim's sensitive first novel, which depicts 30 years of Korea's modern
history in light of its ancient past, is an illuminating prequel to
present-day events. . . . A satisfying excursion into empathetically
rendered lives."
Pivoting across the Atlantic divide, Nitin Deckha reads from his poignant
short story collection Shopping for Sabzi. Deckha's stories trace brash,
young, and successful Indo-Canadian and Indo-American characters as they
maraud through Gujarati marriage conventions and Bollywood dance lessons.
CityMasala writes that Deckha's stories are "culturally relevant,
intelligent, and fascinating."
Shanti Sekaran's debut novel The Prayer Room begins with a callow
Englishman who journeys to Madras to find a dissertation topic and instead
lands an Indian bride, Viji. The unlikely pair wind up in a ranch house in
Sacramento, where Viji must confront a terrifying new American world of
shag carpets and pudding pops. Seeking consolation in her prayer room,
which she visits frequently to gossip, sass, and seek advice from the
framed portraits of her dead relatives, Viji's California dreaming is
interrupted by an unexpected visit from her father-in-law, and the
prospect of a return to her homeland. The San Francisco Chronicle asks us
to sit back and enjoy "the wry and often touching perceptions of Sekaran
and her characters."
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Gesture and Fragment
Featuring: Poet Hoa Nguyen, author of Hecate Lochia; Todd Shimoda, author
of Oh! A Mystery of mono no aware; and Paolo Javier, author of 60 lv bo(e)mbs.
Hoa Nguyen was born near Saigon, grew up in the DC area, and studied poetics at New College in San Francisco. She currently lives in Austin Texas where she teaches creative writing. Her most recent books include Kiss A Bomb Tattoo (Effing Press, 2009) and Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey, 2009).
Todd Shimoda, is the author of Oh! A Mystery of "Mono no Aware" (Chin Music Press), The Fourth Treasure (Nan Talese/Doubleday), and 365 Views of Mt. Fuji (Stone Bridge Press). Born and raised in Colorado, he has lived in California, Nevada, Texas, and Japan. His doctorate is from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a professor at Colorado State University and a visiting researcher at UC-Berkeley. He blogs at shimodaworks.com, contributes to the Asian Review of Books, and is a partner in the California firm SF Design Associates.
Paolo Javier is the author of Megton Gasgan Krakooom (Cy Gist Press, forthcoming), LMFAO (OMG!), Goldfish Kisses (Sona Books), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada Books), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He is the printed matter editor for Boog City, and edits/publishes 2nd Avenue Poetry, a small press devoted to innovative writing. His current project is obb, a multimedia poetry comic with Brooklyn artist Ernest Concepcion. A former Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer-in-Residence, he recently served as Visiting Associate Professor in Poetry at the University of Miami. He lives with his wife in Queens.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Taqwacore Night, featuring Michael Muhammad Knight, Kim Badawi, Al Thawra,
and Hua Hsu
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Join the Asian American Writers' Workshop at the PowerHouse Arena for a
celebration of the burgeoning subculture of American Muslim punk,
featuring one of the scene's key bands, the photographer who documented
their seminal tour, and the novelist who wrote about all of this before it
even existed.
Michael Muhammad Knight, author of the novels Osama Van Halen and The
Taqwacores, which told the story of a fictitious scene of Islamic
punk-rockers, and inspired the real-life Muslim punk movement which
currently shares their name. Photographer Kim Badawi first met Knight in
2005 as a real Muslim punk scene was starting to emerge. From 2006-2007,
he traveled across the country with the musicians in this growing
movement, such as Al Thawra, The Kominas, and Secret Trial Five. His new
collection, The Taqwacores: Muslim Punk in the USA, stands as a
photographic companion to the original text and an indispensable document
of the making of a movement. They'll be joined by Al Thawra, a Muslim punk
band from Chicago, and one of the original Taqwacore bands from the
Taqwatour in Fall 2007, and moderator Hua Hsu, music critic and professor
at Vassar College.
@ The PowerHouse Arena
37 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
The Workshop's Fall Gallery Crawl
You're invited to join fellow art lovers and supporters of The Asian-American Writers' Workshop for a private tour of three prominent West Chelsea galleries whose prestigious September exhibits feature contemporary Asian artists. The directors of each gallery (which have branches in Beijing, Seoul, or both) will give brief talks and answer questions; guests will have ample opportunity to browse the exhibits. Beer and wine will be provided.
6-6:30pm James Cohan, 533 West 26th Street
Xu Zhen, "Lonely Miracle: Middle East Contemporary Art"
Conceptual artist Xu Zhen of Shanghai challenges Western expectations of foreign art by presenting trickster paintings, sculptures, and installations from "Middle Eastern artists."
6:30-7pm Gana Gallery, 568 West 25th Street
Seung-Woo Back, "Revised Ideals"
Photographer Seung-Woo Back of London and Seoul manipulates the works in two series -- "Blow Up," originals taken in North Korea, and "Utopia," official propaganda images -- in his quietly disturbing study of politics and aesthetics.
7-7:30pm Arario Gallery, 521 West 25th Street
Osang Gwon, "Deodorant Type"
Sculptor Osang Gwon of Seoul questions the construct of identity by creating larger-than-life figures covered with thousands of color photographs of his subjects.
Sign up: $10 General; $5 Members
Please note that we will be starting at James Cohan Gallery (and not at
The Asian American Writers' Workshop), but guests can join us at any time
in the tour, by referring to the above schedule.
All galleries are located between Tenth & Eleventh Avenues.
Proceeds from this event will support The Asian American Writers' Workshop, a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans.
Elegance and Wildness
The world is a wild and wooly thing, as is the individual! Persona colludes with self tonight in two poet's unique explorations of inner-space. Join us as life's quiet elegance emerges from a cacophonic juxtaposition of voice, style, and untamed interiority, featuring Rick Barot and Monica Ferrell.
NEA recipient Rick Barot reads from his new book of poetry, Want, an exploration of juxtaposition and identity. He explains, "I had all these different things to draw from because, probably like most writers, I go around with some part of my head that's working as an open flypaper for things to stick to." Barot has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including New England Review, The New Republic and Poetry. He lives in Tacoma, Washington.
Award winning author Monica Ferrell will read tonight from her new poetry collection, Beasts for the Chase. According to Ferrell, the book derives its name from "the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of paradise: an oriental park or pleasure-ground, especially one enclosing wild beasts." Her poems have appeared in the Boston Review, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Paris Review, and Tin House. Her novel, The Answer Is Always Yes, was a Borders Original Voices Selection and named among Booklist's Top Ten Debut Novels of 2008. She is also a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and "Discovery"/The Nation, prizewinner. An assistant professor in the creative writing program at Purchase College, she lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Both authors are recipients of the Sarabande Books Kathryn A. Morton Prize in poetry--Barot in 2001 for The Darker Fall, and Ferrell in 2007 for Beasts For The Chase.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Book Party for Marilyn Chin's Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen.
Help us celebrate the publication of renowned poet, translator, and, essayist Marilyn Chin's irresistibly titled first novel Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. The evening will feature select readings from the book, which Kirkus Reviews calls "A fresh, chaotic and sexy updating of the cross-cultural experience." Discussion to follow.
Born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, OR, Marilyn Chin is the author of three poetry collections: Dwarf Bamboo; The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty; and Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. Awards for her poetry include a Fulbright Fellowship, two NEA grants, and four Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, The Open Boat, and The Best American Poetry of l996. The author on her new novel: "I want to 'pervert' the master/dominant patriarchal narrative with smart experimental short forms and explosive vignettes. I want to give the power of speech and action to the smallest, most vulnerable brown girl in the room." Chin lives in La Mesa, CA and teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
An Evening with Hwang Sok-yong: Reading and Q&A
The
recipient of Korea's highest
literary prize, Hwang Sok-Yong
is an author of world renown
and one of Korea's most famous
novelists. A dissident and former
laborer, Hwang served prison
time after an unsanctioned visit
to the North in the early nineties.
After an international outcry,
he was pardoned in 1998 by the
then newly elected South Korean
president. Seven Stories publisher
Dan Simon (bottom right) will
introduce.
Join
the Workshop, HeyKorean, The
Korea Literature Translation
Institute, and Seven Stories
book as we celebrate the publication
of his most autobiographical
novel, The Old Garden. The
novel tells the story of a political
prisoner who's freed after
eighteen years to find a modernized
Seoul and no trace of the world
he knew. With great poignancy,
Hwang Sok-yong grapples with
the immortal questions-the
endurance of love, the price
of a commitment to causes-while
depicting a generation that
sacrificed youth, liberty, and
often life, for the dream of
a better tomorrow.
@
The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th
Ave)
$5
suggested donation; open
to the public
The First Annual Asian American Literary Festival!
@ powerHouse books
37 Main Street Brooklyn
NY 11201
Back to the Graveyard, a solo show written & performed by Samantha Chanse
A
workshop performance of BACK TO
THE GRAVEYARD, a solo show about
the joys and perils of family
dinner planning, bad art, drinking
in public, and, of course, flesh-eating
monsters. Writer & performer
Samantha Chanse presents four
characters, including herself,
sort of, in a tragi-comedic hour
featuring sullen volunteers, groundbreaking
Re-Readings of The Text from POC
Perspectives, brave and honest
portrayals of homophobia, and
zero nudity.
@
The Workshop
16
West
32nd
Street,
10th
Floor
(btwn
Broadway & 5th
Ave)
$10
suggested donation;
open to the public
HERE
Summer 2009
Events this season sponsored by:
Beerlao and The Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
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Debut Fiction Night!
As our spring season comes to a close, we encourage you to celebrate four fantastic debut novels by Karan Mahajan, Rakesh Satyal, Sung J. Woo, and Paul Yoon.
Karan Mahajan's Family Planning: A Novel chronicles a middle-class couple in contemporary, urban India with thirteen children and another on the way. Mahajan was born in 1984 and grew up in New Delhi, India. A winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and a fellowship from the Camargo Foundation, he has contributed writing to The Believer, The San Francisco Chronicle, Granta, The New York Sun, and the anthology Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction.
Rakesh Satyal's Blue Boy tells the story of Kiran Sharma, lover of music, dance, and all things sensual, son of immigrants, social outcast, spiritual seeker. Satyal is currently an editor at HarperCollins. He has been published in a variety of anthologies, including the Lambda Award-winning The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Fathers.
Sung J. Woo's Everything Asian: A Novel weaves together two compelling stories: a dramedy of the Kim family, reunited for the first time in America, and of Peddlers Town, a depressed, second-class mall where the Kims run their store. Woo's short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney's, and KoreAm Journal. His short story "Limits" was an Editor's Choice winner in Carve Magazine's 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest.
Paul Yoon's Once the Shore is a compilation of linked short stories set on a South Korean island. Yoon was born in New York City. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Best of the Web 2008 and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 admission; open to the public
Drawing in Color: Empowering Girls Through Comics Performance!
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For several weeks now, under the guidance of artist Chitra Ganesh, nine fantastic young women from high schools around New York City have been understanding, dissecting, and drawing comics. They've explored gender/ethnic stereotypes contained in mainstream cartoons, experimented with the aesthetic techniques of comics, and rendered their own unique empowered narratives in comic form.
We'd be delighted if you could join us as they present their remarkable work and reflect upon on the issues of race and gender with which they've critically engaged. We'll have a one-of-a-kine 'zine of their work available at the launch, as well!
Chitra Ganesh was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, where she currently
lives and works. Buried narratives and marginal figures (typically
excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art) inspire
her drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations.
This youth program is funded by The Asian Women Giving Circle.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 admission; open to the public
A Celebration of The Second Annual Hyphen Magazine/AAWW Short Story Contest
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Come hear winner, Shivani Manghnani and finalists Bushra Rehman, Kevin Tang, Ky-Phong Tran and Joy Wood read the pieces submitted for our 2008 short story contest. For more information on the contest, including a full list of the finalists, please click here.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 admission; open to the public
Memes and Books: A Talk by Ben Huh
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Come listen to Ben Huh, the mastermind behind the Lolcats phenomenon. As the CEO of Pet Holdings, he runs I Can Has Cheezeburger? and grew it into the global purveyor of absurd cat humor that we know and love today. The book based on the site I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun has spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times paperback best-seller list. Allergic to cats himself, Ben's ability to pick which memes to popularize has made him a cultural icon. Pet Holdings now includes the popular Failblog, Pundit Kitchen, and Engrish Funny among its repetoire.
Ben will be discussing Memes and Books with David Lat, the founder of the legal blog, Above the Law.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$15 admission; open to the public
And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women
Come hear the diverse voices in the only English language anthology by Pakistani women published in the United States. And the World Changed paints a vibrant picture of the challenges and joys of being a contemporary Pakistani woman. Humera Afridi and Fawzi Afzal-Khan will read their stories.
Co-sponsored by Asia Society
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
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From José Rizal to José Garcia Villa: An Introduction to Philippine Literary Greats
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We invite you to an afternoon of readings in celebration of Philippine culture and two literary heroes who brought the Philippine experience to the public. Harold Augenbraum, Luis Francia, and Dorian Merina read and discuss the writings of José Rizal and José Garcia Villa.
Noli Me Tangere, the powerful and controversial novel by José Rizal (1861-1896), takes place during the Spanish occupation and tells the story of a young man's return to the Philippines from Europe. The novel was banned for its critical view of the clergy, and Rizal was later executed for his seditious views. His courageous voice earned him the respect of the Philippine community, and he is now celebrated as a Philippine national hero.
A reading from Noli Me Tangere and a discussion of Rizal's life and works will be given by Harold Augenbraum and Dorian Merina. Augenbraum will also read from his own translation-in-progress of El Filibusterismo, the sequel to Noli Me Tangere. Harold Augenbraum is Executive Director of the National Book Foundation and the translator of The Penguin Classics edition of Noli Me Tangere. Dorian Merina is the author of The Changegiver and Stone of the Fish, and a spoken word CD, Heaven is a Second Language. The short film, "MIGRATIONS," for which he wrote and recorded the poetry, was awarded the 2008 Poetry Foundation Award.
José Garcia Villa (1908-1997) is considered the most important Asian American writer of the mid-twentieth century. Known as the Pope of Greenwich Village, he has been placed among the modern literary legends such as W.H. Auden and Tennessee Williams. Edith Sitwell has praised him as, "a poet with a great, even astounding, and perfectly original gift. . . . The best of his poems are among the most beautifully written in our time."
Luis Francia will read and reflect on Villa's poetry. A well-known writer himself, Francia will also read from his own book, Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, a semiautobiographical account of a life straddling the American and Philippine cultures, which was awarded the Pen Center Beyond the Margin Award and The Asian American Writers' Workshop Literary Award in 2002.
@ The Queens Library, Woodside
54-22 Skillman Avenue
Woodside, NY 11377
FREE
Novels of Heartbreak & Folly: Romesh Gunesekera and Tania James
Join Romesh Gunesekera and Tania James for an evening of gorgeous cricket players, uneasy converts, and expats on a mission to find love, family and nation. Gunesekera reads from his most recent novel The Match, centering on a lethargic, Hamlet-esque Sri Lankan expat who maneuvers the cricket stadiums from Manila to London. A turbulent world of post-colonial politics hovers in the background as the protagonist, Sunny, takes bat and tallies up wickets. James reads from her debut novel Atlas of Unknowns, tracing two sisters as they embark upon disparate journeys. Lies and secrets unravel as one heroine bats off suitors in Kerala, and the other becomes entangled in the world of her Hindu-American host family in New York. In the words of recent Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz: "James's prevaricating bikini-waxing husband-dodging beautiful-crazy sisters followed me into my day, into my dreams... Atlas is that damned good."
Romesh Gunesekera was born in Colombo in 1954, growing up in Sri Lanka and the Philipines before moving to England. His first work, Reef (1994) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and hailed as "a work of strange, slow-motion, underwater intensity" (The Independent). His later novel The Sandglass (1998), received the BBC Asia Award for Achievement in Writing & Literature.
Tania James received her B.A. in filmmaking from Harvard University and her MFA in fiction from Columbia's School of the Arts. Her debut novel, Atlas of Unknowns, was published by Knopf in April of 2009. Her first publication, "Aerogrammes," was selected as one of the 100 Distinguished Stories of 2008 by Best American Short Stories.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Power of Place: Joe Tsujimoto & Xu Xi
Float through the grit of Sixties Harlem and the fluorescent miasmas of Tsim Sha Tsui with Joe Tsuijimoto and Xu Xi. Tsujimoto reads from his memoir Morningside Heights: New York Stories, which navigates the coming of age of a young Japanese American in the multicultural boroughs of Manhattan. A one-armed elevator operator and a convict turned culinary talent are among the colorful cast that move in the background of the narrator's path to self-discovery amidst the turbulent era. Xu Xi reads from her book of essays Evanescent Isles: From My City-Village, which traces the contours and contradictions of the hyper-modern and post-Communist handover Hong Kong. As Shawn Wong, a pioneering scholars of Asian American studies, writes: "...political idealism, capitalism, economic tsunami, and linguistic imperialism converge on her, and there she is, waving her pencil with confidence and compassion."
Xu Xi is one of Hong Kong's leading English language writers. She is the author of six books of fiction and essays, including Overleaf Hong Kong: Stories and Essays of the Chinese, Overseas and the novel The Unwalled City. Recent awards include the inaugural Man Asian Literary Award shortlist and an O. Henry Prize Story. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, she inhabits the flight path along New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand.
Joe Tsujimoto has published a national award-winning book on creative writing strategies for students, Teaching Poetry Writing to Adolescents, as well as the teacher text Lighting Fires: How the Passionate Teacher Engages Adolescent Writers.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
The Unsilenced Voices: Writings of Exile and Dissent
Join three remarkable writers and activists next week as they discuss their experiences at the turbulent intersections of political oppression, human rights, and creative expression.
@ Bryant Park Reading Room
(btwn 5th & 6th Avenue, adjacent to the James Earl Dodge monument)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Sunday, June, 21, 2pm
Tiananmen 20 Years Later: Bao Pu and the Memoirs of Zhao Ziyang
The Workshop welcomes Bao Pu, an editor and translator of Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang. The bestselling volume, published in Chinese and English on the recent 20th anniversary of the protests, compiles hours of secretly recorded interviews and unprecedented insight into the schisms within the Chinese Communist Party's elite. Though nominally the highest-ranking member of the Party in June of 1989, Zhao reveals here that "no matter what," he would not be "the General Secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students." Zhao was subsequently purged from the party after Tiananmen, and held under house arrest until his death. This remarkable break of silence "marks the first time since the establishment of the People's Republic of China 60 years ago that a senior Chinese leader has spoken out so directly against the party and its system" (Washington Post).
Bao Pu, a political commentator and veteran human rights activist, is a publisher and editor of New Century Press in Hong Kong.
Wednesday, June 24, 7pm
Chronicling Resistance: Taslima Nasrin and Ma Thida
Kavitha Rajagopalan, author of Muslims of Metropolis, moderates a conversation between human rights activists and writers Taslima Nasrin and Ma Thida.
Ma Thida is a fiction writer, human rights activist and practicing surgeon from Myanmar. Author of the novel The Sunflower, Thida has written many stories about the damage done to her country by successive repressive regimes. She is recipient of several awards recognizing her writing and promotion of human rights, including the PEN Barbara Gold Smith Freedom to Write award, the Reebok Human Rights award, an honorary award from the American Association of Arts and Science and, most recently, the Chevening fellowship in conflict resolution at York University. She is a former University of Iowa International Writing Program fellow and is currently in residence at Brown University, where she is the International Writing Project fellow.
Taslima Nasrin is a writer and human rights spokeswoman from Bangladesh. She is the author of thirty-two books of poetry, essays, novels and short stories. Her subject matter includes secularization in Islamic countries and the linkages between secularization and women's emancipation. Ms. Nasrin has been granted numerous awards for her writing and for her human rights work, including the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence, the Ananda Award for her memoir Meyebela (My Bengali Girlhood), a fellowship at Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights, the Human Rights Award from the Government of France, the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament, and the Simone de Beauvoir prize. The recipient of two honorary doctoral degrees from Ghent University and American University of Paris, Ms. Nasrin is currently a Vivian G. Prins Global Scholar at New York University's Department of English.
Co-sponsored by freeDimensional, the World Policy Institute, New York University's Scholars at Risk Program, Art OMI International Arts Center's Ledig House International Residency, and the Open Society Institute.
2nd Annual Bryant Park Reading: Sesshu Foster, Adrienne Su, and Vijay Seshadri.
Join us for three critically acclaimed poets at Word For Word Poetry at the Bryant Park Reading Room.
Prose poet Sesshu Foster's first publication was, fittingly enough, in a Little Tokyo activist newspaper called Gidra--the name of the famous Japanese monster. This combination between urbanism and fantasy marks his work, whether in his creation of a gritty universe ruled by indigenous Azteks in his novel Atomik Aztek, or his poems in City Terrace Field Manual, a fierce collage of the L.A. multi-racial experience. His latest book, World Ball Notebook, blends the fantastic and the mundane with 118 "Games" that include prose poems, checklists, shopping lists and overheard conversations. Growing up between the Chicano barrio and Little Tokyo in East L.A., Sesshu has created "the poetic soundtrack of a people and a place, in the words of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. author Luis Rodriguez. "Sesshu Foster is dangerous, ese! The way a poet should be."
Although Vijay Seshadri is one of the most prominent poets in America, as a young man he worked as a truck driver, a commercial fisherman, a logger, and a biologist for the National Marine Fish Service. He featured these experiences in the fishing industry in his first collection, Wild Kingdom. (His second collection, The Long Meadow won the James Laughlin Award.) Born in Bangalore, India, Seshadri came to America at the age of five, where he grew up in Columbus, Ohio. Influenced by Whitman and Blake, drawing on Indian mythology and the American Civil War, by turns intimate and satiric, Vijay's work has appeared twice in Best American Poetry, as well as in The Paris Review and The New Yorker, which gave a full page to his poem The Disappearances in the weeks following 9/11; while the poem gave a healing voice to many, Vijay actually wrote it months before the attacks. He currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Adrienne Su writes, "Because I prefer the daily to the exotic as subject matter, writing goes best for me when it's woven into everyday life, as a ritual that fits somewhere between making pancakes for my kids and preparing a class for college students." Her latest work, Having None of It, reflects on the experience of being pregnant and becoming a mother--a topic that Adrienne has identified as her central themes. A poet of the Chinese American experience, Adrienne's work has been described by Bob Holman as " rais[ing] a voice of calm and subtle strength in her evocation of a new land, stretching from China to suburban Virginia." Although Adrienne's frequently uses sonnets and other traditional forms, she actually competed at the National Poetry Slam. The winner of an NEA Fellowship and Pushcart Prize, Adrienne is the author of the poetry collections Middle Kingdom and Sanctuary, and has appeared in Best American Poetry 2000.
@ Bryant Park Reading Room
(btwn 5th & 6th Avenue, adjacent to the James Earl Dodge monument)
FREE and open to the public
Crossing Borders & Genress: Ching-In Chen, Minal Hajratwala, Kim-An Lieberman, and Nahid Rachlin
Nonfiction writers Minal Hajratwala and Nahid Rachlin read from Leaving India and Persian Girls. Poets Ching-In Chen and Kim-An Lieberman read from their collections The Heart's Traffic and Breaking The Map.
"I can live in San Francisco, be a writer, be an out lesbian, choose to wear blue jeans or saris ... all of those options are possible because people before me made huge, dramatic changes in their lives. They moved."
After living in San Francisco and New Zealand, Minal Hajratwala grew up in the all-white suburbs of Michigan. "[W]hen we said we were 'Indian,' people asked us, 'What tribe?'" Her novel Leaving India encompasses an entire world within the binding of a single book--the product of an epic seven year journey in which Hajratwala traveled across five continents to speak with over 75 family members. The novel explores what it means to leave one home and choose another--both for those who do the leaving, and for their descendants. As Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker writes, "I love Minal Hajratwala's book Leaving India. It is what I imagine India itself to be like: incomparable, sprawling, rich, surprising, very old and wise and forever capable of re-creating itself, no matter where pieces of it land."
"I yearn to return to Iran to experience the richness of the culture, but when I am there I become aware of all the limitations. The moment I am on the plane coming back to America, I feel a sense of relief and liberation."
Nahid Rachlin writes at the intersection between between the desire to find freedom in a new place and the desire to return to the familiarities of an old home. Rachlin last novel, Foreigner, tells the story of a woman's return to Iran and ultimate decision to stay there. Rachlin's memoir, Persian Girls, begins when a six-month old Rachlin is "given away" by her mother to an aunt who yearned for a child. As Persian Girls unfolds, Rachlin describe her defiance of her father and her pressures to get married, and her coming to America to fulfill her dream of becoming a writer. As the New York Times writes, "Bleak is the right word, if you will understand that bleakness can have a startling beauty."
"I don't think I realized it was a novel-in-poems until after I had written the first set of poems. Slowly, as each poem of that first thirty unfolded, I realized that the protagonist voice wasn't me."
Ching-In Chen's debut novel-in-poems, The Heart's Traffic, showcases this multi-genre writer's ability to weave the narrative of a single character, Xiaomei, into many forms. The book itself is about "how one might create new language to name the New World" and incorporates such Western and Eastern forms as the sestina, villanelle, epistle, haibun, pantoum, and zuihitsu. As Rigoberto González writes, "At the overwhelming crossroads, where the body, sexuality, and culture collide, you will find The Heart's Traffic fibrillating with emotion and pumping forth the strained language that shudders off the tongue."
"But the truth is I have no idea whether my words
connect, if my translations are knowledge or nonsense.
This language engulfs us in separate oceans,
longer and louder than anything I know how to name."
(Translation, from Breaking The Map)
Kim-An Lieberman, a writer of Vietnamese and Jewish American descent, readers from her debut poetry collection, Breaking the Map. Her poems and essays have also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Threepenny Review, and the anthology Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace. As Shawn Wong writes, "Whatever forty-year-old image we might still remember from Vietnam or America that is part real and part television, she makes whole, new, and vibrant. She makes us a witness more than reader."
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
(AC)2: The First Annual Asian American ComiCon
A celebration of the unique contemporary role and historical legacy of Asian American comic artists, featuring the writers and editors of Secret Identities, the first-ever graphic novel anthology of Asian American superhero stories. Come join us at the newly renovated Museum of Chinese in America for this landmark event.
@ Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
215 Centre Street, New York
$25 admission; $15 students/MOCA members/Workshop members
Jammin' Asian: A Special Performance & Fund-raiser
Laugh Lounge presents a Hudson & Tabigue production, Jammin' Asian. This one-of-a-kind night will feature stand-up comedy, music, and magic.
Taiwanese-American musician Debbie Chou plays in the rock band The Barrens.
Daniel Kim has performed stand-up comedy at the Improv, Standup NY, Gotham Comedy Club, NY and Philadelphia Fringe Festivals. As an actor, Dan has performed with East West Players (LA) and the Philadelphia Theater Company, and was a writer-performer in "The Edge of the World" at La MaMa, as part of the National Asian American Theatre Festival.
Tom Hudson is a Korean-American adoptee stand-up comic who performs all over the country and is the co-producer of Jammin'Asian at the Laugh Lounge. Tom promotes Asian-American performers through his showcases, which have included Chopshtick (Gotham Comedy Club) and A-list Comedy (Standup NY).
Bobby Johnson appears regularly at the hottest clubs on the NYC comedy circuit and on WB's The Tyra Banks Show and FOX TV's Morning Show with Mike and Juliet. He's appeared on SIRIUS Satellite Radio and can be heard daily on top NYC radio station 98.7 KISS FM's morning show, The KISS Wake Up Club.
Steve Rosso is a contributing writer to Mad magazine and runs a weekly open mic in The Village.
@ Laugh Lounge
151 Essex Street
New York , New York 10002
$10 advanced tickets; $15 At the Door.
Kevin Nadal & Filipino American Psychology
Come hear Kevin Nadal read from his groundbreaking textbook, Filipino American Psychology: A Handbook of Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice. Filipino American Psychology offers a comprehensive look at the psyche of Filipino Americans. By examining history, cultural values, influences of colonialism, community dynamics and intersections with other identities, the reader will have an opportunity to understand essential information about this population. Students will gain knowledge and awareness about Filipino American identity and personality development, while practitioners will learn culturally-competent techniques to become better counselors, clinicians and educators. This book is the first of its kind, and aims to promote visibility of this invisible group, so that 2.4 million Filipino Americans will have their voices heard.
Kevin L. Nadal, Ph.D., is a professor, psychologist, performer, activist and author who received his doctorate in counseling psychology from Columbia University in 2008. As an assistant professor of psychology and mental health counseling at John Jay College of Criminal Justice - City University of New York, he has published several works focusing on Filipino American, ethnic minority and LGBTQ issues in the fields of psychology and education. In 2007, he led a vast international campaign against ABC Studios for the negative statements made about Filipino medical schools on the television show "Desperate Housewives." A California-bred New Yorker, Kevin is also a stand-up comedian and spoken word artist who has performed across the US since 2000. He was named one of People magazine's hottest bachelors in 2006. He was a guest on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," and he has been featured on The Filipino Channel, the History Channel, Philippine News, and Filipinas Magazine. For more information, please visit his website here.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
House Party! Dumpling, Dim Sum, and Wine
There's no better way to celebrate summer hitting its halfway mark than a good old-fashioned house party—AAWW style. Join New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee and others in a dumpling-making party complete with dim sum and wine. Make new friends, bring old friends and eat to your hearts content! For tickets, call 212.494.0061 or click here.
@ 121 West 17th Street, Apt 7D
(btwn 7th Avenue and Avenue of Americas)
$15 or FREE for members
Flash Fiction - Tara L. Masih and Shouhua Qi
Come hear contributors from the The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, an unprecedented collection of essays on flash fiction.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Spring 2009
Events this season sponsored by:
Singha Beer and The Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
1st Annual Lunar New Year Countdown
Come to our 1st Annual Lunar New Year Countdown, and hear your favorite writers read and share your own work (or just your favorite thing you've read lately). Who knows--you may be reading next to your favorite novelist or poet!
You'll get a chance to check out the new-and-improved Workshop's space--recently redecorated thanks to Parsons The New School of Design, Design Within Reach Annex, and Goil Amornvivat, the star of Bravo's Top Design and TLC's Trading Spaces. Goil will introduce the new space to kick off the night.
Featuring Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Lisa Chen, Dustin Chinn, Annie Choi, Alvin Eng, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Nathalie Handal, Jennifer Hayashida, Cathy Park Hong, Wendy Lee, Ed Lin, Timothy Liu, Taij Kumarie Moteelall, Taiyo Na, Ed Park, Thad Rutkowski, Monica De La Torre, Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, Elijah Wong, Monica Youn & many more.
Think of this less like a reading than a big old-fashioned party. We'll have free Singha beer beer and dumplings. Just drop in when it works for you.
If you're interested in reserving a five-minute reading slot for you or your friends, just give us a call at (212) 494-0061 or drop us an email.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$10 general/$5 members; open to the public
Viva Villa!
A celebration of the life and work of the late, critically acclaimed, Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa. Reading selections from Doveglion: Collected Poems, Penguins Classics' reissue of Villa's collected works, will be poet and editor of the collection, John Cowen; poet and author of the introduction, Luis Francia; and poets Sarah Gambito and Ron Villanueva.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Stranger Love: SAWCC's 6th Annual Literary Festival
A two-day series of readings, panel discussions, and writing workshops featuring South Asian writing that explores love between strangers and love that is strange.
This year's festival, Stranger Love, calls to mind accidental encouters and provocative attractions that defy the boundaries of social expectation. From guerilla movements in Sri Lanka to the suburbs of New Jersey, South Asian women examine journey and memory, war and conflict, and race and sexuality, spanning the genres of poetry, memoir, travelogue, and fiction.
Friday, March 6
Reading and Conversation
7:00pm, The New School
Featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth, Knopf 2008), with author V. V. Ganesshananthan (Love Marriage, Random House 2008). Booksigning to follow.
Wollman Hall
65 W 11th St, 5th Floor
Tickets are $15 and must be purchased in advance. No door sales.
Tickets can be purchased through SAWCC here.
Saturday, March 7
Object Desire: Poetry Workshop with Purvi Shah
10:00am - 12:00pm, The New School
"...None ask whether healing has a catalyst,
where ache can be converted
to desire. Did my heart fall
or did the heart fall apart? Did you lose
or did I lose—where is the object
to be found?..."
(From "Attack. Suddent. Heart—", Terrain Tracks, Purvi Shah)
Roses. Rings. Truffle. Perfumed notes. How do we signify love? What are the objects we use to communicate desire? this poetry workshop will focus on writing related to the object of our desire. We will investigate desire's materiality while plumbing emotions and the complexities of love and longing. The workshop will include a group activity, independent writing, and a lightning exercise in order to produce a polished draft of a poem by the end of the session. The goals of this workshop include ruminating on object desire, sharing writing with workshop attendees, producing a poem, and having fodder to continue writing for weeks to come!
Purvi Shah, Executive Director of Sakhi for South Asian Women, a community based anti-domestic violence organization, in the author of Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press 2006), which won a Many Voices Project prize. Her debut poetry collection, recognized across Asian American and women's communities, explores migration as potential and loss.
Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Autobiographical Fiction with Bushra Rehman
10:00am-12:00pm, The New School
Writing from life can be a tricky business. There are people to protect, faulty memories of events, and the pitfalls of self-censorship and self-aggrandizement. Autobiographical fiction employs techniques of both memoir and fiction. It recognizes that our lives are too rich not to write about, but that our imaginations are too strong to ignore. In this workshop, we will write by drawing upon the truths and lies of our lives and will cover literary techniques such as character, dialogue, setting, and story arc.
Bushra Rehman is 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). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and she has been featured in the New York Times, India Currents, NY Newsday, on BBC Radio 4, KPFA, and the Brian Lehrer Show. She was recently a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts, where she completed her first novel.
@ The New School
6 E 16th St (at 5th Ave), 9th Floor
$10 registration fee, advance sign up required
To sign up, e-mail SAWCC a letter of interest specifying which workshop you would like to attend and briefly describing your writing background to litfest@sawcc.org.
Stranger Histories: War and Literature
1:15pm-2:30pm
Panelists speak about the way they engage narrative and verse to address issues of civil conflict, terrorism, and protest.
Fawzia Afzal-Khan (Editor, Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out, Olive Branch Press 2005)
Meena Alexander (Quickly Changing River: Poems, Triquarterly Books 2008)
V. V. Ganeshananthan (Love Marriage, Random House 2008)
Moderated by Zohra Saed (PhD Candidate, CUNY)
Stranger Migrations: Travel and Literature
2:45pm-4:00pm
Panelists discuss nonfiction that takes the form of travelogue and memoir and their work's exploration of journey, displacement, and diaspora.
Minal Hajratwala (Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009)
S. Mitra Kalita (Suburban Sahibs, Rutgers University Press 2003)
Suketu Mehta (Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Knopf 2004)
Moderated by Pooja Makhijani (Editor, Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America, Seal Press 2004)
Passing Strange: Race, Gender and Sexuality
4:15pm-5:30pm
Panelists consider how their writing reimagines raced, gendered, and sexual identity in unconventional ways.
Abha Dawesar (Family Values, Penguin India 2009)
Farzana Doctor (Stealing Nasreen, Inanna 2007)
Chandra Prasad (On Borrowed Wings: A Novel, Atria 2007)
Moderated by Svati Shah (Postdoctoral Fellow, Duke University)
@ The New School
6 East 16th Street (at 5th Ave), 9th Floor
FREE
Closing Night Reading
7:00pm
From dating on Craigslist to undiscovered family histories, South Asian women share their own writing on the theme of "stranger love." Featuring Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Meena Alexander, Abha Dawesar, Farzana Doctor, Minal Hajratwala, S. Mitra Kalita, Yesha Naik, Amy Paul, Bushra Rehman, Zohra Saed, and Purvi Shah.
@ Bar 13
35 East 13th Street
$5 at the door
Cosponsored by The New School's South Asia Forum, SAWCC, and The Workshop.
This even was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the New York Council for the Humanities.
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
The powerHouse Arena hosts a reading and talk with author Jennifer 8. Lee and fellow food writer Sarah Murray about "adventures in the world of Chinese food" in celebration of the paperback release of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. The night includes a raffle, Chinese goodies, and other surprises. For more information call 718.666.3049.
@ powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street, Brooklyn
RSVP: rsvp@powerhousearena.com
Comedy Night!
Come join us and co-curator Laurel Fantauzzo for a night of hilarity. Featuring stand-up by celebrated comedians who have been featured on everything from Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, E! Entertainment, VH1, to Late Night with Conan O'Brien, our lovely (and particularly attractive) guests: Sheela Shrinivas, Helen Hong, Jen Kwok, Kevin Nadal and Ali Wong and improv by Barkada: Kirk Damato, Terry Jinn, Erik Tanouye, Risa Sang-urai, and Becky Yamamoto will be sure to please.
The night features an audience-judged competition as the stand uppers answer the question: "What's the worst fight you've ever had with your parents?" Watch, judge, laugh, love.
Sheela Shrinivas has taught writing and other fun subjects to students in fun countries like Spain and India. Sheela has performed stand-up at various venues in New York City, and performs regularly around town with her improv group, The Fever.
Helen Hong is a comedian whose enthusiastic character impressions have landed her on E! Entertainment, TLC, ImaginAsian TV, and national commercials for Comcast and Xerox. A rising star in the NY comedy scene, Helen was a semi-finalist in the 2007 & 2008 NY's Funniest Stand-Up Competition and was featured in the NYC Underground Comedy Festival. Before her career in comedy, Helen was a successful TV director/producer, and was featured behind the scenes on TLC's "What Not to Wear."
Jen Kwok is a writer and performer based in Brooklyn, NY who combines music, improv, making people uncomfortable and stand-up comedy. Although She enjoys playing ukulele to tens of people at basement burlesque shows, Jen has also reached national recognition as a finalist in NBC's Stand-Up for Diversity and maintains one of the fastest growing blogs on the Internet.
Kevin Nadal, Ph.D., is a performer, professor, and psychologist. A
California-bred New Yorker, Kevin has been performing stand-up comedy and one man shows across the U.S. for the past decade. He was named one of People Magazine's hottest bachelors in 2006, was a guest on the O'Reilly Factor in 2007 and was featured in the independent movie Brown Soup Thing in 2008. He thinks of his stand-up comedy as non-traditional Filipino "kwento kwento" (or storytelling) about growing up Filipino, gay, and fabulous.
Ali Wong is a stand-up comic and writer who has performed at various venues in New York and throughout California. She is currently the host of The Onion Comedy Series: The Golden Showers Bring March Flowers Show. She has a self-described addiction to durian, sneakers and Project Runway. Her dream dates include, jumping naked off a cliff into a river and Scrabble and Guiness with ice cream.
Barkada:
Kirk Damato is an improviser and writer living in New York City. He is the co-creator of Cakey! The Cake From Outer Space and also announces for the Gotham Girls Roller Derby.
Terry Jinn has showcased his multifaceted comedic act on NBC's Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Conan O'Brien as well as Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn.
Erik Tanouye is the co-founder of the improv group, Asia-town, and director of the acclaimed improv shows, I Eat Panda and T.J. Monkeys.
Risa Sang-urai is a seasoned improv comic and coach who has appeared on VH1 as well as NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Becky Yamamoto has performed in venues around New York as well as internationally with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company. Her comedic exploits have been decribed as "...expertly deadpan..." by The New Yorker.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Hari Kunzru and Porochista Khakpour
In Hari KunzruÕs latest work, My Revolutions (Dutton 2008), Chris Carver reflects on the past he keeps hidden from his family. Catching a glance of the woman he loved while acting as a revolutionary, Carver considers what the true significance of his actions were. Xerxes Adam is asking similar questions in Porochista KhakpourÕs Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic 2007). Xerxes has tried to abandon his Iranian heritage for much of his adult life, but when he falls in love with a half Iranian girl, Xerxes is forced to make sense of the troubled past heÕs so desperate to escape.
Hari Kunzru is the critically acclaimed and multi-award winning author of The Impressionist, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award in 2002, Transmission, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2004, and the short story collection, Noise. He was named one of GrantaÕs ÒTwenty Best Fiction Writers under FortyÓ and has been compared to Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk, and Don DeLillo by the New York Times. He currently serves are deputy president of English PEN and is a member of the editorial board of Mute magazine. For more, visit his blog at HariKunzru.com.
Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in the Greater Los Angeles Area. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and received her MA from Johns Hopkins University. She began writing as an arts and entertainment journalist with work appearing in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Paper, Flaunt, Nylon, Bidoun, Alef, Canteen, Nerve.com and FiveChapters.com. The New York Times Book Review has said that Sons and Other Flammable Objects is filled with Òpunchy conversation, vivid detail, sharp humorÓ and Òimbued with a genuine humanity that wins our affection.Ó For more on Khakpour, visit her site at PorochistaKhakpour.com or read her blog at RedRoom.com.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Kavitha Rajagopalan and Shalini Shankar
Curious about life at the frontlines of the Asian Diaspora? Come hear Shalini Shankar and Kavitha Rajagopalan tell the intimate, firsthand stories of South Asian youth and Muslim immigrant families.
What does it mean to be a young and South Asian today? Northwestern professor Shalini Shankar spent nearly three years kickin' it with Desi teens in Silicon Valley trying to find out. The high school students in Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class and Success in Silicon Valley are caught between the world of their immigrant parents and American pop culture, between arranged marriage and instant messaging, Desi bling and model minority expectations. Shalini tells the stories from the full range of South Asian youth. The teens in Desi Land are Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Sikhs. They are first- to fourth-generation immigrants, and the children of assembly-line workers, engineers and CEOs. Vijay Prashad calls Desi Land "a loving portrait of young people trying their best to fashion culture and life in jobless America," describing the book's account of young Desis as "an eye-opener, whether you're wearing your mad tight color contacts or not."
In the West, Muslims are seen as creatures of stereotype, suspected terrorists and cartoon zealots, rather than loving parents, struggling daughters, or people in love. Kavitha Rajagopalan's Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West is a corrective: a loving, nuanced portrait of Muslim immigrant families in London, Berlin, and New York. In Berlin, Kavitha will take you on a tour of the Turkish Kurdish community, where you'll get to know a pioneering Kurdish farmer, his traditional wife and their daughter, the first woman in their family to graduate from college. In London, you'll meet a BMW-driving, cologne-wearing Palestinian activist outraged over the Palestinian plight in Israel. And in New York, you'll get to know a gentle Bangladeshi man and his individualistic daughter, who goes against her culture and the law to marry an undocumented Pakistani man—all in the hopes of finding a little middle-class American happiness. These personal stories have led Saskia Sassen to call Metropolis "one of the most interesting accounts" of the Muslim diaspora. Watch Kavitha, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, discuss the book online here and here or read her blog.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Book Party
Join us as we celebrate Timothy Liu's newest poetry collection, Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse. Poetry, champagne, and cake.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Free; open to the public
The 4th Annual AAWW/Cave Canem Celebration
A night of vibrant readings curated and hosted by Tina Chang and Tracy K. Smith, featuring Sapphire, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Jessica Hagedorn, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Wayne Koestenbaum.
Jessica Hagedorn, born and raised in Manila, Philippines, is the author of Dream Jungle, Burning Heart, The Gangster of Love, Danger and Beauty, and Dogeaters, which won The American Book Award and a National Book Award nomination. Ishmael Reed has called her a "vanguard artist," whose work has crossed over narrowly defined racial categories and embraced African-American, Latino and Asian traditions and who writes "the kinds of novels that will be written in the next century."
Read her work here.
Brenda Shaughnessy's poems—described by poet Richard Howard as letting us in on both the fun and pain of ecstasy—have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. The author of Interior with Sudden Joy, Shaughnessy is the poetry editor at Tin House magazine and the author most recently of Human Dark with Sugar, the winner of the James Laughlin Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times recently compared her not just to Ashbery and Dickinson, but Abbot and Costello: "And there isn't a single poem in Human Dark With Sugar that isn't funny... Shaughnessy has enough spritzy, brainy humor to spike the thin milk of your musings and give them body." Read her work here.
Sapphire is "an enrapturing voice that charms and shocks" (Miami Herald). The author of Black Wings & Blind Angels: Poems and Push: A Novel, which was recently adapted into a film starring Maria Carey and Lenny Kravitz. Her other works include American Dreams, a collection of prose and poetry and Meditations on the Rainbow: Poetry. "Few literary works today," Poets & Writers has written, "are as affecting as [Sapphire's] or have had as much impact on our society." Read her work here.
Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room, winner of The 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Ellis is a "rare young poet" able to take root in the contradiction-fraught soil of Washington, D.C., and Maverick is a "a compendium of lyric gestures compressed into taught chords of meaning" (Gregory Pardlo). A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, Ellis is a contributing editor to Callaloo and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. His Breakfast and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets is also forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series. Read his work here.
Wayne Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author most recently of a collection of poems called Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films. His publications include works of nonfiction such as Andy Warhol and Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars and Aesthetics, the novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and four books of poetry: Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. His critical book, The Queen's Throat, is a rigorous exploration of a phenomenon frequently discussed casually but seldom considered from a scholarly viewpoint: the predilection of gay men for opera. "Koestenbaum's many short poems and shorter stanzas pivot between the quizzical and the chatty, between the simply fabulous and the merely strange, achieving, at best, a campy bravura with an undertone of dismay" (Publisher's Weekly). Read his work here.
Co-sponsored by Cave Canem in collaboration with Guernica: A Journal of Art and Politics.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
New Stories from Iranians in America: An Association of Iranian American
Writers Literary Event
Please note the error on our print calendar. This event is scheduled for Friday, April 17, not Thursday.
Founded in 2008, the Association of Iranian American Writers (AIAW) has become a vibrant and growing nexus for contemporary Iranian American writing. Please join us for an evening of readings by Taha Ebrahimi, Javad Mohsenian, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, and Solmaz Sharif.
Taha Ebrahimi's award-winning writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Seattle Times, RIVET Magazine, Elan Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, "Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction" (Norton, 2008) and is forthcoming in Love and Pomegranates: New Voices Celebrating Iran. She has been in residence at both Hedgebrook and the Millay Colony for the Arts, where she was also on the jury in 2008. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Pittsburgh where she also taught writing for three years. Originally from Seattle, Washington, she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Javad Mohsenian, M.D. was born and educated in Iran, he is a psychiatrist, poet and writer, in suburban Philadelphia. He passed Shiraz Medical School exam and wrote a best seller, Rahnemaye Kankoor: A guide to college entrance exams, published by Elmi, a major publishing company in Tehran. His second novel, Today is also Late (Emrooz Ham Deer Ast), depicting the struggle of youth against the old traditions was accepted on a professional basis. Persian Moonlight, his first novel in English was a repetition of the old struggle until the doctor writer came in contact with a doctor publisher, owner of Moore Publishing Company. He published 9/11 Children, last year and is currently working on a novel in relation to events in Iran.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Open City and elsewhere. His memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, about growing up communist in the United States, was published by Dial Press in March.
Born in exile, Solmaz Sharif completed degrees in Sociology and Women of Color Writer at U.C. Berkeley. While there, she studied and taught with June Jordan's Poetry for the People. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at 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 in Berkeley Poetry Review and numerous campus publications. Her readings include Bowery Poetry Club, Hunter College, and Pacifica Radio.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
A Celebration of The Chapbook
The Celebration of the Chapbook festival calls attention to the rich
history of the chapbook and highlights its essential place in poetry
publishing today as a vehicle for alternative poetry projects and for
emerging authors and editors to gain entry into the literary
marketplace. The festival will forge a new platform for the study of
the chapbook inside and outside the academy and celebrate the
importance of chapbooks to America's cultural heritage and future.
Thursday, April 23
@ The Graduate Center, CUNY | map
Chapbook Fair
10:00am-6:00pm, The Elebash Recital Hall Lobby
Brief History of Chapbooks
3:00-4:30pm, The Elebash Recital Hall
With Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the New York Public Library's Berg
Collection; and Michael Ryan, Director of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at
Columbia University. Moderated by Richard Kaye, Hunter College, CUNY
Chapbooks in the 20th and 21st Centuries
4:30-6:00pm, The Elebash Recital Hall
With Michael Basinski, Assistant Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books
Collection of the University Libraries, SUNY at Buffalo; Anne Waldman,
Chair and Artistic Director of Naropa University's Summer Writing
Program; and Kevin Young, Emory University. Moderated by Ammiel
Alcalay, Queens College, CUNY.
Keynote Reading
6:00pm, The Elebash Recital Hall
Readings by Lytton Smith, Gerald Stern, Judith Vollmer, Kevin Young
and others, with an introduction by Kimiko Hahn.
Friday, April 24
@ The Graduate Center, CUNY | map
Chapbook Fair
10:00am-6:00pm, Rooms 8301/8304
Chapbook Now: Producing Chapbooks
A Workshop for Poets
10:00-11:30am, Room 8400
With Rachel Levitsky (Belladonna*); Sharon Dolin (The Center for Book
Arts); and Ryan Murphy (Four Way Books). Moderated by Alice Quinn
(Poetry Society of America).
Chapbook Now: Producing Chapbooks
A Workshop for Publishers
11:30am-1:00pm, Room 8402
With Jen Benka (Booklyn); Matvei Yankelevich (Ugly Duckling Presse);
and Brenda Iijima
(Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). Moderated by Rob Casper (Poetry
Society of America).
Workshop registration information to be announced.
Friday, April 24
@ The Center for Book Arts | map
Craft/Bookmaking for Writers: A Workshop
2:00-5:00pm
Craft/Bookmaking for Publishers: A Workshop
2:00-5:00pm
Workshop registration information to be announced.
Saturday, April 25
@ The Asian American Writers' Workshop | map
Collector's Show-and-Tell: The Secret History of Asian American Literature
2:00-4:00pm
Come join literary historian Patricia Wakida for a special day of Show-and-Tell. The lecture will include a hands-on discussion of early examples of Asian American chapbooks and self-published publications, including ShigÕs Review, a poetry and photo 'zine published in the 1950s-1970s by Shigeyoshi "Shig" Murao, the legendary owner of City Lights Books in San Francisco who was famously arrested in 1957 for selling Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems.
Wakida, who is currently working on a biography of Shigeyoshi, will also discuss: early chapbooks from the 1920s-1940s featuring the work of Carlos Bulosan and Yone Noguchi; DIY publications from the I-hotel and the first wave of Asian American poetry in the '70s, such as the first published poems of Lawson Inada, David Rafael Wang, Francis Oka, Barbara Noda (featuring illustrations by Wendy Yoshimura); chapbooks and anthologies documenting the rise of San Francisco's Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest (founded in 1972) multidisciplinary Asian Pacific American arts organization in the country; and innovative handbound, letterpress-printed chapbooks from Asian American publishers active today.
After Ms. Wakida's presentation, guests are invited to hang out and browse through her rich trove of chapbooks that collectively embody a secret history of Asian American literature. Feel free to bring your own self-published projects, as well for critique and discussion. Also included will be a discussion on chapbook design, structure and production, highlighted by a chance to handle classic and archival chapbook examples.
Patricia Wakida has coordinated a number of projects on Asian American and California history, art, and culture, including an anthology focused on the Japanese American internment experience, Only What We Could Carry, and the collected work of Nisei author Toshio Mori, Unfinished Message. Patricia has worked as an apprentice papermaker in Gifu, Japan and as an apprentice letterpress printer and hand bookbinder in California; she maintains her own letterpress business under the Wasabi Press imprint. She works for Asian diaspora/Asian American publisher Kaya Press and independently as a book consultant throughout the Bay Area.
Publishing from the Margins
4:30-6:00pm
So, what do Heath Ledger, experimental poetics, and postcards have in common? Find out at Publishing from the Margins, a Workshop panel that looks at chapbooks as just another DIY mode of distribution, like 'zines, mini-comics, podcasts, and blogs, that let you to avoid mainstream publishing and share your work with your friends. Poets Tan Lin, Dawn Lundy Martin and Bushra Rehman will read from their chapbooks and discuss their views of the chapbook as an alternative channel of publication for minority writers. Discussion moderated by literary historian Patricia Wakida and followed by a reading by poets from Rehman's Postcard Poetry Project.
Tan Lin is the author of HEATH (PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE), a wild, multi-authored poetry collection that mashes together an MP3 protest song, performance art, legalistic theories of plagiarism, cut-and-pasted images from Wikipedia, and the death of Heath Ledger. His books of poetry include Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe and BOX (both from Sun and Moon Press), and his individual poems have appeared in such journal as New American Writing and Conjunctions.
Dawn Lundy Martin is a founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of young Black post-theorists who perform and write in hybrid experimental forms, embracing radical poetics and cutting-edge critical theory about gender, race and sexuality. She is the author of The Morning Hour, selected by C.D. Wright for the Poetry Society of AmericaÕs National Chapbook Fellowship, and A Matter of Gathering / A Gathering of Matter, winner of the 2006 Cave Canem Book Prize. She is also co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, a feminist, activist foundation that works nationally to support young women and transgender youth.
Bushra Rehman discusses her experience leading The Postcard Poetry Project an AAWW workshop where participants wrote poems on postcards that they sent to poets in a similar workshop in San Francisco. She's co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism, an anthology that is taught in women's studies and ethnic studies classes around the country.
Reception
6:00pm
Co-sponsored by Center for Book Arts, CUNY Graduate Center Queens College, Poetry Society of America and The Workshop.
All events will be held at:
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
From Jose Rizal to Jose Garcia Villa: An Introduction to Philippine Literary Greats
Join us for a special reception in celebration of two heroes of Philippine literature and of the Philippine-American heritage and experience, and for a lively discussion and refreshment.
Noli Me Tangere is the great Philippine novel by Jose Rizal (1861-1896), a love story set during the Spanish occupation, and the story of a young gentleman who returns to the Philippines from Europe after his fathers death. This powerful, moving novel and its sequel, El Filibusterismo were banned by Spanish authorities. Rizal was subsequently executed for sedition and is the best-known Philippine national hero.
Harold Augenbraum discusses Rizals life and reads from his translation of the Noli, published by Penguin Classics, and then from his translation-in-progress of the Fili. Augenbraum is Executive Director of the National Book Foundation and a well known translator and critic.
Known as the Pope of Greenwich Village, Jose Garcia Villa (1908-1997) was arguably the most important Asian American writer of the mid-twentieth century, as well as a colleague of modern literary giants such as W.H. Auden and Tennessee Williams. Edith Sitwell called him "a poet with a great, even an astounding, and perfectly original gift. . . . The best of his poems are among the most beautifully written in our time."
Luis Francia, a well known writer and poet, discusses Villa and reads from his poetry, and will also read from his own book Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago. Eye of the Fish, Francia's semiautobiographical account of life straddling American and Philippine culture, won the Pen Center Beyond the Margin Award and The Asian American Writers' Workshop Literary Award in 2002.
An informal discussion will be encouraged after the presentations. Wine and meryenda hors d'oeuvres will be served.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Tickets: $25; Members of the AAWW and the AAJA, $20; Students, $15; VIP, $50
For tickets click here, or call us at 212.494.0061
Celebrating Kaya & Castro
Over the course of ten books, Australian novelist Brian Castro has
studied, depicted, and parodied the cultural swirl of globalization as
it affects Australian life. Castro arrives in the United States on the
heels of a presidential election that has raised difficult questions
about our own multiraciality, transnational identities, and global
role. Brian Castro is an Asian-Australian writer, born in Hong Kong
and has lived in Australia for over 45 years. His father was
Portuguese and his mother Chinese/British. His books take in the whole
sweep of multicultural Australia without pushing any particular issue,
placing language, literature and irony at the forefront of their
endeavours.
Kaya Press is proud to announce the publication of Castro's U.S.
debut, Shanghai Dancing
, a fragmented fictional autobiography told in
written images and reclaimed photographs. The novel centers on Antonio
Castro, the victim of a restlessness and rootlessness he calls
"Shanghai Dancing." The fictional Castro walks out of the real
Castro's life, backtracking his ancestors' economic, missionary,
political, and sexual migrations from Portugal and Liverpool to
Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Kaya Press is a nonprofit independent publisher of Asian, Pacific
Islander diasporic literature. Kaya is dedicated to presenting new and
innovative fiction, poetry, critical essays of Asian American writers,
and the recovery of important and overlooked work from the Pacific Rim
and the API diaspora.
Brian Castro will be followed by performances and readings by writers
Eric Gamalinda, Ishle Yi Park, and Thad Rudkowski.
Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong and has lived in Australia since
1961. His first novel Birds Of Passage (Rainbow Publishing) shared the
Australian/Vogel literary award and has been translated into French
and Chinese. His novels Double-Wolf (Allen & Unwin) and After China
(Allen & Unwin) were both winners of the Victorian Premier's Literary.
Shanghai Dancing (Giramondo), has won the Vance Palmer Prize at the
2003 Victorian Premier's Awards, the Christina Stead Prize at the 2004
NSW Premier's Awards and was named the NSW Premier's Book of the Year.
He is currently the Chair of Creative Writing at the University of
Adelaide.
Eric Gamalinda was born in Manila. His is the author of novels,
story and poetry collections, including Amigo Warfare (Cherry Grove
Collections), Zero Gravity (Alice James Books), winner of an Asian
American Literary Award, Lyrics from a Dead Language (Anvil, Manila)
and Planet Waves (New Day, Manila), winner of the National Book Award
in Manila. Along with Luis H. Francia, he is the co-editor of the
anthology—Flippin': Filipinos on America (Asian American Writers
Workshop). Eric is currently working on Deep Splendor, a collection of
poems; People are Strange, a collection of stories; and The Descartes
Highlands, a novel.
Ishle Yi Park is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. She has
performed her unique blend of poetry & song across the United States,
Cuba, New Zealand, Singapore, and Korea. Her first book, The
Temperature of This Water (Kaya/Muae, 2004), won
several awards, including the PEN America Beyond Margins Award for
Outstanding Writers of Color. Ishle has read with such artists as
KRS-One, Ben Harper, De La Soul, and Saul Williams. The New York Times
wrote, "Ms. Park has an angelic face and the soul of a rock star."
Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate
of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University. He is the
author of the innovative novels Roughhouse (Kaya) and Tetched (Palari
Publishing); both books were finalists for an Asian American Literary
Award.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
A Night with Award-Winning Author Ha Jin
Please join us for an intimate evening with writer Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The Workshop is proud to welcome Jin and to present the public with a rare opportunity to meet the author. This special event focuses on Jin's newest book, Writer as Migrant, published by the University of Chicago Press. In his first work of nonfiction, Jin writes three interconnected essays and tackles issues relating to being a migrant writer. The San Francisco Chronicle finds that "Though the issues are weighty, Jin's prose is straightforward and welcoming....In this poignant and provocative book, Jin takes us on this journey [to our envisioned homelands], revealing paths laid by migrant writers before him and perhaps by those who will follow."
Ha Jin is the critically renowned author of five novels, including, Waiting and War Trash, as well as three collections of short stories and three books of poetry. His short story collection, The Bridegroom, won the Asian American Literary Award. He currently teaches literature at Boston University.
@ The Home of Virginia Davies
299 West 12th Street #PHA
(off 8th Avenue)
$45 / $25 Members
For tickets click here, or call us at 212.494.0061
Fred Ho and Jazz
Activist, musician, and writer Fred Ho reads from his latest, Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: Collected Political, Cultural and Creative Writing; live jazz to follow.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
In Honor of Mumbai
For our special Asian American heritage month event, photojournalists are paired with authors as they reflect on their personal associations with Mumbai, including Amitava Kumar, Vijay Prashad, Sadia Shepard, and others.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$10 suggested donation; open to the public
Fall 2008
Events this season sponsored by:
Singha Beer and The Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
Coming of Age Tales: Lora Jo Foo and Wendy Lee
Paring childhood stories with her nature photography, Earth Passages: Journeys Through Childhood is Lora Jo Foo's beautifully collaged memoir of escaping hard living in San Francisco Chinatown and finding sanctuary in woods. Wendy Lee deftly renders the delicate and precarious contours of the international adoption experience in her debut Happy Family.
From the age of 11, Lora Jo Foo worked as a garment worker in San Francisco's Chinatown. Earth Passages: Journeys Through Childhood recounts the painful and intimate stories from that childhood. Elaine H. Kim, Professor of Asian American Studies in the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, says, "Earth Passages gives readers tantalizing glimpses into Lora Jo Foo's memories of childhood and especially of her mother, whom she can forgive after she is able to describe the pain in expressive vignettes and attempt to heal it with images of nature that she captures with the eyes and heart of an artist." Foo is also the author of Asian American Women: Issues, Concerns, and Responsive Human and Civil Rights Advocacy, recently published by the Ford Foundation. Alongside her fiction writing and nature photography, she works as attorney and advocates for worker rights.
Wendy Lee worked for two years in China as a volunteer English teacher at the first women's private college in the country, Hwa Nan Women's College, located in Fuzhou. This city found its way into Lee's first novel, Happy Family, as the hometown of narrator, stalwart nanny Hua Wu. The San Francisco Chronicle describes Happy Family saying, "[Lee] deals with a hot-button issue in a manner neither shy nor didactic, and she invests her characters with humanity when they might easily become sociological types. Happy Family is worth reading for those reasons alone, and serves as the debut of a writer who may well do great work later on." Lee was compelled to write on the subject of the international adoption experience after reading an article on the adoption of Chinese baby girls in which a parent commented that they adopted from China, because unlike adopting in the U.S., there was no chance of the mother taking the child away. The threat of this stands at the crux of this slim yet resonant volume.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
The Practicing Writer: Monthly Career/Craft Talks
Panel: MFA Programs Today
Come to the inaugural event of our Practicing Writer series, a monthly series dedicated to the career and craft development of writers.
Thinking of applying to an MFA program but don't know where to begin? Come hear the heads of two prominent NYC-area MFA programs, Kimiko Hahn, Distinguished Professor at Queens College MFA Program, CUNY and Robert Polito, Director of the Writing Program at The New School, talk shop and get a head start.
This series is co-sponsored by the Council of Literary Magazine and Presses and Poets & Writers, Inc..
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Debut Night!: Sarah Gambito, Joseph Legaspi, David Mura
In her poetry collection, Matadora, Gambito challenges traditional Filipina gender norms in moves as witty and fierce as her title suggests. Legaspi's poetry collection Imago, which has been compared to Pablo Neruda, poignantly renders rites of passage into manhood. In his novel, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire, Mura leads us through the haunted corridors Ben Ohara's family, as he retraces the legacy of his family's internment.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Many Mountains Moving: Jeffrey Ethan Lee, Pedro Ponce, Renato Rosaldo, Thaddeus Rutkowski and Purvi Shah
Come celebrate Many Mountains Moving: A Literary Journal of Diverse Contemporary Voices, with some of its editors and contributors. MMM was founded by Naomi Horii in 1994 and quickly achieved national recognition. The editors took chances on works that were exciting, brilliant, eccentric, courageous and heartfelt, by unknown and famous writers of all kinds. Work from the journal has appeared in The Best American Poetry and in Pushcart Prize anthologies. This evening's reading will showcase a range of work from recent issues.
Jeffrey Ethan Lee published identity papers (Ghost Road Press, 2006), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award for poetry. He also published invisible sister (Many Mountains Moving Press, 2004). He also published The Sylf (2003), which
won the Sow's Ear Poetry Review Chapbook prize, and Strangers in a Homeland (Ashland Poetry Press chapbook, 2001). He also created identity papers (2002), a dramatic poem on CD with actress Lori-Nan Engler and percussionist Toshi Makihara. He won the first Tupelo Press Prize for literary fiction for The Autobiography of Somebody Else. He has published poems, stories, and essays in Many Mountains Moving, CrossConnect, North American Review, Crazyhorse, Crab Orchard Review, Washington Square, and American Poetry Review. He has the Ph.D. and MFA from NYU. He is the senior poetry editor for Many Mountains Moving, a journal and small poetry press.
Pedro Ponce teaches fiction writing and contemporary American literature at St. Lawrence University. He is the author of Superstitions of Apartment Life, a chapbook of short fictions (Burnside Review Press) and numerous stories featured in Ploughshares, The Beacon Best of 2001 (edited by Junot Diaz), Hotel St. George, Sleepingfish, DIAGRAM, Quick Fiction, and other publications. He is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project award and a Tara Fellowship for Short Fiction.
Renato Rosaldo writes in English and Spanish. His first book of poetry, Prayer to Spider Woman/Rezo a la mujer araa received an American Book Award, 2004. Individual poems have won the El Andar poetry contest, 2000, and the Many Mountains Moving poetry contest, 2005. As a cultural anthropologist at New York University, he is the author of Culture and Truth.
Thaddeus Rutkowski, current fiction editor of Many Mountains Moving, is the author of the novels Tetched and Roughhouse. Both books were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. His stories and poems have been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches fiction writing at the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA in Manhattan.
Purvi Shah's first book of poetry, Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press 2006), won a Many Voices Project prize. Her poetry has been recognized in Asian American and feminist communities and is a counterpart to her social justice advocacy. She serves as Executive Director of Sakhi for South Asian Women, an organization based in New York City which works to end violence against women, and is a board member of the New York Women's Foundation, a cross-cultural alliance of women helping women funding change. Shah, who earned a Master's in English from Rutgers University, was recently awarded with a Social Service Achiever of the Year Award from the South Asian Excellence Awards.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Poetry with Politics: Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan and Roger Sedarat
Kageyama-Ramakrishnan draws on her tender memories of her grandparents as she addresses Japanese American internment in Shadow Mountain. In Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, Sedarat confronts past and current injustices in Iran with hope for its future.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Poetry and Dance: Mong-Lan
Writer, visual artist, and Argentine tango dance/teacher, Mong-Lan brings her love of the dance into her latest collection, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art, where she mixes calligraphic art with graceful and quick-witted poetry. After the reading, Mong-Lan will give a tango performance and teach you some tango basics!
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
The Practicing Writer: Monthly Career/Craft Talks
Panel: MFA Programs Today
Deborah Landau (Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at NYU) and Ben Marcus (Associate Professor and Chair of the MFA program in creative writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts)
Thinking of applying to an MFA program but don't know where to begin? Come hear the heads of prominent NYC-area MFA programs talk shop and get a head start.
This event is co-sponsored by the Council of Literary Magazine and Presses and Poets & Writers, Inc.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
The Practicing Writer: Monthly Career/Craft Talks
Panel: How To Get An Agent
Jin Auh (The Wylie Agency), Ayesha Pande (Collins Literary Agency) and Amy Tipton (FinePrint Literary Management)
So you've finished your masterpiece but don't want it lost in the slush pile? Come hear three agents discuss how to find the right home for your work.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Siblings Unite!: David Yoo and Paula Yoo
In Stop Me If You Have Heard This One Before, Yoo humorously captures that special mania that only your high-school crushes can induce. Yoo's debut Good Enough chronicles the journey of Patti, an over achieving Ivy-bound teen itching to rebel. After the reading, this young adult duo will discuss creativity among siblings and confess who hogged the bathroom the longest.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Open Mic: The Witchdoctors and Assassins Series
Had your fill of reading the usual classics for your AP exam literature and college English classes? Come to our open mic series for a little change of scenery. Curated by Nuyorican semifinalist Elijah Kuan Wong, Witchdoctors offers you a safe space and nurturing environment. Come bring your own work or just sit back and listen to an eclectic group of Asian American artists present poetry, prose, film, theatre, and multimedia textsÑin other words, works that've probably not yet found their way into your bluebooks or your hearts.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
For Gourmands and Foodies: Joanne Chen and Kim Sunee
In The Taste of Sweet: Our Complicated Love Affair with Our Favorite Treats, Chen makes you think twice about those carrots in your lunch bag as she ponders America's sweet-tooth anxiety. Abandoned at three in a Korean marketplace, Kim Sunee tells her story about personal geography and the food that helped her find her way in Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Debut Fiction Night!: Monica Ferrell and Ed Park
Ferrell's wickedly funny, The Answer is Always Yes, follows one NYUers quest for coolness and rise into the NYC club scene. A hilarious take on office life with Pynchonesque touches, Park's Personal Days makes one feel less alone during those tiny apocalypses caused by email typos.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Open Mic: The Witchdoctors and Assassins Series
See October 10th description for more information
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Party!: Scrabble is for lovers...of The Asian American Writers' Workshop
Do you refer to the day Scrabulous was taken off Facebook as 'The Day the Wordplay Died'? Thinking of tattooing that last triple word score on your arm? Come to our inaugural Scrabble party and get your group wordplay on again! Play hard, drink some Singha Beer, and make new friends/worthy opponents.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Poets House co-presents a celebration of Language For A New Century
Tina Chang, Monica Ferrell, Eric Gamalinda, Kimiko Hahn, Nathalie Handel, Cathy Park Hong, Khaled Mattawa, Ravi Shankar, and Barbara Tran.
A celebration of the ground-breaking Norton anthology, Language For A New Century: Contemporary from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond including a panel discussion with Tina Chang, Kimiko Hahn, Nathalie Handel, Khaled Mattawa, and Ravi Shankar and readings by Monica Ferrell, Eric Gamalinda, Cathy Park Hong, and Barbara Tran.
@ The Tribeca Performing Arts Center
More Details TBA
Iranian American Writers: The Next Generation
Reading and Book Signing Featuring:
Porochista Khakpour, Sons and Other Flammable Objects
Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran, raised in Los Angeles, and lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Paper, Flaunt, Nylon, Bidoun, Canteen, Nerve.com and FiveChapters.com, among others. She has been awarded fellowships from The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, Northwestern University, and The Sewanee Writers' Conference. She currently teaches Fiction at Bucknell University. Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic) New York Times "Editor's Choice," Chicago Tribune "Fall's Best," 2007 California Book Award winner, and Dylan Thomas Prize longlist selection is out in paperback this.
Please see PorochistaKhakpour.com for more info.
Roger Sedarat, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic
Roger Sedarat's first poetry collection, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, won Ohio UP's Hollis Summers' Prize. He has published scholarly articles on American and Middle Eastern literature, and his own verse as well as translations have appeared in such journals as New England Review, Poet Lore, and Iranian.com. He teaches poetry and translation in the MFA program at Queens College, City University of New York.
Aphrodite Desiree Navab, "Tales Left Untold" and "Re-Collecting Iran"
Aphrodite Desiree Navab's poetry "Tales Left Untold," is published in Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006), edited by Persis Karim, Parisa Milani, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press. Her autobiographical essay, "What is Home After Exile? An Iranian Greek American Homecoming," is published in Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Place and Time (2007), edited by Jenesha de Rivera, Patricia Justine Tumang, Seal Press. Her short story, a prose revisit of "Tales Left Untold" will be published in the forthcoming anthology edited by Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank, Powow: American Short Fiction from Then to Now (2008), Da Capo Press: Perseus Books.
Manijeh Nasrabadi, Souvenir
Manijeh Nasrabadi received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Hunter College. Her essay "Before I Knew Him" won the City University of New York Arts Gala Memoir Prize in 2005, she was a Hertog Fellow that same year and is a 2008 recipient of a Hedgebrook writing residency. "Souvenir," her essay on the challenges of seeing the self clearly, appears in About Face, published by Seal Press in June 2008. "Forest Fire," an essay on the intersection between Jewish and Zoroastrian cultures, will be appearing in the anthology Love and Pomegranates. She is co-director of the Association of Iranian-American writers, a growing professional network that promotes both established and emerging voices. She teaches creative writing at Hunter College. Visit her website at ManijehNasabadi.com.
Co-sponsored by ArteEast and Association of Iranian American Writers.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Finalists Reception & Announcement of Winners
11th Annural Asian American Literary Awards
A special cocktail reception celebrating the finalists and announcing
the winners for our fiction, poetry, and nonfiction awards. Meet new
friends, while supporting Asian American literature. Open bar! Live
pianist! Finger foods by Poshan Complementary Nutrition! Cupcakes by
the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory!
@ TAMA Gallery
5 Harrison St. |
Map it
$20 members | $30 non-members | $45 for tickets & membership
For more information, click here.
Two parts gritty, one part sexy. On the rocks.
Crime fiction, erotica and a rock band.
In Henry Chang's Year of the Dog, Detective Jack Yu is transferred to another precinct but can't seem to get away from his Chinatown past. Don't I Know You? is Karen Shepard's suspenseful story of a boy who finds his mother murdered in late '70s New York. Gay erotica writer Joel C. Tan reads from his latest collection of poetry, Type O Negative. A rock band plays after the reading!
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
A special night featuring
Kazim Ali and honoring Myung Mi Kim's Dura
Join us for a special night honoring the work of legendary
experimental poet Myung Mi Kim and the re-release of her book Dura.
The night begins with Kazim Ali, whose The Far Mosque, possesses, in the words of Meena Alexander, "a metaphysical feel ... that renders it
fit for our globalized age, a geography underwritten by the loss of
fixed abode." Myung Mi Kim reads from Dura, a classic of avant-garde poetics at once formally challenging and politically engaged.
Influenced by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Dura is an investigation
of national and personal identity that asks, in the words of Sueyeun
Juliette Lee, both what it means to be Korean American and what it
means to define space in national terms. After the reading, two
prominent Asian American experimental poets--Cathy Park Hong and Tan Lin--respond to Dura and Myung's body of work.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
CABARETCINEMA: Where Movies and Martinis Mix
Annie Choi introduces Nobody Knows
Based on true events, Nobody Knows is the story of a mother who
abandons her four illegitimate children in a Tokyo apartment, leaving
the eldest son to feed, clothe, protect, and sustain his siblings. The
12-year old Yagira Yuya won the Best Actor prize at the 2004 Cannes
International Film Festival for his heartbreaking performance. The
film is a part of "The Proverbial Pictureshow" series, which presents
feature films to illustrate Bhutanese proverbs, in this case:
"A child who is shown love and affection through an excess of joy and
peace will not be able to learn much."
Annie Choi is the author of the memoir Happy Birthday or Whatever:
Track Suits, Kim Chee, and Other Family Disasters. Born and raised in
Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley, Choi now lives in New York City.
She maintains the website Annietown.com.
@ Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street
212.620.5000 x344
Free with $7 bar minimum; open to the public
The Practicing Writer: Monthly Career/Craft Talks
Chat: How To Write with Kids and a Day Job
Note: Date has been changed from November 4th.
With poet Lisa Chen, poet Marcella Durand, New Press editor Andrew Hsiao, and novelist Andrea Louie
Finding time for your writing life can be a tricky business when juggling kids, a job, and sleep. Come hear a few writers talk about how they keep their writing life vibrant despite other obligations.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
An Evening with the Ma-Yi Writers' Lab
Come for an exciting night of eleven short plays--all written between Thanksgiving and December 3rd just for you! The Workshop and the Ma-Yi Writers Lab have commissioned eleven Asian American playwrights to write short one-act plays using titles from the Workshop's library for inspiration.
Join the following members of Ma Yi, the largest collection of Asian American playwrights ever assembled, for an unpredictable night of theater: A. Rey Pamatmat, Nora Chau, Nandita Shenoy, Dustin Chinn, Eugene Oh, Mrinalini Kamath, Lloyd Suh, Qui Nguyen, Michi Barall, Patricia Jang and Jon Kern.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
11th Annural Asian American Literary Awards
Awards Ceremony
For the 11th Annual Asian American Literary Awards, The Workshop will present a Lifetime Achievement Award to playwright David Henry Hwang, who will reunite with B.D. Wong in a special reading and celebration for the 20th anniversary of their seminal contribution to Asian American culture, M. Butterfly. Hwang and Wong will discuss their seminal contribution to Asian American culture with Oskar Eustis, the Artistic Director of The Public Theater. Every audience member will receive a free paperback of M. Butterfly.
The winner of the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction is Mohsin Hamid for The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt). The winner of the Asian American Literary Award for Nonfiction is Vijay Prashad for The Darker Nations (New Press). The winner of the Asian American Literary Award for Poetry is Sun Yung Shin for Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press).
Awards Ceremony @ Cantor Theater at NYU, 7:30pm - 9pm
36 East 8 St. |
Map it
$20 members | $30 non-members | $45 for tickets & membership
VIP Reception @ Deutsches Haus at NYU, 6pm - 7:30pm
42 Washington Mews |
Map it
$100
For more information click here.
Note: Date has been changed from November 19th.
Circumference: Jennifer Hayashida and Jeffrey Yang
A reading concert with Circumference, the journal of poetry in translation. Jennifer Hayashida reads from her translation of Swedish poet Fredrik Nyberg's dark and intimate A Different Practice. Jeffrey Yang reads from his translation of classical Chinese poet Su Shi's East Slope and his own debut An Aquarium.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Back to the top
Spring/Summer 2008
Events this season sponsored by Singha Beer and Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
Young Adults Brunch!
PEN America Center and The Asian American Writers' Workshop co-host a Saturday morning brunch for
young writers. Teen writers are cordially invited to break bread with, chat with, and present their writing to novelist Kashmira Sheth (The Keeping Corner)
and Simon & Schuster editor Sulay Hernandez (Final Theory).
Former microbiologist Kashmira Sheth writes stories for youth full-time. She is author of Blue Jasmine (Hyperion, 2004), a novel inspired own experiences as a teenager
who moved by herself from India to America. She is also author of Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet (Hyperion, 2006) and a newly-released historical fiction, The Keeping Corner (Hyperion, 2007).
Sheth lives with her family in Madison, Wisconsin.
Simon & Schuster editor Sulay Hernandez has edited a variety of fiction and non-fiction books, most recently Final Theory (Simon & Schuster, 2008), a science-based thriller slated
for release in 20 countries in 19 languages. Sulay worked previously for Kensington Publishing, as well as for a literary agency. A native New Yorker, she teaches at
City College.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
FREE and open to the public
Buy designer furniture and support The Asian American Writers' Workshop!
The Workshop is getting a makeover -- with the help of Goil Amornvivat of TLC's "Trading Spaces," Parsons The New School for Design, and Design Within Reach Annex.
Buy furniture at the DWR Annex in New Jersey from May 3 through 11 and a percentage of sales will go to supporting the Workshop.
Bring in a print out of this e-mail and the DWR Annex will give you a ten percent discount (10%) on Annex items only!
Please join us for the Opening Reception. Meet Goil and see his exclusive window design featuring work by prominent Asian American writers.
Opening Reception
Saturday, May 3, 12 - 4pm
@ DWR Annex
55 Hartz Way
Seacaucus, NJ 07094
Public transportation: take the 129 bus from Port Authority in Manhattan.
For driving directions and more information, click here
Cosponsored by Design Within Reach, Tug Studio and Parsons
The New School for Design
  
Poetry Reading: Indran Amirthanayagam and Brenda Shaughnessy
Poems of loss and love. In The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007), Indran Amirthanayagam memorializes the Asian Tsunami in 2004. "I hid your life vest in the death trap on purpose, my love" begins the speaker in "Three Sorries" one of the many spunky and perverse poems in Brenda Shaughnessy's new collection, Human Dark With Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).
Indran Amirthanayagam is a truly cross-cultural writer. At the age of eight, he moved from Sri Lanka to London and Hawaii and currently works as an United States diplomat based in Vancouver, Canada. A poet who works in English, Spanish and French, Amirthanayagam's books include The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press, 1993), El Infierno de los Pajaros (Resistencia, Mexico, 2001), El Hombre que Rocoge Nidos (Resistencia/CONARTE, Mexico, 2005) and Ceylon R.I.P. (The International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2001) Amirthanayagam's essays and op-eds have appeared in the Hindu, the New York Times, El Norte, Reforma, The Island, and Groundviews (Sri Lanka). Influenced by Latin American poets, such as Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz, Amirthanayagam has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Poetry Prize of the Juegos Florales of Guaymas, Sonora, and an award from the US/Mexico Fund for Culture for his translations of Mexican poet Manuel Ulacia. He blogs here.
Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. Her poems -- described by poet Richard Howard as letting us in on both the fun and pain of ecstasy -- have appeared in Best American Poetry, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. Her previous collection, Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. The poetry editor at Tin House magazine, Shaughnessy has taught poetry at Princeton University and The New School. Human Dark with Sugar is the winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. The Village Voice has praised her "ringing declarations of erotic tumult" and stated that her "linguistic density and invention powers these poems beyond the therapeutic self-massage typically associated with her themes of love, lust, and daughterhood."
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Reading: Jen Sookfong Lee and Preeta Samarasan
Debut fiction night! Jennifer Sookfong Lee's The End of East (Thomas Dunne Books, 2008) explores isolation, immigration, and romance in Vancouver's Chinatown through the eyes of a Chinese Canadian woman in her early twenties. Set on the outskirts of Ipoh in Malaysia, Preeta Samarasan's The Evening Is The Whole Day, reveals the secrets that lead to the topsy-turvy unraveling of the prosperous Rajasekharan family.
Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised in Vancouver's East Side, where she now lives with her husband. Her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Claremont, Horsefly, and Jasmine. The End of the East -- described by The National Post as an "impressive" three-generational novel -- was chosen for The New Face of Fiction program, awarded by Knopf to outstanding Canadian novels. Author Gail Anderson-Dargatz writes, "Whatever assumptions I had about Vancouver's Chinatown have been supplanted by Lee's vision of a world where family obligation is passed on through the generations, where personal dreams are sacrificed for family goals as a matter of course."
Born in Malaysia, Preeta Samarasan finished high school in the United States and now lives in France with her husband and dog. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where an earlier version of Evening Is The Whole Day won the Avery and Jule Hopwood Novel Award. Samarasan recently won The Asian American Writers' Workshop/Hyphen Magazine Short-Story award. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in EGO Magazine, A Public Space, and the anthology Urban Odysseys: KL Stories. Author Peter Ho Davies has described Evening as a "a magical, exuberant, tragicomic vision of post-colonial Malaysia reminiscent of Rushdie and Roy. In prose of acrobatic grace, Samarasan conjures a vibrant portrait, by turns intimate and sweeping, of characters and a country coming of age."
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
UnFairy Tales Final Performance
Join us for an evening of short fiction by The Asian American Writers' Workshop's young adult writers. This past spring, as part of a workshop called UnFairy Tales: The Myths in Myths, students questioned traditional myths and wrote their own. In this final performance, they'll read their own UnFairy Tales, wild and fun short stories that defy what you've come to expect from fairy tales. Come here about a baseball-slinging Cinderella and a modern-day Urashima. These students have it all and then some.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
FREE and open to the public
Special Event: Open House
Drop by this Thursday for three of your favorite things: beer, treats and The Asian American Writers' Workshop. You're invited to our Open House -- a great chance to
snack, mingle, and learn more about the Workshop.
Meet the Workshop's new Executive Director, Ken Chen, as well as some of your favorite Asian American writers, like Ed Lin, Henry Chang, Lara Stapleton, Monica Youn, Purvi Shah
and Timothy Liu.
Co-sponsored by Singha Beer and the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
FREE and open to the public
Panel: Fusion Stories: Next-Gen Asian American Books for Young Readers
Parents and teachers, having trouble finding Young Adult novels that speak to you and your kids? Fusion Stories is a new website that
aims to tell Asian American stories for this generation of young readers. These aren't traditional tales set in Asia or stories of hard-scrabbling immigrants. Instead, Fusion Stories
offers fun, relatable stories about teen-dating, growing up biracial, eyelid surgery, and just feeling like you don't fit in. Fusion novelists Grace Lin, An Na, Janet Wong and
David Yoo talk about the next generation of young adult literature featuring Asian American characters. Bring your kids for treats from the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory!
Grace Lin is the author and illustrator of Year of The Dog (Little, Brown Young Readers, 2005) and over a dozen books such as The Ugly Vegetables (Charlesbridge Publishing, 1999) and Dim Sum For Everyone! (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2001). While Grace's books cover the Asian-American experience, she believes that "books erase bias, they make the uncommon everyday, and the mundane exotic. A book makes all cultures universal." Year of The Rat (Little, Brown Young Readers) continues the story of Grace, a Taiwanese American girl, as she navigates the challenges of growing up "different" in an upstate New York community.
An Na was born in Korea and grew up in Southern California. She is the author Wait For Me (Penguin, 2006) and A Step From Heaven (Penguin, 2001), a Michael L. Printz Award winner and National Book Award Finalist. In her latest, The Fold (Penguin, 2008), Joyce Kang never felt pretty enough especially when compared to her older sister, but when her plastic surgery crazed aunt offers her the chance of a lifetime - to change her eyes forever - Joyce must decide what she believes is beautiful.
Janet Wong is the author of eighteen books for children, mainly picture books and poetry collections, including The Dumpster Diver (Candlewick Press, 2007) and TWIST: Yoga Poems (McElderry/Simon and Schuster, 2007). A former lawyer, she chose to write because she wanted to "do something important - and couldn't think of anything more important than working with children." In Minn and Jakes Almost Terrible Summer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), we learn that Jake has a Korean grandmother, which makes him one-quarter Korean, or "Quarpa," as he likes to call it.
David Yoo is the author of Girls For Breakfast (Random House, 2005), which was named a NYPL Best Book for Teens and a Booksense Pick, and Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before (Hyperion, Sept 2008). In Stop Me a resigned loser Albert Kim captures the affection of his dream girl Mia, only to get bumped to the sidelines when Mia's uber-popular ex, Ryan, gets cancer. David teaches adult fiction workshops at the Gotham Writers Workshop and writes a monthly column in Korean Journal.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Co-sponsored by the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Reading: V.V. Ganeshananthan and Manil Suri
Two novels about love and war. In his second novel, The Age of Shiva (W.W. Norton, 2008), Manil Suri chronicles the life of Meera Sawhney, an exquisitely fleshed out
woman who comes of age during India's partition. A lush, witty, expansive novel, Shiva spans from Indian politics and mythology to Meera's own intimate struggles of love,
marriage, and motherhood. Lyrical and innovative, V.V. Ganeshananthan's debut novel, Love Marriage (Random House, 2008) brilliantly unfolds how war can both form and fracture a
family. Yalini's parents fled the collapsing country of Sri Lanka and now she, caught between the history of her ancestors, their political involvements, and her own modern
world, must decide where she stands.
In 2000, Time magazine named Mani Suri a "Person to Watch." His first novel, The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton, 2001), won the 2002 Barnes and Noble Discover
Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The Observer has called his latest, The Age of Shiva, a "story about the hope of redemption invested in passionate
mother-love, a Lawrentian theme, but also one with roots in Indian mythology." A Guggenheim Fellow, Suri works as a mathematics professor at The University of Maryland Baltimore
County, where he also resides.
Journalist and novelist Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and The American Prospect. A graduate
of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, she is the Vice President of the South Asian Journalists Association and a graduate board member of The
Harvard Crimson. Author Daniel Alarcon calls her debut, Love Marriage, "a complex, moving evocation of love and war - two ideas which overlap more often, and more
dramatically, than we often care to recognize."
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Reading & Conversation: Fae Myenne Ng
"No story matters till it is finished and the only stories that need telling are the ones whose endings do not fulfill us," writes Fae Myenne Ng in Steer Toward Rock
(Hyperion 2008). Steer is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Ng's first novel Bone (Hyperion 1993), a classic of Asian American literature and not since Bone, has
a work so eloquently revealed the complex loyalties of Chinese America. Set in a McCarthy-era San Francisco, Steer Toward Rock is the story of a man who chooses love over the
law, illuminating relationships that are complicated by the process of immigration. Ng will read and discuss her work with Will Schwalbe, a board member of The Asian American
Writers' Workshop.
A first generation Chinese-American, Fae Myenne Ng was born in San Francisco. In her bestselling and critically praised debut, Bone, Ng uncovered the hopes and grief a
Chinatown family, aided by her "poet's gift for metaphor and ... reporter's eye for detail" (Michiko Kakatuni, The New York Times). Ng is the recipient of numerous awards, including
the Pushcart Prize and awards from the NEA, the Lannan Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Novelist Maxine Hong Kingston called Steer Toward Rock "a tale
about illegal aliens from China, told with their own images, idioms, and axioms - and charming humor."
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Cosponsored by Asia Society
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Reading: Guernica Fiction
Short fiction night. Novelist Alexander Chee guest edits a special issue of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics featuring New
Korean American Fiction and asks what it means to be Korean American. Come hear Alexander Chee, Catherine Chung, Elaine H. Kim, and Jin Yong Sohn read from stories
published in the June 2008 issue of Guernica.
Alexander Chee was born in Rhode Island and grew up in Korea, Guam and Maine. A recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award,and fellowships from the NEA and the MacDowell Colony,
Chee has been named as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the Year by Out Magazine. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener
Copernicus Prize, The Asian American Writers Workshop Literature Award and the Lambda Editor's Choice Prize, and was a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense
76 selection. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009. He teaches at Amherst College and blogs at
Koreanish.
Catherine Chung lives in Rockville, MD and has an MFA from Cornell University. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Jentel and the MacDowell Colony, and a "waiter"
scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She is the recipient of a Pushcart nomination, and grants from the Lannan Foundation at SFAI, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and
the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. Her work has appeared in The Journal.
Jin Young Sohn is currently a freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design studying Apparel Design. In his free time he enjoys reading, crocheting and drawing.
Elaine H. Kim has won fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. She has work published or forthcoming in
So to Speak, upstreet, and Guernica, and was a finalist in the 2007 Storyquarterly Fall Fiction Contest. Elaine recently returned to New York from South Korea and
currently lives in Brooklyn.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Poetry Reading: Bei Dao and Jennifer Chang
An evening of poetry. Nobel Prize-nominated poet Bei Dao reads with Jennifer Chang, whose debut collection, The History of Anonymity (University of
Georgia Press, 2008), explores a nocturnal world of childhood and myth.
Often seen as the preeminent Chinese poet of his generation, Bei Dao was born in Beijing in 1949. In 1978, he co-founded the literary journal Today (Jintian) and the
"Misty Poets" movement, whose avant-garde style challenged the social realist style favored by the Communist literary establishment. His poem The Answer has been likened to a
Chinese democracy movement's equivalent of Blowin' in the Wind and was chanted at the Tiananmen Square protests. Bei Dao has lived in England, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark,
Holland, France, and the United States since 1987. He has won numerous awards, including Jeanette Schocken Literary Prize from Bremerhaven, Germany (2005), International Poetry Argana
Award from the House of Poetry in Morocco (2002), Tucholsky Prize from Swedish PEN (1990). He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Jennifer Chang's poems have appeared in New England Review, The New Republic, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Boston Review and the anthologies Best New Poets
2005 (Samovar Press and Meridian, 2005) and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004). Her new collection, The History of Anonymity,
tours a craggy, translucent landscape of moonlit memories and childhood memories, leading poet Arthur Sze to describe it as "spare yet sinuous, haunted, visionary." Chang co-chairs
the advisory board of Kundiman, a non-profit organization that promotes Asian American poetry.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Co-sponsored by Asia Society and Zoland Poetry
Reading: Don Lee and Francie Lin
Madcap stories of mayhem! A sculptor turned Brussels sprouts farmer, an indicted movie producer, and an alcoholic kung-fu diva are just a few of the characters in Don Lee's
Wrack and Ruin (W.W. Norton, 2008), a suspenseful and satirical comedy of errors that culminates in literature's first-ever windsurfing chase scene. A tragicomic take on crime
fiction, Francie Lin's The Foreigner (Picador, 2008) chronicles the journey of Emerson Chang as he is thrust out of his quiet and uneventful life into the throws of the Taiwanese underworld courtesy of his brother Little P and his friends, Atticus, Big One, and Poison.
A third-generation Korean American, Don Lee spent the majority of his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul. Formerly the editor of the Ploughshares literary journal, Lee has received an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize, and his stories have been published in The Kenyon Review, GQ, and New England Review. He is the author of the American Book Award-winning novel, Country of Origin (W.W. Norton, 2005) and the story collection Yellow (W.W. Norton, 2002), which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Members' Choice Award from The Asian American Writers' Workshop. The Washington Post describes Wrack and Ruin saying, "brilliant farce conveys a sense of the characters' agony, and that is true here. But there are also moments of gentle joy, and the author's affection for this little corner of the world can be infectious." In November 2007, Don Lee received the inaugural Fred R. Brown Literary Award for emerging novelists from the University of Pittsburgh's creative writing program.
Francie Lin is a former editor at The Threepenny Review and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan in 2001-2002. She lives in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The San Francisco Chronicle describes Lin's debut novel, The Foreigner, saying, "[Lin] demonstrates an admirable range and skill in The Foreigner. She's capable of writing both marvelous
humor and scenes of utter darkness in her tale of a naive man at a complete loss for dealing with the world."
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
The Mixtape Reading: Stories About Songs
Featuring: Lisa Chen, Amber Drea, Ed Lin, Ishle Yi Park, Bushra Rehman, Patrick Rosal, Anantha Sudhakar, and Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai
Eight writers write about songs that strike a chord with them. The result is an evening of stories, a mixtape of fiction, poetry and non fiction. Expect tales of angst, wonderment
and love. And sex. And death. And everything in between.
Lisa Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She earned a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her work has been published in Hanging Loose, ZZYZVA, Prairie Schooner, and Threepenny Review. She works as a media and communications consultant for progressive organizations and campaigns.
Amber Drea received her MA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago in 2006. She has been published in AMNewYork, Spin.com, BPM and Chicago Magazine.
Ed Lin is the author of the novels Waylaid (Kaya Press, 2002) and This Is a Bust (Kaya Press, 2007). Waylaid was praised in Booklist, Asianweek, and Playboy and was named to Booklist's Editors Choice 2002 list and also won the Members' Choice Award from The Asian American Writers' Workshop. His website is http://www.edlinforpresident.com.
Ishle Yi Park is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. She has performed her unique blend of poetry & song across the United States, Cuba, New Zealand, Singapore, and Korea. Her first book, The Temperature of This Water (Kaya/Muae, 2004), won several awards, including the PEN America Beyond Margins Award for Outstanding Writers of Color. Ishle has read with such artists as KRS-One, Ben Harper, De La Soul, and Saul Williams. The New York Times wrote, "Ms. Park has an angelic face and the soul of a rock star."
Bushra Rehman is a vagabond poet who traveled for years with nothing more than a Greyhound ticket and bookbag full of poems. Now, she performs her work regularly around the country. She is author of Marianna's Beauty Salon (Vagabond Press, 2001) and co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Seal Press,
2002). Bushra has been featured on BBC Radio 4, the Brian Lehrer show, The New York Times, India Currents and NY Newsday. Her work has appeared in Color Lines,
Mizna, Curve, and SAMAR. To read poetry or excerpts of her on-the-road desi adventure novel, visit http://www.bushrarehman.com.
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea Books, 2004), which won the Members' Choice Award from The Asian American Writers' Workshop, and most recently, My American Kundiman (Persea 2006), which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry, as well as the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award.
Anantha Sudhakar is a PhD candidate in English at Rutgers University. Her poetry has appeared in The Asian Pacific American Journal.
Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai is a Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based Chinese Taiwanese American spoken word artist who has featured at over 275 performances worldwide including three seasons of "HBO Def Poetry." She was the recipient of a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Urban Artist Initiative NYC Fellowship and a 2004 Illinois Arts Council Governor's International Exchange Award. Her current projects include her hip hop theater solo show "The Grieving Room," spoken word videos to spark political dialogue via viral media, and a cybermedia project integrating spoken word into mixed-reality platforms. Please visit her website at http://www.yellowgurl.com.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Reading: Anita Jain and Sandeep Jauhar
Memoir night. In Marrying Anita: Quest for Love in New India (Bloomsbury, 2008), Anita Jain, a thirty-something New Yorker frustrated with Western dating norms, travels to Delhi with the goal of finding a husband using a somewhat more traditional method only to stumble upon a New IndiaÑa vibrant cosmopolitan place where instead of a marriage arranged by aunties, she finds herself among a generation that enjoys bar-hopping not to mention bed-hopping, rock bands and Westernized dating. ResidencyÑand especially its first year, called "internship"Ñis an apprenticeship legendary for its brutality. Intern: A Doctor's Intitation (FSG, 2008) is Dr. Sandeep Jauhar's story of his days and nights in residency at a prominent teaching hospital in New York City, a trial that led him to question every conventional assumption about doctors and medicine and subsequently comment on our own misgivings about doctors and medicine today.
Anita Jain was born in New Delhi in 1973 and moved to the U.S. when she was six months old. She bounced from state to state in her early childhood which might help to explain her later peripatetic life. After graduating from Harvard University with an undergraduate degree in 1994, she worked as a financial journalist in Mexico City, Singapore, London, New York and Delhi, where she currently lives. Publishers' Weekly praises the "world weary yet earnest voice" within Jain's debut, Marrying Anita. Prior to its the publication, Jain wrote about her state-side dating experience in her 2005 New York Magazine piece, "Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?"
Sandeep Jauhar was a Ph.D. student in physics at Berkeley when a girlfriend's incurable illness made him yearn for a profession where he could affect people's lives directly. Working in a New York teaching hospital, Jauhar wrestled with his decision to go into medicine and discovered a gradual but deepening disillusionment with his newfound profession. Intern chronicles Jauhar's first eighteen months in medicine, as he asks all the hard questions about medicine today that laypeople are askingÑand reaches satisfying and often surprising conclusions about the human side of modern medicine. Time magazine describes, Intern as a "wise memoir [that] takes the readers to the heart of every young physician's hardest test: to become a doctor yet remain a human being." The director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, he writes regularly for The New York Times and The New England Journal of Medicine.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Poetry Reading: Word For Word Poetry Program in Bryant Park
An evening of poetry in conjunction with the Bryant Park Summer 2008 Word for Word Series featuring Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, John Yau and Shanxing Wang.
Spoken word artist Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai has been featured in over 275 performances at venues including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the House of Blues, the Apollo theater, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and three seasons of the award-winning "Russell Simmons Presents HBO Def Poetry." The author of Inside Outside Outside Inside (2004) and Thought Crimes (2005), Tsai has shared stages with Mos Def, KRS-One, Sonia Sanchez, Erykah Badu, Amiri Baraka, and many more.
Shanxing Wang is the author of Mad Science in Imperial City (Futurepoems 2005), which was awarded the 2006 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry, sponsored by The Asian American Writers' Workshop. Imperial City combines Wang's unique past experiences as a Mechanical Engineering student and an activist at the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Imperial City has been described by Lyn Hejinian as "a work of genius" and by Brian Kim Stefans as "a brilliant gem dropped through the keyhole from an alternate universe."
John Yau is a leading art critic, poet, essayist, and prose writer, the author most recently of Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin, 2002), The United States of Jasper Johns (Zoland Books, 1996), and My Symptoms (Black Sparrow Press, 1998). In addition to his work as a poet, Yau is the publisher of Black Square Editions and the art editor of The Brooklyn Rail. A teacher at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Yau has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets.
@ Byrant Park Reading Room
between 5th Avenue and 6th Avenue, adjacent to the James Earl Dodge monument
FREE and open to the public
LUMINOUS: A Night of Peace, Love & Music
DJ Boo, DJ Q aka Chino, Issil, Legal Money Mike from Aotearoa, Taiyo Na, Heather Park, Bushra Rehman, Pat Rosal
A party curated by Ishle Yi Park. Peace meditation, then poems and songs and music.
co-sponsored by Lady Leisure & Element & Imaginasian TV
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
free; open to the public
free Element gift bags
Reading: Drunken Boat Reading
A celebration of Drunken Boat's special tenth anniversary issue, a multimedia event featuring poet Meena Alexander, sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, fiction writer Geronimo Madrid, sound sculptor Sawako, installation artist Robin Starbuck, poet Jerry Williams and musician Jonathan Zalben.
Meena Alexander's poetry includes Illiterate Heart, winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk (2004), and Quickly Changing River (2008) all published by TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems (Everyman's Library/ Knopf, 2005) and author of the memoir Fault Lines (Feminist Press 1993/2003).
Writer, vocalist and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, is the author of three chapbooks which include Ichi-Ban and Ni-ban (MOH Press), and Manuel is destroying my bathroom (Belladonna Press), as well as the album, Television. LaTasha has received scholarships, residencies, and fellowships from Cave Canem, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, Naropa Institute, Caldera Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Eban Demarest Trust. She is the poetry curator for Exit The Apple.
Geronimo Madrid's fiction has appeared in The Literary Review, Bomb! Magazine, storySouth, and Drunken Boat. In 2007, the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore College awarded him the Mimi Bresler Smith & Patricia Robertson Amusa-Shonubi Minority Scholarship.
Sawako is a sound sculptor. Her work has been praised as "post romantic sound" by Boston's Weekly Dig. Sawako has released 4 solo albums and has performed internationally in MUTEK (Canada); Warm Up at P.S.1, Tonic, Issue Project Room (NYC); Corcoran Gallery (Washington DC); UCLA Hammer Museum (LA); Glade Festival, ICA (UK); OFFF (Lisbon); Apple Store (Japan) etc. Visit her website troncolon: sawako
Robin Starbuck is a multimedia/installation artist. Before relocating to New York City in 2002, she taught as a full time Assistant Professor of Art in sculpture & new media for Wesleyan College in Georgia and as an Adjunct Professor in critical writing for the Atlanta College of Art. She now is Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence, Associate Degree Programs.
Jerry Williams's poetry and nonfiction have appeared in such magazines as American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Tin House and many others. In 2003, Carnegie Mellon University Press published his collection of poems, Casino of the Sun, which was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A new collection of poems, Admission, is due out from Carnegie Mellon in 2009. He lives in the Bronx and teaches at Marymount Manhattan College.
Jonathan Zalben's music for film, theater, and television has been shown at Slamdance, SXSW, Tribeca, LA Film Festival, New York International Fringe Festival, and Chicago SketchFest. His orchestral works have been performed by the Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra and the New York University Orchestra. Zalben holds a U.S. patent for sa muffler design.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
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Winter/Spring 2008
Events this season sponsored by Singha Beer
Poetry Reading: Li-Young Lee and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
Join us for an evening of poetry. Pinocchio, Madama Butterfly's son, and a boy clown are a few of the characters that Jennifer Kwon Dobbs imagines in Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press, 2007). Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, Li-Young Lee's Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton, 2008) describes the immanent value of everyday experience.
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs was born in Won Ju Si, South Korea. Her poems have appeared in 5 AM, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, MiPOesias, Poetry NZ, Tulane Review, among others and have been anthologized in Echoes Upon Echoes (The Asian American Writers' Workshop, 2003) and Contemporary Voices from the Eastern World (W.W. Norton, 2008). Her music collaboration, "Among Joshua Trees," won the New York Youth Symphony's First Music Series and debuted at Carnegie Hall. She is a fellow at the University of Southern California and founding director of the USC SummerTIME Writing Program. Currently, she teaches literature and writing at the City University of New York - La Guardia.
Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry, his most recent being Behing My Eyes. His earlier collections are Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001), Rose (BOA, 1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University, The City in Which I Love You (BOA, 1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Lee's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 1988 he received the Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. He lives in Chicago with his wife Donna and their two sons.
Cosponsored by Kundiman and The Asia Society.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
Reading: Susan Choi - A Person of Interest
In a discussion with Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, Harold Augenbraum, Choi will talk about her latest book, A Person of Interest (Penguin, 2008), a vision of a life turned upside-down in the aftermath of a Unabomber-type attack. The novel explores the ethnic, social and psychological dimensions of contemporary American society in an age of terror. Book signing and reception to follow.
Susan Choi was born in Indiana and grew up in Texas. She is the author of The Foreign Student (HarperCollins, 2004), which won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Discover Great New Writers Award at Barnes & Noble, and American Woman (HarperCollins, 2004). With David Remnick, she edited an anthology of fiction entitled Wonderful Town: New York Stories from the New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
@ The Asia Society
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
725 Park Avenue at 70th Street
$10 members/students with ID, $12 nonmember
Reading: Ed Lin, Lisa Chen and Tao Lin
An evening of fiction and poetry. In This Is a Bust (Kaya Press, 2007), Ed Lin turns the conventions of hard-boiled pulp stories on their head by exploring the unexotic and very real complexities of New York City's Chinatown, circa 1976, through the eyes of a Chinese-American cop. Mouth (Kaya Press, 2007), Lisa Chen's debut collection of poetry, gives voice to things that occur below the level of hearing or just beyond our notice by way of fables, instructions, classified ads and reality shows. Tao Lin's debut novel Eeeee Eee Eeee (Melville House, 2007) uneasily documents the life of a recent college graduate, Andrew, with surreal touches - celebrity cameos, bears, and dolphins who say 'Eeeee Eee Eeee' to express emotion.
Lisa Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She earned a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her work has been published in Hanging Loose, ZZYZVA, Prairie Schooner, and Threepenny Review. She lives in New York and works as a media and communications consultant for progressive organizations and campaigns.
Ed Lin is the author of Waylaid, a novel guided by an unnamed narrator, the 12-year-old son of Taiwanese immigrant parents who run a rundown motel on the New Jersey coast. Published by Kaya Press in 2002, Waylaid was universally praised in a broad range of publications including Booklist, Asianweek and Playboy. Waylaid also won the Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop in 2003. This Is a Bust, Lin's second novel, was published by Kaya last fall with a starred pre-publication review.
Tao Lin is the author of a story-collection, Bed, and a novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, published simultaneously by Melville House on May 15, 2007 in the first two-book story-collection/novel debut since Ann Beattie in 1976. Tao is also the author of a poetry collection, You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am (Action Books, 2006). Tao's second poetry-collection, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, will be published in May 2008 by Melville House.
Cosponsored by Singha Beer
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
Third Annual Asian American/African American Poetry Reading
Curated by Tracy K. Smith and Tina Chang
Cosponsored by Cave Canem
The Asian American and African American communities gather for a night of brilliant poetry. Readings by Meena
Alexander, Jeffery Renard Allen, Regie Cabico, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, R. Erica Doyle and Bakar Wilson.
Meena Alexander's poetry includes Illiterate Heart, winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk (2004), and Quickly Changing
River (2008) all published by TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems (Everyman's Library/
Knopf, 2005) and author of the memoir Fault Lines (Feminist Press 1993/ 2003) She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College
and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of two collections of poetry,
Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell
1999), and a novel, Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
2000), which won The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction. Born
in Chicago, he holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois
at Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of English at The
City University of New York and teaches in the graduate writing program
at The New School. He is the Founding Director of the Pan African
Literary Forum. Allen's book of short stories, Bread and the Land, will
be published in 2008. He is presently at work on Talking Talk, a book of
interviews and conversations with fiction writers of African descent
from around the world, and the novel Song of the Shank, based on the
life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth century African American
piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind
Tom.
Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam & has appeared on two seasons of HBO's Def
Poetry Jam. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Spoken Word Revolution & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He is the recipient
of three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, The Barnes & Nobles Writers for Writers Award, A Larry Neal Prize for Poetry and a 2008
DC Commission for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. He is the artistic director of Sol & Soul, an arts and activist organization & co-sponsor of
Split This Rock's Poetry Festival: a celebration of Poetry of Provocation & Witness in Washington, DC March 20-23 2008.
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs was born in Won Ju Si, South Korea. Her debut collection of poetry, Paper Pavilion (White Pine Prees 2007),
is the winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in 5 AM, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, MiPOesias, Poetry NZ,
among others and have been anthologized in Echoes Upon Echoes (The Asian American Writers' Workshop, 2003) and Language For A New Century (W. W. Norton
2008). She is a fellow at the University of Southern California and founding director of the USC SummerTIME Writing Program. Currently, she
lives in New York City.
R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn, NY to Trinidadian parents. Her work
has appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Ms. Magazine, Black Issues Book
Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Utne Reader, Black
Renaissance/Renaissance Noire and Sinister Wisdom and has been
anthologized in Best American Poetry 2001, Voices Rising, Bum Rush the
Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gumbo: Short Fiction by Black Writers, Gathering
Ground, Best Black Women's Erotica 2, and Role Call is forthcoming in
Bloom, Our Antilles: Queer Writing from the Caribbean and Quotes
Community: Notes for Black Poets. She is the recipient of various grants
and awards, including a Fellowship in Poetry from the New York
Foundation for the Arts, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award in
Poetry and a Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction. She received her MFA in
Poetry from The New School and works as a teacher and literacy coach at
Vanguard High. Her manuscript, proxy, was selected by Claudia Rankine as
a finalist for the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.
Bakar Wilson's work has appeared in the Vanderbilt Review, the
Lumberyard, and three Cave Canem anthologies. He is a native of
Tennessee and currently teaches at Medgar Evers College.
Beer and wine courtesy of Singha Beer
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
Reading: Chitrita Banerji and Jennifer 8. Lee
Join us for a sumptuous evening of food-themed tales. In The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, 2008), New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee chronicles her search for the world's best Chinese restaurant with a mix of in-depth research and entertaining personal anecdotes. Culinary historian, Chitrita Banerji has narrated her love of food in several volumes her latest being Eating India: An Odyssey into the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices (Bloomsbury, 2007), an account of her culinary tour across India.
Chitrita Banerji grew up in Calcutta and came to the United States as a graduate student; she received her master's degree in English from Harvard University. She has since become and internationally recognized writer on Bengali food, and is the author of Life and Food in Bengal (Penguin Books India, 2005), Feeding the Gods (Seagull Books, 2006), and Land of Milk and Honey (Seagull Books, 2007). A two-time winner of the Sophie Coe Awards in Food and History, she has written about food for Gourmet, Gastronomica, Granta, the Boston Globe, and the American Prospect.
Jennifer 8. Lee is a metropolitan reporter at The New York Times, where she has worked for many years. She harbors a deep obsession for Chinese food, the product of which is The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, 2008), which explores how Chinese food is all-American. Born and raised in New York City, she attended Hunter College Elementary and High School and is alumna of Harvard University.
Cosponsored by Singha Beer
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
Writing Across Borders: Meena Alexander, Jessica Hagedorn and Kimiko Hahn
In conversation, chaired by Harold Augenbraum
Three Asian American women writers address questions of literary form and taboo, body and community, voice and text, dream and reality, and what it is to write across multiple borders.
Born in 1951 in Allahabad, India, Meena Alexander began writing poetry at ten years old. While her poetry might be her best-known work, her work spans a variety of literary genres. Her first book, a single lengthy poem, entitled The Bird's Bright Wing, was published in 1976 in Calcutta. Since then, Alexander has published seven volumes of poetry, including Illiterate Heart, winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk (2004), and Quickly Changing River (2008) all published by TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems (Everyman's Library/ Knopf, 2005) and author of the memoir Fault Lines (Feminist Press 1993/2003). She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Kimiko Hahn was born in 1955 in Mt. Kisco, New York. She received an undergraduate degree in English and East Asian studies from the University of Iowa, and a master's degree in Japanese literature from Columbia University in 1984. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006); The Artist's Daughter (2002); Mosquito and Ant (1999); Volatile (Hanging Loose Press, 1999); and The Unbearable Heart (Kaya Press, 1995), which received an American Book Award. She is a Distinguished Professor in the English department at Queens College/CUNY and lives in New York.
Jessica Hagedorn was born in Manila in 1949 and moved to San Francisco when she was 14. She is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter whose works include three novels, Dream Jungle (2004), The Gangster of Love (Penguin, 1997), and Dogeaters (Penguin, 1991), and a collection of poetry and prose, Danger And Beauty (City Lights Books, 2002). She is the editor of Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Penguin, 1993) and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World (Penguin, 2004). Her screenplays include Fresh Kill, a feature-length film directed by Shu Lea Cheang, and four episodes of The Pink Palace, an animated series created for Oxygen TV. Among her plays are Dogeaters, adapted from the novel; Stairway to Heaven; and Most Wanted, a collaboration with composer Mark Bennett.
@ Segal Theater of the Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue, at 34th Street
FREE
Reading: Jaed Coffin and Kao Kalia Yang
A night of Southeast Asian American memoir. Six years ago at the age of twenty-one, Jaed Muncharoen Coffin, a half-Thai American man, left New England to visit his mother's native village of Panomsarakram-thus fulfilling a familial obligation. A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (Da Capo, 2008), part armchair travel, part coming-of-age story, is Coffin's debut that chronicles his journey. Driven to tell her family's story after her grandmother's death, The Latehomecomer (Coffee House Press, 2008) is Kao Kalia Yang's tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. The Latehomecomer is an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard.
Jaed Coffin holds a B.A. in philosophy from Middlebury College and an M.F.A. from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast Writing Program. A boxer, sea-kayaker, and lobster fisherman, he lives in Brunswick, Maine.
Born in a Thai refugee camp in 1980, Kao Kalia Yang immigrated to Minnesota when she was six. Together with her sister, she founded Words Wanted, a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang has also recently completed a short film on the Hmong American refugee experience.
Cosponsored by Singha Beer
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
Book Party: Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond
Edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar
Hosted by W.W. Norton & Company and the Rubin Museum of Art with The Asian American Writers' Workshop
Multiple readings, book signing, DJ, bar, celebration.
Language for a New Century celebrates the artistic and cultural forces flourishing today in the East, bringing together an unprecedented selection of works by South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian poets as well as poets living in the Diaspora. Some, such as Bei Dao, Mahmoud Darwish, Michael Ondaatje, and Naomi Shihab Nye are acclaimed worldwide, but many more will be new to the reader. The collection includes over 400 unique voices - political and apolitical, monastic and erotic, established and emerging - that represent a wider artistic movement that challenges thousand-year-old traditions, broadening our notion of contemporary literature.
Language for a New Century has already attracted the attention of a numberof eminent writers and thinkers, including Howard Zinn, Yusef Komunyakaa and Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer, who writes, "This extraordinary, library-in-one volume: what a resource! The editors have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature." Guggenheim Fellow and Los Angeles Times Book Award winning poet Carolyn Forch has written"Language for a New Century [is] a field guide to the human condition in our time."
@ Rubin Museum
K2 Lounge
150 West 17th Street
Free and open to the public
Reading: R. Zamora Linmark and Nina Revoyr
Two writers read from their upcoming works. R. Zamora Linmark is the author of the acclaimed Rolling The R's (Kaya/Muae, 1997), and Prime Time Apparitions (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) as well as Leche (2008) and Evolution of A Sigh which is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press in April 2008. Nina Revoyr is the author of Necessary Hunger (St. Martin's Griffin, 1998) and Southland (Akashic Books, 2003), her latest, The Age of Dreaming (Akashic Books, 2008) about a Japanese silent film star in the early days of Hollywood is also forthcoming in April 2008.
R. Zamora Linmark is the author of the novel Rolling The R's, which he's adapted for the stage, and two poetry collections, Prime Time Apparitions and the just-published Evolution of a Sigh. A recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, his prose, poetry, and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies in the U.S. and the Philippines. He has just completed a novel, Leche, the sequel to Rolling The R's, and is at work on another novel and a collaborative book project with Lisa Asagi, Justin Chin, and Lori Takayesu.
Nina Revoyr was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a white American father, and grew up in Tokyo, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles. She is the author of Necessary Hunger, Southland, and The Age of Dreaming. Nina has been an Associate Faculty member at Antioch University, a Visiting Professor at Cornell University, and the Remsen Bird Visiting Writer at Occidental College. She has also worked for more than a decade in the fields of child welfare and public education. Nina lives in Los Angeles with her English Springer Spaniel, Russell.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
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Fall Calendar 2007
Two Warriors: Mark Habana & Harry Ramos
Open mic. Poetry. Found words. Prose. Drama. Music by DJ Justin Woo. Please arrive early to sign up for the open mic.
Two Warriors is a New-York based poetry duo that found life at the Asian American Writers' Workshop in 2002 by bringing together stories of love, peace,
family, tribute and tradition in their writing. In an effort to break down barriers and provide a sense of home for everyone through their performances, Mark and
Harry aim to involve the crowd, interact with the audience, interpret stories, infuse emotion, and inspire hearts and minds. They have been blessed to perform in
venues throughout the NYC tri-state area, including Five Points, Galapagos Art Space, Urban Juke Joint, Wazzup Cafe, Charlie's Den, Tasty Coco, Je Bon Lounge and
Fusion Ti, as well as locations in Massachusetts, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Hawaii. You can contact them at twowarriors.com.
Justin Woo loves DJing and primarily mixes house and trance. He is the resident DJ for the Poetic Voices reading at the Iron Monkey in Jersey City, NJ,
as well as mobile DJing events. Justin also specializes in collaborative, political, cross-disciplinary performance. He has co-written, co-directed, and performed
in four spoken word theatre productions that have debuted in New York City and Rutgers University. He is also a teaching artist for SlamChops, an educational poetry
program for youth at the Bowery Poetry Club. His most recent project, New Street Poets, appeared as part of the 2007 New York Fringe Festival.
Thanks to Singha Beer for sponsoring this event!
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
An Evening with Michael Ondaatje
6pm (VIP cocktail reception), 7:30pm (Reading)
In partnership with The Consulate General of Canada - New York, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Singha Beer and Moti Hasson Gallery.
 One of the most exciting voices in contemporary literature, Michael Ondaatje reads from his favorite works. A stunning fusion of jazz rhythms, film montage technique, and profoundly beautiful language, encompassing memoir, poetry, and film, revealing a passion for defying conventional form.
Born in Sri Lanka, the former Ceylon, of Indian/Dutch ancestry, Ondaatje went to school in England and then moved to Canada. From the memoir of his childhood, Running in the Family, to his Governor-General's Award-winning book of poetry, There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning To Do, Ondaatje casts a spell over his readers. And having won the British Commonwealth's highest honor - the Booker Prize - he has taken his rightful place as a contemporary literary treasure. In 2000, Ondaatje was awarded the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the Prix Medicis, the Governor General's Award, and the Giller Prize for his novel Anil's Ghost. His transcendent novel, The English Patient, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. He is the author of four collections of poetry including The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. His works of fiction include In the Skin of the Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and most recently Divisadero (Knopf, 2007).
@ Moti Hasson Gallery
535 West 25th Street
(btwn 10th and 11th Aves)
Chelsea arts gallery district, New York City
For tickets, call the Workshop at 212.494.0061.
6pm: Private VIP cocktail party ($100)
7:30pm: General Public reading, audience Q&A and booksigning ($15)
VIP and general tickets may be purchased over the telephone with a credit card through the Workshop only. Please call 212-494-0061. Tickets will be
held at the door under your name. A limited number of student tickets are available for purchase in-person, in advance with current ID for $7 at the
Workshop (Tuesday - Friday, 12 noon - 7 pm). There will be no tickets available at the door. All proceeds from the event support the Workshop.
How To Get Your Poetry Published (and live a life as a poet)
Cosponsored by Poets & Writers
Wouldn't quit the day job--but you love poetry nevertheless. A panel discussion with Alice Quinn, (Poetry Society of America/The New
Yorker), Deborah Garrison (poet/Alfred A. Knopf editor), and Joseph Legaspi (poet/Kundiman codirector), moderated by Quang Bao on
getting your poems and manuscripts edited and published. A frank conversation about creating a life as a poet, including residencies, mentoring,
anthology projects, self-publishing, MFA programs, teaching and public readings. A conversation about the mechanics of getting published--and expert,
friendly advice about maintaining a life in the professional world of poetry.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
"Miss" a 2-act play by Quang Bao
A staged reading, directed by Loy Arcenas
Quang Bao's work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Threepenny Review, The New York Times and National Public Radio. He is the coeditor of Take Out: Queer Writing from Asian Pacific America, and current director of The Workshop. He has just completed his first novel.
Loy Arcenas' recent directing credits include Warren Leight's No Foreigners Beyond This Point, Betsy Howie's Callie's Tally, and Jon Marans' Old Wicked Songs. He also directed the Ma-Yi Theatre production of Lonnie Carter's The Romance of Magno Rubio, for which he received an Obie Award in Sustained Excellence of Set Design.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
"My Friend Has Come" by Toshiro Suzue
A staged reading, directed by James Yaegashi
A hot summer day somewhere in nowhere Japan. A friend waits. A friend comes. A friend leaves. This simple story of two friends humorously and poignantly reminds
us of the sweetness and pain of connecting with another human being.
Written early in his career by Toshiro Suzue, the forerunner in the "quiet theater" movement in Japan, this play won the OMS Drama Prize, the first of many prestigious
awards the playwright has received. The play is expected to have its American premier in 2009.
Toshiro Suzue is a playwright/director/actor based in Kyoto, Japan. He is the recipient of numerous major Japanese theater awards including: The OMS Drama Prize for
Tomodachi ga Kita (My Friend Has Come); The Kishida Kunio Drama Award for Kami o Kakiageru (Fireflies); and the Japanese government's National Arts Festival
Grand Prize for Uchu no Tabi, Semi ga Naite (Travel Through Space, the Cicadas Cry). He is also the co-founder and publisher of the playwriting magazine, LEAF,
with fellow playwrights, Masataka Matsuda and Hideo Tsuchida. Suzue's plays have been translated into English, German, Russian and Indonesian.
James Yaegashi is a classically-trained theater artist based in New York. His acting work has been seen on and off Broadway, including the original productions of
John Guare's A Few Stout Individuals, Julia Cho's Durango, Richard Greenberg's A Naked Girl on the Appian Way and Take Me Out (2003 Tony for Best
Play). He has also worked in major regional theaters across the U.S. such as South Coast Repertory, Alabama Shakespeare Festival and Long Wharf Theatre, among others.
James is also a translator, and has translated several Japanese plays into English and American plays into Japanese, including My Friend Has Come, which he will
direct in 2009.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
The Daddy Project
Four monologues by Mary Beth Brooker, D.W. Gibson, Anoo Siddiqi and Tracy K. Smith about their relationships with their fathers,
performed by Nandita Chandra, Craig Edwards, Mark Gowers, and Derek Lucci. Directed by Dawn Akemi Saito.
Mary Beth Brooker Mary Beth Brooker, writer, visual artist, mother, lives in Northampton, Massachusetts with her husband and their five year old daughter.
DW Gibson currently serves as Executive Director of the Ledig House International Writer's Colony in Hudson, New York. As a writer, his work has been published in
various literary journals. He spent some time as a script editor and writer on documentaries for PBS, A&E Television Network, and MSNBC. Some of his credits include "Eugene
O'Neill Biography"; "Lost Generation Biography"; "The Hate Network"; "Inside Alcoholics Anonymous." He has just finished a novel.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is a writer, architect, and historian working in New York. She has written extensively on architectural and urban
issues and recently contributed an essay to the Asian American Writers' Workshop anthology Topography of War, exploring issues of spatial
memory and architectural experience in memoir. This is her first piece written for the stage.
Tracy K. Smith is the author of The Body's Question (Graywolf, 2003), which won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her second book, Duende (Graywolf 2007), received the 2006 James Laughlin Prize of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Princeton University.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$10 tickets in advance at 212.494.0061
$15 at the door
The 10th Annual Asian American Literary Awards
Celebrating a decade of excellence in Asian American Literature.
Congratulations to the 2007 Asian American Literary Award winners, Linh Dinh, Amitav Ghosh, and Samrat Upadhyay.
Presentation of winning books, cocktail reception, booksigning and surprise announcement of the Members' Choice Workshop Award!
For winners' bios and list of Members' Choice Award finalists click here.
@ Housing Works Bookstore
126 Crosby Street (btwn Houston and Prince Streets)
New York City
$12 general, $10 members, Free for students with ID
Thanks to Singha Beer for sponsoring this event.
Approaches to Asian American Literary Anthologies with Luis Francia
A free workshop for teachers of high school seniors and first-year college students. Complimentary copies of Workshop anthologies with teachers' guides. Call 212.494.0061 to register.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
FREE
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Summer Calendar 2007
Book Launch: Lost Men by Brian Leung
In his debut novel, Lost Men, (Shaye Areheart Books, 2007) Brian Leung explores cultural identity, the meaning of family, and the pressures of fate as
characters confront their complex pasts. Westen Chan vividly remembers the day he lost both his parents - his mother to a car accident, and his father, who,
unable to come to terms with the death of Westen's mother, leaves him to live with his aunt and uncle. Westen struggles to understand his identity, his place
in the world, and why his father, after so many years, has sent him a letter inviting him on a trip to China - a promise that was made
to Westen when he was a child.
Reading followed by booksigning and a reception with music by New York based alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, who will present excerpts from
his most recent album Codebook with longtime collaborator bassist Carlo de Rosa.
Co-sponsored with Artists & Audiences Exchange, a NYFA public program
Brian Leung's story collection, World Famous Love Acts, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Asian American Literary Award, was a
Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and was chosen as an Editor's Pick in Entertainment Weekly. His work has appeared in Story, Crazyhorse, Indiana
Review, Grain, Gulf Coast, Kinesis, Mid-American Review, Salt Hill, Gulf Stream, and numerous other periodicals.
He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University and lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where he is an assistant professor at the University of Louisville.
Lost Men is his first novel.
Guggenheim fellow Rudresh Mahanthappa is one of the most innovative young musicians and composers in jazz today. Named a Rising Star of the alto saxophone by
the Downbeat International Critics Poll for the past four years, Rudresh has incorporated the culture of his Indian ancestry to create a truly groundbreaking
artistic vision. He is a 2006 Artist Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
Txt Me: Identity and Community Summer Youth Writing Workshop Performance
Participants of our summer youth writing workshop will give a reading performance at The Asian American Writers' Workshop!
In this eight-day workshop, participants have explored the use of fiction writing, creative journalism, and poetry through one of the newest mediums for
writers: the blog. Ten young writers will present a writing piece told through their internet avatars, characters they have created just for this workshop.
Fittingly, this event coincides with the Blogiversary - the mark of a decade since the first blogger.
Please come for this live reading with ten amazing young writers!
Readings by: Jessica Bolandrina, Lauriz Bonzon, Wei Lie Chen, Wing Lam Cheung, Pau Font de Rubinat, Ivana Ng,
Tasnim Shamma, Mari Jo Umali, Toni Watson and Matthew Yee.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Free
IN THE HOUSE: A reading by friends of the Workshop
Curated by Nicholas Chung, Mrigaa Sethi and Kaori Suzuki
Cosponsored by Kundiman
Continuing our support for emerging writers, we are excited to present a showcase of poets and fiction writers from our workshops, with Nicholas Chung,
Ilisa Lam, Mrigaa Sethi, Antonius Wiriajada and Helena Zhang. See them here first before they get too hot to touch!
Nicholas Chung lives in a small room but won't use big words.
When she is not writing poetry Ilisa Lam writes about technology, space and weapons as cultural anthropological phenomena, the subject of her doctoral
dissertation at CUNY Graduate Center. Ilisa regrets being unable to attend the reading. Her work will be read by Kaori Suzuki.
Mrigaa Sethi enjoys feeding young people a little more than actually teaching them. For grown-ups, she throws raucous parties and, in the
mornings-after, she counts syllables at the breakfast table.
Antonius Wiriadjaja was born in Jakarta and raised in Boston. He received a BA from Hampshire College, where he absorbed the taxonomy of environmentally
friendly household products from his eco-conscious peers. His interests include neurons, literature and public nudity.
Helena Zhang is a person. She has lived in many houses.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit
The Workshop is pleased to support the 4th Biennial APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit! The APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit is the largest national gathering of
APIA spoken word artists, performers, writers, community leaders and arts educators. It is a three-day event with a mission to challenge the often peripheral and
passive roles the artist is branded within the APIA community and the arts community at-large and to acknowledge the arts as a critical, elemental component in
building, empowering and transforming tool for our community and our selves.
Friday: Family Showcase @ the Workshop
Saturday: Summit Workshops and Panels @ University Settlement Community Houston Center, Community Showcase @ Judson Memorial Church
Sunday: Family and Community Meetings @University Settlement Community Houston Center
Click here for more information and to register.
Family Showcase: Friday, August 3rd, 7pm @ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Entrance Included with registration. Note this event is closed to the general public. You must register to attend and read!
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Winter/Spring Calendar 2007
PEN World Voices: World City, NY
 Authors of both fiction and nonfiction discuss how New York features in
their work and ponder the endless and mysterious allure of what is
arguably the world's cultural capital. Featuring Jorge Franco, Eduardo
Lago and Suketu Mehta; moderated by Connie Rosenblum of the New York
Times.
Co-sponsored with PEN World Voices 2007: The New York Festival of International Literature. For more information about the festival, click here
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street , 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Free
Jorge Franco (Colombia) was awarded the Pedro Gmez Valderrama National Narrative prize for his first collection of short stories, and his first novel won the Ciudad de Pereira National Novel Competition. His novel, Rosario Tijeras, was awarded the Hammett International Prize and has been translated into fourteen languages and successfully adapted into a film. His most recent novel is Melodrama.
Eduardo Lago (Spain/United States) is the author of a collection of short stories; a memoir; and Call Me Brooklyn, his first novel, which won the 2006 Nadal Prize in Spain. He is the director of Instituto Cervantes New York.
Suketu Mehta is a fiction writer and journalist based in New York. His first book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, won the Kiriyama Prize, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Mehta's work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and Harper's among many other publications. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York.
Connie Rosenblum is the author of Gold Digger: The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce and the editor of New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times. She is the editor of the New York Times City Section.
Reading: Tinling Choong and Anchee Min
In Firewife: A Story of Fire and Water (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2007), Tinling Choong draws on the ancient Chinese creation legend of Nuwa and the battle between
fire and water to give a modern story of how women are connected throughout time. Anchee Min's new book, The Last Empress (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), continues the story of
Tzu Hsi, or Empress Orchid, offering an extensively researched, highly revisionist portrait of a critical female figure in modern Chinese history.
 Tinling Choong was born and raised in Malaysia. She received a B.A. from Wellesley College, is working toward her PH.D. In East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale
University and she is at work on a novel. She lives in Vermont.
 Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. At seventeen she was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao's Shanghai Film Studio recruited her to work as
a movie actress. Her critically acclaimed memoir, Red Azalea, recounts her experience during the Cultural Revolution, a period she revists in fictional form in her national
bestselling Becoming Madame Mao. With the internationally bestselling novel Empress Orchid, Min continued her project of offering extensively researched, highly
revisionist accounts of critical female figures in modern Chinese history. Min's new book, The Last Empress, continues this masterful revisionist work.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street , 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
Kaya! Fundraiser
Curated and hosted by Ishle Yi Park
A night of music and poetry featuring Tina Chang, Lisa Chen, Luis Francia, Kimiko Hahn, Cathy Park Hong, Ed Lin, Pat Rosal, Thad Rutkowski, and Lisa Yun. Music by DJ Mas; musical guest Vudou Soul. Limited open mic-- please arrive early to sign in. Proceeds to go to Kaya Press, a nonprofit independent publisher of Asian/diasporic literature and culture.
cosponsored by Lady Leisure, Blue Rabbit Productions, Sulu Series
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
New York City
$10 - $20, sliding scale
Tina Chang, author of Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books), has received numerous awards from the Academy of American Poets, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, among many others. She is currently co-editing Contemporary Voices of the East: An Anthology of Poems to be published by W.W. Norton in 2008.
Luis H. Francia is the author of Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago (Kaya), a collection of poetry, Museum of Absences (Meritage Press), and co-editor, with Angel Velasco Shaw, of Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999 (NYU Press).
Since her Kaya book, The Unbearable Heart, Kimiko Hahn has published several collections, including The Narrow Road To The Interior (W.W. Norton) - a book subverting the Japanese classic genres of zuihitsu and tanka. She is a Disintinguished Professor at the new MFA program at Queens College/The City University of New York.
Cathy Park Hong's first book of poetry was Translating Mo'Um (Kaya), and her book Dance Dance Revolution (W.W. Norton) is forthcoming. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Ed Lin's first novel Waylaid was published by Kaya in 2002. Kaya will publish his second novel, This Is a Bust, this fall.
Mas has been a disciple of music for the majority of his life. He is honored to be spinning tonight for Kaya and at the AAWW, which is one of the places where it all started.
Ishle Yi Park is a Korean American woman who is the Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. Her first book, The Temperature of This Water (Kaya), is the winner of three awards: the PEN America Beyond Margins Award for Outstanding Writers of Color, the Members' Choice Award of the Asian American Literary Awards, and an Honorable Mention from the A.A.A.S. (Association of Asian American Studies).
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full length-collections of poetry, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea Books), which won the Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award, and most recently My American Kundiman.
Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the innovative novels Roughhouse (Kaya) and Tetched (Palari Publishing); both books were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award.
Lisa Yun is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton and co-founder of the Asian and Asian American Studies Program. Her book, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese and Africans of Cuba, is forthcoming with Temple University Press. She has been the recipient of a NYFA fellowship for her poetry, which has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals.
Book Launch: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
 In recent years, there has been unprecedented attention paid to the Third World and the economic and social success and failures of its post-colonial
nations. Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations (The New Press, 2007), discusses the history of the developing world and its current struggles.
Vijay Prashad is Professor and Director of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is on the board of the Center for Third World
Organizing, United For a Fair Economy, and the National Priorities Project. In addition, Prashad writes a monthly column for Frontline, India and contributes
to Counterpunch. Prashad's most recent books include The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and Dispatches from Latin
America: Experiments Against Neoliberalism. He is the author of ten other books, including Karma of Brown Folk and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting,
both of which were chosen by the Village Voice as books of the year.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street , 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
A Celebration of Poetry with Cave Canem
 The Asian American and African American communities gather for a night of brilliant poetry and music. Readings by Elizabeth Alexander, Justin Chin, Kimiko Hahn, Linda Susan Jackson, Gregory Pardlo, Vijay Seshadri and the musical stylings of Patrick Rosal in collaboration with Aracelis Girmay. Curated by Tina Chang and Tracy K.
Smith.
Elizabeth Alexander's collections of poetry include Antebellum Dream Book (Graywolf Press, 2001), Body of Life (1996), and The Venus Hottentot (1990). Her poems, short stories, and critical writing have been widely published in such journals and periodicals as The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, The Village Voice, The Women's Review of Books, and The Washington Post, and her work is anthologized in over twenty collections. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago, and the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks.
Justin Chin is the author of Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard, and three collections of essays, Burden of Ashes, Attack of the Man-eating Lotus
Blossoms, and Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks. His newest collection is Gutted (Manic D Press).
Kimiko Hahn's seven books of poems include The Unbearable Heart, which received an American Book Award, and most recently, The Narrow Road to the Interior.
In this new volume, she collects work inspired by the Japanese forms, tanka and zuihitsu; the title, itself, comes from Basho's famous poetic journal, Okunohosomichi.
She is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA program at Queens College, The City University of New York.
Linda Susan Jackson's first collection of poems, What Yellow Sounds Like, was a finalist in the 2006 National Poetry Series Competition and will be published
by Tia Chucha Press in Spring 2007. She has published two chapbooks, Vitelline Blues and A History of Beauty. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard
Review, Brilliant Corners, Asheville Poetry Review, Gathering Ground, Heliotrope, Los Angeles Review, Rivendell, Warpland,
and Brooklyn Review 21 among other journals and has been featured on From the Fishouse audio archive. She is an Assistant Professor and Deputy Chair of the
English Department at Medgar Evers College/City University of New York and a Cave Canem graduate fellow.
Gregory Pardlo is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His
poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Calalloo, Lyric, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, Volt, Black Issues
Book Review and on National Public Radio. He teaches creative writing at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant with his wife and daughter.
His manuscript, Totem, was chosen by Brenda Hillman for the American Poetry Review/ Honickman First Book Prize and will be published Sept. 2007.
Vijay Seshadri's collections of poems include James Laughlin Award winner The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 2004) and Wild Kingdom (1996). He currently
teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full length-collections of poetry, My American Kundiman and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive. The closest he got to conservatory was secretly struggling with first species counterpoint during the graveyard shift of his second job at 19. He once jammed with Max Roach and was terrible.
Aracelis Girmay writes poetry, fiction, & essays. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she earned degrees from Connecticut College & NYU. Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow & former Watson Fellow. Her poems have been published in Callaloo, Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, and Ploughshares, among others. Her book of poems, Teeth, will be published by Curbstone Press this summer.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street , 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
Uptown/Downtown
Curated and hosted by Helena Zhang and Brynn Saito
  Let the summer begin! Join us for an evening of readings by ten emerging writers. Five poets from New York University and five from Sarah Lawrence College share their work in a dynamic bridging of two creative communities.
Brynn Saito / M. Rebekah Otto / Ivanna Yi / Brandon C. Dumont / Diana Alvarez / Allyson Paty / Beth Onusko / Carson Donnelly / R. Perry Ivey / Helena Zhang
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
New York City
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Fall Calendar 2006
The Workshop's 15th Anniversary Party!
Come to our anniversary party! Celebrating 15 years of literary journeys, poetic revelry, prose persuasions, and love and support for
Asian American literature. Meet and mingle with writers and artists to raise a toast to the Workshop. Presentation of The Lifetime Achievement Award
to Maxine Hong Kingston by Jessica Hagedorn and the announcement of the 2006 Asian American literary award winners will begin at 8:15pm.
Cosponsored by
Wine courtesy of Mrs. Peggy Furth of Chalk Hill Winery
Water courtesy of Borjomi Water
6pm - 7pm, VIP reception
@ Cendrillion
45 Mercer Street (btwn Grand and Broome Street)
$1000 tickets in advance, please click here for details
7pm - 9pm, General reception
@ 
35 Wooster Street
(btwn Grand & Broome Street)
Click here for directions
We are requesting a $10 donation from everyone who wants to attend.
Please pre-pay using a credit card. It will guarantee your admission because the event will likely sell out.
Please call 212.494.0061
The Woman Warrior @ 30
Cosponsored with the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program & Institute at NYU and The
National Book Foundation. This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Dept of Cultural Affairs.
 Please join us in acknowledging one of the most
important novels of the 20th century. A daylong event commemorating Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, comprised of readings,
panels, and reflections with speakers including David Eng, Jack Tchen, Fay Chiang and a roster of other scholars and artists. The tribute
culminates in a performance at the Workshop.
Stuyvesant High School
345 Chambers Street
(btwn River Terrace & N. End Avenue)
9:30am, Reading and conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston
Open only to Stuyvesant High School students
 NYU Conference: Panel Discussions
NYU Kimmel Center
Shorin Performance Studio, 8th floor
60 Washington Square South
(at the corner of LaGuardia Place)
1pm - 1:30pm, Introduction with Jack Tchen, Quang Bao and David
Eng
1:30pm - 2:45pm, The Woman Warrior, Literary Forms, and Other Genres:
Biography and Autobiography, Folk Tales, Performance. Moderated by Cyrus Patell, with Fay Chiang, Sunita
Mukhi and Karen Shimakawa
2:50pm - 4pm, Women and The Woman Warrior. Moderated by Christine Balance, with Luis Francia, Gloria Jacobs,
Sabrina Margherita and Kate Rigg
4:05pm - 5:15pm Politics, Immigration, and The Woman Warrior. Moderated by Crystal Parikh, with Susana
Lei'ataua, Sheridan Prasso, Svati P. Shah and Ellen D. Wu
The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
7pm, 30th Anniversary Tribute to The Woman Warrior and launch
party for the forthcoming anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of
Peace (KOA Books) edited by Kingston. With readings by Quang
Bao, Earll Kingston, Maxine Hong Kingston and Chun Yu.
Followed by reception and book sales
$10 suggested donation
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts was published in 1976 and won the National Book Critics' Circle Award. According to the
Modern Language Association, it is the most commonly taught text in modern university education. She has earned additional awards, including the National Book Award for China Men,
the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the National Humanities Medal. Kingston most
recently edited the anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (KOA Books).
Book Launch: Topography of War
Cosponsored by
Religions for Peace, a growing global network of inter-religious councils and groups, harnesses the power of cooperation among the world's faith communities
to help stop war, end poverty, and protect the earth.
 Join editors Andrea Louie and Johnny Lew for a
special launch event to mark the publication of the Workshop's latest anthology, Topography of War: Asian American Essays, a collection of creative
nonfiction works that examine the many ways in which war remains part of personal histories as well as the collective memory of Asian America.
Special Guest: Channapha Khamvongsa, project director of Legacies of War. Legacies of War was created to
raise awareness about the history of the Vietnam War-era bombing in Laos, to provide space for healing the wounds of war and to create greater hope for a future
of peace. Founded in 2004, Legacies of War uses a multifaceted approach, including visual and performance arts, to tell the stories of the Laotian people and
their enduring survival of the bombing in Laos and the lingering effects of deadly cluster bombs.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street , 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation
Speed Dating Round 2: Short Story Clinic
Cosponsored with 
Short fiction has been wildly popular at times in American literature and a chosen first form
for emerging writers. In Speed Dating Round 2, short story writers are paired up one-on-one with editors. Personal feedback, professional advice and criticism make this a valuable opportunity for writers to have a look into the publishing market for the short story.
To participate:
1) Send your short story (25-page limit, double-spaced) to desk@aaww.org. Include your name, contact information, and a short bio. Write "Speed Dating" on the subject line.
Deadline to submit is Tuesday, October 17th.
2) If your story is chosen, the Workshop will forward it to the appropriate editor who will read your work in advance and be prepared to offer personal feedback. Payment is due upon acceptance.
3) Come on time to your assigned half-hour meeting and ask whatever you want. If you are unable to attend the event in person, but would like to participate, we will be accepting phone appointments also.
Featuring editors:
Stacey Barney (Kensington Books)
Lexy Bloom (Random House/Vintage/Anchor)
Larissa Dooley (Riverhead)
Kendra Harpster (Penguin/Viking)
Christopher Jackson (Random House/Spiegel and Grau)
Radhika Jones (The Paris Review)
Anne McPeak (The Hudson Review)
John Parsley (St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books)
Jennifer Pooley (HarperCollins/William Morrow)
Anjali Singh (Houghton Mifflin)
Jill Schoolman (Archipelago Books)
$65 general, $50 members. Accepted on a rolling basis until filled. The Workshop will do the pairing. Open to individuals from all different levels of writing, ethnic backgrounds and literary interests.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Stacey Barney, an editor at Dafina/Kensington Books, has held posts in both adult and children's book publishing, beginning her career at Lee & Low Books, a
multicultural children's book publisher. She then worked at Farrar, Straus and Giroux with such talented new writers as Chris Abani and Lisa Dierbeck. At
Amistad/HarperCollins, she published LA Times Bestselling author Tamara T. Gregory's Passport Diaries as well as acclaimed author Ronin Ro's latest,
Raising Hell: The Reign, Ruin, and Redemption of Run-D.M.C. and the bestselling This Voice In My Heart by Gilbert Tuhabonye. At Dafina/Kensington,
Stacey is looking for Christian fiction, young adult, pop culture, and narrative nonfiction that speaks to the themes of education, race, class, gender and
immigration -- the outsider's voice. She is also very interested in family stories, memoirs, women's fiction, and international fiction. She will launch a young
adult line for the Dafina list in the fall.
Lexy Bloom is an associate editor at Vintage/Anchor, part of the Knopf publishing group at Random House, where she works on both paperback reprints and
original titles. She has worked with numerous authors in paperback, including Edwidge Danticat, James Salter, Mary Gaitskill, John Banville, Helen Oyeyemi, Thisbe
Nissen, Richard McCann, and Tova Mirvis. She also works with Natsuo Kirino, Joshua Henkin, Danit Brown, Tod Wodicka, and Mia Kirshner, among others, whose original works are forthcoming from Knopf, Pantheon and Vintage/Anchor in 2007. Before coming to Vintage/Anchor, she was US Books Editor for Granta Books.
Larissa Dooley has worked with numerous award-winning and bestselling writers such as George Saunders, Steven Johnson, Erik Reece, John Hodgman, and Dan
Crane in her position at Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in Boldtype and Poets & Writers.
Kendra Harpster began her literary career at Doubleday in 1999 where she worked with writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead and Aimee Bender,
published fiction by Shari Goldhagen (Family and Other Accidents), and Rod Liddle (Too Beautiful for You), and non-fiction by David Rakoff (Don't
Get Too Comfortable), and the Lance Armstrong Foundation (Live Strong). Now an editor at Viking, her list includes both literary and commercial fiction.
Her upcoming titles for Viking/Penguin include Tana French's In the Woods, Danielle Ganek's Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him, Susan Vreeland's
Luncheon of the Boating Party and Kim Edwards' short story collection, The Secrets of a Fire King.
Christopher Jackson is Executive Editor at Spiegel & Grau, a new division of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group at Random House, Inc.
He has worked with numerous bestselling and award-winning authors, from Victor Lavalle and Edwidge Danticat to David Corn and Jack Weatherford. His
authors at Spiegel & Grau include Warren St. John, Matt Taibbi, Ta-Nehesi Coates, and Adam Mansbach.
Radhika Jones is the managing editor of The Paris Review, and her interview with Peter Carey appeared in the magazine's summer issue. She is a
frequent contributor to Bookforum and the author of introductions to Barnes & Noble Classics editions of Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and
A Room with a View.
s Anne McPeak is the associate editor of The Hudson Review. She received a B.A. in literature from Bard College, with a concentration in writing.
Previous to joining the magazine, she was an assistant at the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency. Her fiction and book reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail.
John Parsley is an Editor at Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, where he acquires and edits literary and commercial fiction and narrative nonfiction.
He is also the founding editor of LOST Magazine, a monthly online magazine that features fiction and nonfiction and has
published writers including Tom Bissell, Wayne Curtis, Marilyn Johnson, Peter Orner, Mary Roach, Floyd Skloot, and Robert Sullivan.
Jennifer Pooley is an editor at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, where she began her career in 1998. She loves discovering strong new
voices in literary and commercial fiction and has acquired such debut novels as K. L. Cook's The Girl From Charnelle, Catherine Hanrahan's Lost Girls and
Love Hotels, and Willy Vlautin's The Motel Life. Her nonfiction acquisition interests are eclectic and include serious narrative nonfiction, humor,
history, science, and memoir that deliver an unforgettable armchair experience, such as Marjorie Hart's Summer At Tiffany (forthcoming) and Alison and
Melissa Houtte's Alligators, Old Mink and New Money, and the occasional whimsical gift title with a pop culture slant, such as Amy Allen's This Little
Piggy Went to Prada: Nursery Rhymes for the Blahnik Brigade (forthcoming) and David C. Barnette's The Offical Guide to Christmas in the South: Or, If You
Can't Fry It, Spraypaint It Gold. She publishes the work of such authors as John Barlow, Christoper Bram, Maud Casey, Emily Franklin, Lolita Files, Lisa Jewell,
Ami McKay, and Leslie Pietrzyk, among others.
Anjali Singh began her career in publishing in 1996, when she landed a job as a scout of American and Canadian books for foreign publishers. Before
joining Houghton Mifflin in 2006, she worked as an editor at Vintage and Pantheon Books, where she sought out American and international writers of literary fiction,
travel, memoir, and narrative journalism. Her authors included Nuha al-Radi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Diana Abu-Jaber, Nadeem Aslam and Valerie Martin. While there,
she also carved out a niche publishing graphic novels, among them Marjane Satrapi's memoirs of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, Persepolis
and Persepolis 2 (which she also translated from the French), David B.'s Epileptic, Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat and Jessica Abel's La
Perdida.
Jill Schoolman founded Archipelago Books in 2003 after working with Seven Stories Press for four years in the editorial department. She graduated from
Yale University with a BA in Literature in '92, and studied English literature at Oxford University in '89-'90. She worked as an assistant film editor before she
entered the publishing world. (She also delivered pizzas on mopeds in Paris for several months.) She was selected to participate in the French-American
Foundation-sponsored editors' exchange program in '99 as well as the German Book Office-sponsored editors' trip to Germany in '03. Archipelago Books is a
non-profit press devoted to classic and contemporary international literature.
The Daddy Project
Cosponsored by New York Theater Workshop
In literature (and perhaps in other art forms) fathers receive less attention than mothers. If men are raised to be the strong and silent type, how do
we know who they are and how do they shape and challenge our own personas? A night of four performance pieces presented by professional actors, authored by Jesse
Cameron Alick, Quang Bao, Christopher Murray and Joshua Pushkin. An intimate look at the relationship between men and their dads.
Featuring:
Lazy Man's Load by Christopher Murray, performed by Drew Hildebrand
The Scorpion and the Fox by Jesse Cameron Alick, performed by Craig Alan Edwards
Christopher Columbus, Senior by Quang Bao, performed by Hoon Lee
The Pink Caballero by Joshua Pushkin, performed by Chad Corbitt
Directed by Loy Arcenas
 Jesse Cameron Alick is the Associate Artistic Director for Subjective Theatre Company and as the Associate Producer for Smokin Word Productions. He is the author the plays Sleep Awake and Come Back to Me, and a book of poetry, How to Reach a State of No Wind in Just Under a Year. His poetry has also appeared in the anthology The Full Spectrum (Random House), A&U magazine, The Errorist and Inspired by a Dream.
 Quang Bao's work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Threepenny Review, The New York Times and National Public Radio. He is the coeditor of Take Out: Queer Writing from Asian Pacific America, current director of The Workshop and a Revson Fellow at Columbia University. He teaches creative writing at Cooper Union and has just completed his first novel.
 Joshua Pushkin completed his BS in Human Development and a Masters in Public Administration at Cornell Univerity. He is currently the Director of Development for Cable Positive, an HIV/AIDS action organization dedicated to educating the public about the disease through the medium of cable television.
 Christopher Murray's poetry has appeared recently in Windy City Times, Bloom, the Soft Skull Press anthology Bend, Don't Shatter and on NPR as read by Garrision Keilllor as part of The Writer's Almanac. This year, Christopher was named a Charles H. Revson Fellow at Columbia University.
Loy Arcenas' recent directing credits include Warren Leight's No Foreigners Beyond This Point, Betsy Howie's Callie's Tally, and Jon Marans' Old Wicked Songs. He is currently rehearsing Mac Wellman's 2 September at the Flea Theatre. He also directed the Ma-Yi Theatre production of Lonnie Carter's The Romance of Magno Rubio, for which he received an Obie Award in Sustained Excellence of Set Design.
Chad Corbitt is a student at Brooklyn College. He sends his love to Kelly, Laurie, and Matty.
Craig Alan Edwards has appeared on television in Law & Order, All My Children, As The World Turns and Spenser: For Hire; and on film in Sweet & Lowdown, Lip Service, The Opposite Sex, All The Wrong Places, Run Of The House, and Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop. Craig has written and performed his own one-man show, The Man in Room 306, a fictional account of Dr. King's last night in Memphis, and has appeared in New York productions of Waiting For My Man; (DR2 Theatre), Box (2003 NY International Fringe Festival), A Last Dance for Sybil (with Ruby Dee) and Love's Labor's Lost. Craig has his own performance company, KING ALIVE! The Dream Lives.
Drew Hildebrand will appear later this month in the New York premiere of Mac Wellman's 2 September at the Flea Theater. Also at the Flea he has performed in A.R. Gurney's Screen Play, Drums In The Night, and Ashley Montana Goes Ashore In The Caicos with Bebe Neuwirth. His other credits include The Front Page (Long Wharf Theater) and Gary Winter's The Impotent General (Brick Theater). He is a former US Naval Officer, and a veteran of the conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He has trained at Cornell University and BADA.
Hoon Lee is originally from the Boston area where he began his performing career as a singer and musician. Since moving to New York, he has appeared on Broadway in Flower Drum Song (originated the role of Chao), Urinetown, Pacific Overtures; other New York productions include American Hwangap (Lark Theatre), SIDES: The Fear is Real... (Culture Project and P.S.122), Back from the Front (NY International Fringe Festival), The King & I (Papermill Playhouse), and Hot Stuff High! (Mr. Miyagi's Theatre Company). He has also appeared on television and in film in Sex and the City, Saving Face, and We Own the Night. He continues to perform in bands and is currently recording a new solo project. He is a graduate of Harvard University.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$10, tickets in advance are encouraged as seats are limited
Writing Filipino America
Curated by Luis Francia
The year 2006 marks the centennial of Filipino immigration to the United States. Readings by Fil-Am writers Lisa Ascalon, Gina Apostol,
Marlon Unas Esguerra, Luis Francia, Sarah Gambito and Tai Yo. Honoring those who preceded them, reflecting the creative literature penned by
generations of Filipino and Filipino-Americas. In conjunction with "Moving Archipelago: A Century of Writing Filipino America," a landmark act of remembrance and a
weekend conference at New York University. For more information, click here.
@ the Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue
$5 suggested donation
The 9th Annual Asian American Literary Awards
Since 1998, the Workshop has been recognizing excellence in Asian American literature through our annual awards ceremony. Join us in making this
year's event the best yet. Here's to throwing prose, cocktails, and well-deserved kudos into the shaker and seeing what comes out, awarding the best in
Asian American fiction, poetry, and nonfiction of 2005. And since Workshop members serve as the fuel to our literary fire, we are pleased to recognize their
voices in our Members' Choice Award. Ceremony and awards presentation with authors, followed by booksigning and reception.
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation by Jeff Chang, (Picador USA) Nonfiction.
Presented by Greg Tate.
Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap, (Grove Press) Fiction.
Presented by Brian Leung.
Mad Science in Imperial City by Shanxing Wang, (Futurepoem books) Poetry.
Presented by Suji Kwock Kim.
With special guest speaker Sudhir Venkatesh
And surprise announcement of Members' Choice Award winner!
Members' Choice Award finalists:
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li, (Random House) Fiction
Real Karaoke People by Ed Bok Lee, (New Rivers Press) Poetry
Tetched: A Novel in Fractals by Thaddeus Rutkowski, (Behler Publications) Fiction
@ The Asia Society
725 Park Ave at 70th Street
New York City
$12 general, $10 members, students free
Tickets at 212.494.0061
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Summer Calendar 2006
New York Minutes: A Storytelling Contest
$100 cash prize + one year free membership to the Workshop
Participants Wanted Now!
Have you ever ...
Lived with 47 roommates in a studio apartment?
Been sexually harrassed during your internship?
Thought you were smarter than your boss?
Gone on the date from hell?
Stolen a chandelier from an open house at a loft you could never afford?
Then, we want to hear about it. You get 5 minutes to take it from beginning to end at our live storytelling contest on Tuesday, July 18!
To sign up, call 212.494.0061, Tuesday - Friday from 12:30 - 6:30pm. Deadline to enter contest is Friday, July 14th at 6:30pm. Contestants accepted
on a rolling basis.
Who can enter the contest?: Anyone who has spent some time in the five boroughs of New York with a good story to tell, regardless of age or
ethnicity.
How will the contest be judged?: Audience vote counts for 50%, so bring your friends. The other 50% is from the current interns at the
Workshop. Read about the four of them here.
But my story is 8 minutes long!: Sorry, any story over 5 minutes will be disqualified.
Featuring N. Rain Noe, F. Omar Telan, Edward Garcia + special guests. Reception.
@ the Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
New York City
$5 at the door. Free for Workshop members.
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Spring Calendar 2006
Book party: Ed Bok Lee, Real Karaoke People
With special guests Pablo Medina, Taiyo Na and Purvi Shah.
Poet Ed Bok Lee presents a night of poetry and music. In Real Karaoke People, poems and prose combine tradition and pop culture
with the energy of hip-hop, the off-key voices of karaoke, and a girl's wicked drawl that first crackled through a KFC late-night drive-thru speaker.
Ed Bok Lee's collection of poetry, Real Karaoke People (New Rivers Press, 2005), was a recipient of the Many
Voices Project Award. A former state Grand Slam Poetry champion, he holds an M.F.A from Brown University, and regularly reads and performs his poetry and
stories across the country. Among his many awards are grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation. His work has been published
in Arts & Letters, Crab Orchard Review, St. Paul Pioneer Press and Manoa, among others.
Booksigning, reception and live karaoke.
@ the Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
New York City
$5 at the door. Free for Workshop members.
The Million Dollar Book Contract: How To Get (THE BEST) Agent
Cosponsored with Poets & Writers magazine
If you are writing a book or have completed one, you will need an agent. Where? How? Who? Learn how to avoid the painful, expensive process of
sending out manuscripts yourself blindly and waiting for rejection letters. A panel discussion featuring four top literary agents sharing expertise on how
to land a book contract. Followed by audience Q&A.
Sloan Harris, International Creative Management
Dorian Karchmar, William Morris Agency
Ayesha Pande, Lyons & Pande International
Ira Silverberg, Donadio & Olson
Sloan Harris has worked in ICM's book department for 16 years, specializing in narrative nonfiction and literary fiction. Clients include
Jeffrey Goldberg, Hampton Sides, Doug Stanton, Susan Casey, George Pelecanos, James McManus, Anthony Lane, and Anthony Swofford, among others.
Dorian Karchmar is a literary agent at the William Morris Agency in New York where she specializes in literary fiction and creative nonfiction.
She is a graduate of the University of Iowa's MFA program in Nonfiction Writing and represents a diverse group of critically-acclaimed and prize winning
authors, including Jennifer Haigh, winner of the 2006 L.L. Winship/PEN Award for the New York Times bestseller, Baker Towers, and the 2004 PEN/Hemingway award
for her debut novel, Mrs. Kimble; Eric Puchner, former Stegner Fellow and Pushcart Prize winner whose debut Music Through the Floor was one of the
breakout collections of 2005; Dr. Sharon Moalem, evolutionary biologist and author of the forthcoming Survival of the Sickest, a radical study of the
evolutionary histories of common inheritable diseases and conditions; and Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin, adapted by director Gregg Araki into one
of the most successful independent films of last year.
Ayesha Pande launched Lyons & Pande International last fall with her partner Jennifer Lyons. She was previously and editor for 15 years, including stints
at Crown Publishers and at HarperResource. In 2001 she moved to Farrar, Straus & Giroux as a senior editor, where she acquired and edited a range of literary
fiction and nonfiction, including the PEN Hemingway-winning GraceLand by Chris Abani. She represents clients who write literary fiction, narrative nonfiction
and young adult fiction, as well as historians and journalists. Clients include Malaysian writer Preeta Samarasan as well Pakistani American writer Sheba Karim.
Ira Silverberg is a literary agent at Donadio & Olson. Prior to that, he worked in publishing in various capacities including Director of Publicity
at Grove Weidenfeld, Publisher and Editorial Director of High Risk Books/Serpent's Tail, and Editor in Chief of Grove Press. Some of his clients include National
Book Award nominees Christopher Sorrentino, Rene Steinke and Adam Haslett; pop culture critics Neil Strauss, Jon Savage and Simon Reynolds; style gurus Kate Spade,
Katie Brown, and Amanda Brooks; as well as Andrei Codrescu, Dennis Cooper, Lawrence Chua, David Bezmozgis, Shelley Jackson, R. Zamora Linmark, Sam Lipsyte and
Heather McGowan among others.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
New York City
$7 in advance, $10 at the door.
For advance tickets, please call 212.494.0061 with credit card information.
Panel discussion: 51%: Women Write the World
Geography is literary destiny. A panel discussion featuring women writers from four continents on the powerful notions of home, how gender differences
influence a writer's literary landscape, what women writers around the world have in common, and if there is such a thing as a female imagination. With Melania
Mazzucco, Margriet de Moor, Helen Oyeyemi, Ann Provoost and Ayu Utami. Moderated by Jessica Hagedorn.
Presented with PEN World Voices and The New York Festival of International Literature.
Jessica Hagedorn was born in Manila in 1949 and moved to San Francisco when she was 14. She is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter whose works include
three novels, Dream Jungle, The Gangster of Love, and Dogeaters, and a collection of poetry and prose, Danger And Beauty. She is the
editor of Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World. Her screenplays
include Fresh Kill, a feature-length film directed by Shu Lea Cheang, and four episodes of The Pink Palace, an animated series created for Oxygen TV.
Among her plays are Dogeaters, adapted from the novel; Stairway to Heaven; and Most Wanted, a collaboration with composer Mark Bennett.
Born in Rome in 1966, Melania G. Mazzucco has written subjects and screenplays for films, inventing stories or re-writing those of others; while for
theater she developed Una pallida felicit? (A Pale Happiness), which was performed theaters such as the Teatro Stabile in Turin, Piccolo Teatro in Milan,
Teatro Valle in Rome, and won the Gold Medal for Italian Dramaturgy in 1996. In 1996, she published her first novel, Il bacio della Medusa, and her second two
years later, La camera di Baltus. Her most recent book, Vita, won the 2003 Strega Prize, Italy's leading literary award.
Margriet de Moor was born in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, in 1941. After a career as a classical singer, de Moor made her writing debut with a collection
of stories, Op de rug gezien (Seen From Behind), followed by three novellas in one volume, Dubbelportret (Double Portrait). These books earned her the
Lucy B. and C. W. van der Hoogt Prize in 1990. Her highly praised first novel, First Grey, Then White, Then Blue won her the AKO Literature Prize, for which
her second novel, The Virtuoso was also nominated. She has since published other novels such as The Duke of Egypt and The Kreutzer Sonata.
Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and has lived in London since the age of four. She completed her book The Icarus Girl just before her
19th birthday while studying for her A-level exams. She is now a student of social and political sciences at Cambridge University. Oyeyemi is currently at work on her
second novel.
Born in Poperinge, Belgium in 1964, Anne Provoost studied literature at the University of Louvain. She is the author of four novels. Her books have been
translated into 12 languages and received major literary prizes. Her latest novel is now longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Provoost is a
member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature. She lives with her husband and three children in Antwerp.
Ayu Utami was born in Bogor, Indonesia in 1968, and grew up in Jakarta. Her first novel, Saman, was awarded the Best Novel from Dewan Kesenian
Jakarta in 1998 and in 2000 she was a Prince Claus Award laureate for opening new horizons for modern literature in Indonesia. A founding member of Indonesia's
Alliance of Independent Journalists, Ayu Utami currently works for Radio 68H, an independent news radio station that is broadcast all over the country, and for the
art center Komunitas Utan Kayu. She writes regular opinion pieces in a newspaper and a magazine in Indonesia.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
New York City
Free
For more information, click here or call 212.334.1660
Reading and panel discussion: Young Adult and Children's Literature
Authors Jenny Han, Justina Chen Headley, Grace Lin and David Yoo read from their novels and talk about writing children's
and young adult fiction, subverting stereotypes and creating Asian American characters that reflect reality in literature for youth.
Cosponsored with the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families
Jenny Han was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned an MFA in writing for
children at New School University. She lives in New York City. Shug (Simon & Schuster) is her first novel.
Justina Chen Headley is the author of the young adult novel Nothing But the Truth (and a few white lies) (Little, Brown) and a picture book, The
Patch (Charlesbridge). After graduating from Stanford University, Justina worked as a marketing executive at Microsoft. She lives near Seattle, Washington.
Grace Lin is the award-winning author of over a dozen children's books, including The Ugly Vegetables (Charlesbridge), Dim Sum for Everyone!
(Knopf), and Robert's Snow (Viking). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, she most recently published her first children's novel The Year of the
Dog (Little, Brown). She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
David Yoo is a graduate from Skidmore College with an MA from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He lives in Massachusetts.
Girls for Breakfast is his first novel.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
New York City
$5 at the door. Free for Workshop members.
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