Please
join us for a screening of Vincent
Who?, followed by a discussion with Curtis Chin, one of the founders of
Asian Pacific Americans for Progress and producer of the documentary
for a Q and A after the film. Light refreshments will be served.
VINCENT
WHO? (40 minutes) - In 1982, Vincent Chin was murdered in Detroit by
two white autoworkers at the height of anti-Japanese sentiments. For
the first time, Asian Americans around the country galvanized to form a
real community and movement. This documentary, inspired by a series of
town halls organized by Asian Pacific Americans for Progress on the
25th anniversary of the case, features interviews with the key players
at the time, as well as a whole new generation of activists. "Vincent
Who?" asks how far Asian Americans have come since then and how far we
have yet to go.
Featured
interviews include: Helen Zia (lead activist during the Chin trial),
Renee Tajima Pena (director, "Who Killed Vincent Chin?"), Stewart Kwoh
(Executive Director, Asian Pacific American Legal Center), Lisa Ling
(journalist), Sumi Pendakur (Univ. of Southern California), Dale Minami
(civic rights attorney), Frank Wu (former Dean, Wayne State Law
School), Doua Thor (Executive Director, Southeast Asian Resource Action
Center) and a group of five diverse young APA activists whose lives
were impacted by Vincent Chin.
@ The
Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5
suggested donation; open to the public
Donations
will support the New York Chapter of Asian Pacific Americans for
Progress.
The
moon may be waning, but our lunacy is
just beginning. Swing by the Workshop on Friday, February 12 to read
your poems of heartbreak and new beginnings. You may even be reading
between some of your favorite writers! Check back later, or better yet,
show up, to find out who our special guests will be this year.
Jen
Kwok
is a writer and performer whose comedic exploits have been featured on
CNN, PBS, MTV, The New York Times and Rolling Stone Magazine. Jen's
distinct act - a sparkling combination of ukulele, wit and sass! - has
made her a favorite on the NYC performance scene. Jen was also a
finalist in NBC Stand-Up for Diversity, and has an upcoming role in the
film, Eat, Pray, Love.
Ed
Lin
is the author of Waylaid (2002) and This Is a Bust (2007), both
published by Kaya Press. Snakes Can't Run (2010), the sequel to This Is
a Bust, is published by Minotaur Books. Lin, who is of Taiwanese and
Chinese descent, holds degrees in mining engineering and journalism
from Columbia University. He lives in New York with his wife, actress
Cindy Cheung.
@ The
Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5
suggested donation; open to the public
Sign up
for a 5-minute at the event starting at 8:30pm
Help
us celebrate Jason KooÕs
debut collection of poems, Man on Extremely Small Island, which Denise
Duhamel calls "an absurdly funny meditation on loneliness, desire and
the silences between us". Winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize,
Koo's highly engaging collection includes thoughts on practically
everything, from baseball to sandwiches to hippos to love. Koo will
read briefly from his work and answer questions afterward and sign
books. Food and drinks will be provided. Come listen to the work of a
poet whose vision Bob Hicok calls "expansive and humane".
Jason Koo was born in
New York City and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his BA in
English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from the University of
Houston and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University
of Missouri-Columbia. The recipient of fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, he has published
his poetry and prose in numerous journals, including The Yale Review,
North American Review and The Missouri Review. He teaches at NYU and
Lehman College and serves as Poetry Editor of Low Rent. He lives in
Brooklyn.
@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested
donation;
open to the public
Saturday, February
27, 2010 Explore
Bhutan: Culture, Art and Travel
If you've always wanted
to
visit this magical kingdom, come to this event to learn more! There
will be a slide show of beautiful pictures depicting the country's
culture, scenery, history and people, including literary readings and
testimonials from travelers who have recently been there. Sponsored by
Wind Horse Trek and Tours, this event will change your perspective of
Bhutan and make a dream to visit there an actual reality. Hosted by Ugen
Tshering and Debbie
Wong.
Space rental event
Saturday, March
6, 2010 Speed
Dating with Kavita Ramdya, author of Bollywood Weddings.
Purchase
your ticket by March 1st by visiting our ticketing site
Tired of
making eyes at readings and not approaching the hottie next to you?
Wondering how you can meet people thatÕll compliment your
bookcase? Interested in hearing more about love in Asian America? Keep
it in the family and let the Workshop help you find the one at our
first ever speed dating event. The Asian American
Writers' Workshop presents
MATCHMAKER, a special event about how we meet, mingle, and marry in
Asian America. You don't have to be Asian American to attend!
The event
will be hosted by stand-up comedian Jen Kwok, the hilarious mastermind
behind Date an
Asian,
her self-described comic ode to "the awesomeness of dating an asian
guy."
$20 for
members $30 for non-members
Kavita
Ramdya was born in New York City and raised in Long Island. She
received her B.A. from New York University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from
Boston University where she was a Presidential University Graduate
Fellow. She currently works at an American bank in London and is a
regular Arts Opinion-Editorial columnist for ÒNews India
Times". She also writes about popular culture and current events for a
variety of publications, both mainstream and academic, including "India
Abroad" and "The Indian American." Kavita Ramdya co-chairs the Junior
Leadership Circle for Women
for Women International, a
charity which provides financial and emotional assistance to women
survivors of war. By interviewing twenty couples,
Bollywood Weddings addresses
the various methods of meeting a potential future spouse including
using family & friends, personal ads, and internet dating
services and the subtle influence of Bollywood movies throughout.
Friday,
March 12, 2010 A New
Day: Readings by Afghan and Iranian American Writers
Celebrate Now Ruz, our
common
New Year, with an evening of fiction and memoir by ground-breaking
writers from the Afghan and Iranian American
diasporas.ÊAcknowledging the deeply entwined histories of our
peoples and the overlapping richness of our literary traditions, this
reading is inspired by desire to forge new artistic collaborations in
the US, where the breadth and insight of our many stories are most
urgently needed. Ê
Join contributors to
the
forthcoming Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature--Naheed
Elyasi, Sedika
MojadidiÊand Sahar
Muradi--along with
best-selling novelistÊDalia
Sofer, debut
novelistÊFiroozeh
Kashani-SabetÊand
poetic prose writerÊAphrodite
Desiree Navab for readings
and conversation to welcome in the new year. Ê
This event will be
hosted by Zohra
Saed, co-director of the
Association of Afghan American Writers, and
Manijeh Nasrabadi,
co-director of the Association of Iranian American Write,rand
cosponsored by Arte Easts.
Zohra
Saed received her MFA at
Brooklyn College. Her poetry and essays have been published in numerous
anthologies and journals.Ê Most recently inÊ
Gallerie International Journal: Afghanistan Ed. Bina Sarkar (India:
2009); The Crab Orchard Review
(Summer/Fall 2009); and in Speaking
for Herself: Asian WomenÕs Writings
(Penguin India Books: 2009). She has performed as part of the cast of
the legendary theater director Ping ChongÕs Undesirable
Elements in 2000 and in 2007,
where the ensemble caste performed at the first National Asian American
Theater Festival. She is co-editor of the first Anthology
of Contemporary Afghan American Literature
(University of Arkansas Press, forthcoming).
Sedika
Mojadidi is a documentary
filmmaker who has produced both independent films and television
projects. Her film work includes two experimental documentaries shorts
on Afghanistan, Kabul, Kabul
and Zulaikha, both distributed
by Third World Newsreel. Her feature length documentary, Motherland
Afghanistan, about her
fatherÕs struggle to make a difference as an OBGYN working
in Afghanistan, aired on the Independent Lens Documentary Series and
screened at the AFI Film Festival. The United Nations Populations Fund,
(UNFPA) hosted national screenings of Motherland
Afghanistan to raise awareness
about the maternal health fistulas crisis in Afghanistan and globally.
Sedika has lectured extensively on issues of Afghan identity, maternal
health and filming in Afghanistan throughout the country. Her writing
will be published in an anthology of Afghan American writing.
Currently, Sedika is a supervising producer on a medical series, Boston
Med, for ABC News in the long
form documentary unit.
Naheed
Elyasi fled Afghanistan in
1982, three years after the Soviet invasion.Ê Her family
walked across the mountains into Pakistan, where they lived for one
year before being accepted as refugees to the United States. Naheed
grew up in North Carolina, where she studied Communications and Public
Relations.Ê After completing her degree at East Carolina
University, she moved to Atlanta, where she studied Fashion Design. Her
love for fashion brought her to New York in 1999, where she worked as
an assistant designer at Maggy London and in the production department
at Marc Jacobs.Ê She eventually left fashion to pursue a
career in not for profit, and joined School of Hope, an organization
that raised funds for schools in Afghanistan.Ê Naheed is
currently the Director of Communications at the Council for Economic
Education, and a contributing writer for Zeba
Magazine.
Sedika
Mojadidi is a filmmaker and
writer. Her most recent documentary film, Motherland Afghanistan was
aired on PBS. Her films on Afghanistan and the Afghan-American
experience include: Kabul,
Kabul and Zulaikha.
Sahar
Muradi was born in Kabul,
Afghanistan.Ê She and her family emigrated to the United
States when she was three years old. She grew up in New York and
Florida. Ê Sahar received her B.A. in Literature and Creative
Writing from Hampshire College, and her M.P.A. in Interntional
Development from New York University.Ê Sahar has written
extensively about her family experiences, as well as reported on
current events in Afghanistan.Ê Her writing has been featured
in literary magazines, newspapers, as well as read on public
radio.Ê In 2003, Sahar returned to her native Kabul to work
for two years. She helped coordinate a donor conference with the
Foreign Ministry, as well as managed a small grant program for civil
society development.Ê She is currently a Program and Trek
Coordinator for the international organization, buildOn.Ê She
lives in Brooklyn. She is co-editor of the first Anthology
of Contemporary Afghan American Literature
(University of Arkansas Press, forthcoming).
Dalia
Sofer was born in Tehran,
Iran. At the age of eleven she moved to New York, where she attended
the LycŽe Fran�ais de New York, and later, New York University. Dalia
received an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and has been a
resident at Yaddo.ÊShe is the recipient of a Whiting Writers'
Award, of the 2008 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, and of the 2009 Sami
Rohr Choice Award.ÊHer novel,
The Septembers of Shiraz, was
selected as a 2007 New York
Times "Notable Book of the
Year," was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award in 2008, and has been
(or is in the process of being) translated and published in sixteen
countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Spain, Portugal,
Russia, Israel, and Brazil. She has published essays in various
anthologies, and has been aÊcontributor to Poets
& WritersÊmagazine,
the New York Times Book Review,
the Academy of American
PoetsÕ National Poetry Almanac,
and NPR. She lives in New York City.
Firoozeh
Kashani-Sabet teaches
Middle Eastern history and directs the Middle East Center at the
University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Frontier
Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation,
1804-1946 (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Conceiving
Citizens: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in Modern Iran
(forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2010). She is also completing a
book on America 's historical relationship with Iran and the Islamic
world entitled, The Making of
the 'Great Satan': A History of US - Iranian Relations
(under contract with Princeton University Press). Her first novel, Martyrdom
Street, will be published by
Syracuse University Press in 2010.Ê
Aphrodite
DŽsirŽe Navab is a Greek
Iranian American artist and writer based in New York City (b. 1971,
Iran). She uses visual art and writing to investigate transnational
issues in art, education, cultural and womenÕs
studies.Ê The world premiere of her solo show,
She Speaks Greek Farsi was at
ICC Athens, Greece. NavabÕs creative nonfiction and fiction
are published or forthcoming
Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian
Diaspora, Homelands;
WomenÕs Journeys Across Race,
Place
and Time and other anthologies.
She is currently writing her novel.
Friday, March 19,
2010 @ 9PM Mouth
to Mouth Open Mic: Featuring Staceyann Chin and Vidur Kapur
Join us for our second
Open Mic
of the year, hosted by Jen Kwok and Ed Lin. Writer, activist, and
Def Poetry Jam star, Staceyann
Chin reads from her new memoir,
The Other Side of Paradise,
which tells of her coming up in Paradise, Jamaica. As The
Washington Post said,
Ò we saw her perform in 2000 and never forgot
it.Ó You wonÕt either. Last year, stand up
comedian Vidur Kapur was one of the top three booked acts on US college
campuses, where he and moved South Asian and LGBT students on the
margins to the campus core. Come have a drink on us.
Sign up starting at 8:30
(come
early as our slots will fill!)
Open Mic begins at 9:00
Staceyann
Chin is a fulltime artist
and winner of countless slam titles. A resident of New York City and a
Jamaican National, she has been an Òout poet and political
activistÓ since 1998. From the rousing cheers of the
Nuyorican Poets' Cafe to one-woman shows Off- Broadway to poetry
workshops in Denmark and London to co-writer and performer in the Tony
nominated, Russell Simmons Def
Poetry Jam on Broadway, Chin
credits the long list of "things she has done" to her grandmother's
hard-working history and the pain of her mother's absence. Staceyann
has enjoyed great success internationally, with much lauded
performances in London, Denmark, Germany, and New York's own Central
Park- Summer Stage.
Vidur
Kapur was nominated in
Ô08 for a "NewNowNext" Award by MTV Network's Logo as "Brink
of Fame: Comic". Vidur was selected as a New York finalist by NBC's
"Stand Up for Diversity" initiative and performed as part of the famous
New York Comedy Festival where he was described as "a comedian to
remember". Vidur starred in a VH1 tv pilot called "Carolines" which
will be aired soon. Vidur's most recent stand-up special "One Night
Stand Up" Vol. 2 is currently airing on Logo. He was listed by India
Tribune as one of the "Top 31 personalities of Indian Americans". He
has co-starred with Margaret Cho in MTV LOGO's "Outlaugh Festival on
Wisecrack" and has toured internationally including Canada, India, the
UK, Ireland, the Caribbean and South Africa.
Internationally
acclaimed
avant-electronica superduo Matmos slice breakbeats out of ballad
stanzas in a brand new collaboration with poet Monica Youn, based on
her just-released book of poems Ignatz,
which itself is a reconceptualization of George Herriman's classic
comic strip Krazy Kat.
Purchase your tickets here.
Performance: 8pm ($10
donation)
Ignatz Book Party: 9pm (FREE)
Matmos
(M.C.
Schmidt and Drew Daniel) are notorious for their musique concrete
mash-ups: amplified crayfish nerve tissue, liposuction surgery, a cow
uterus, latex fetish clothing, a five gallon bucket of oatmeal. They
have released eight albums, most recently Supreme Balloon (Matador
2008).ÊIn 2001 they were asked to collaborate with the
Icelandic singer Bjork on her ÒVespertineÓ album,
and subsequently embarked on two world tours as part of her band. They
have also collaborated with a wide range of artists across disciplines
from the Kronos Quartet and Antony and the Johnsons to visual artist
Daria Martin and playwright Young Jean Lee (for her play
ÒThe AppealÓ).
AAWW Board member Monica
Youn's second book of poems
IGNATZ was recently published by Four Way Books. Her first book Barter
was published in 2003 from Graywolf Press. She has been awarded poetry
fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Rockefeller Foundation,
and Stanford University and has been a visiting professor of creative
writing at Pratt Institute and at Columbia University. She works as an
attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where
she is the director of the campaign finance reform project.
Thursday, March 25,
2010 @ 7PM On the
Run: A Reading with Nami Mun and Sonya Chung
Photo
by Brigitte Sire
Photo
by Robin Holland
Sometimes
when you run away from something, you can find yourself surprised to
end up at home. Join debut novelists Sonya Chung and Nami Mun as they
read about characters on the run from exes, parents, and, that worst
enemy, themselves. In ChungÕs
Long for this World, a war
photographer and her father take refuge and rediscover their families
in Korea. National Book Award finalist Kate Walbert calls it an
Òintricately structured and powerfully resonant portrait of
lives lived at the crossroads of culture.Ó In Miles
from Nowhere, we follow
Joon-Mee, a 12 year old runaway, through 1980s New York, a landscape of
escort clubs, addiction, petty crimes. Whiting Award-winner Alexander
Chee has called Nami Mun Òeasily one of the most important
new talents in American fiction.Ó
Sonya
ChungÕs short
fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The
Threepenny Review, BOMB
Magazine, Crab
Orchard Review, and Sonora
Review, among other
publications. ÊShe is a recipient of the Charles Johnson
Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and the Bronx Council on
the Arts Literary Fellowship and Residency. Ê
Nami
Mun currently lives and
teaches in Chicago, was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up there
and in Bronx, New York. She has worked as an Avon Lady, a street
vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a
nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator. After earning a GED,
she went on to get a BA in English from UC Berkeley, and an MFA from
University of Michigan, where she received the first place Hopwood
Award for short fiction. Her debut novel, Miles
from Nowhere (Riverhead), was
shortlisted for the Orange Award and selected for AmazonÕs
Best Fiction of 2009 So Far, Indie Next, and Booklist
ÒEditorsÕ ChoiceÓ as well as
ÒTop Ten First Novels.Ó Named Best New Novelist
of 2009 by Chicago magazine, she is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and
a 2009 Whiting Award.
Wednesday, April 7,
2010 @ 7PM Book
party - Ken Chen's Juvenilia with Louise Gluck
Join us
as we celebrate the publication of AAWW Executive Director Ken
ChenÕs debut poetry collection Juvenilia. As winner of the
2009 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the oldest literary award in
the country, Chen will read from his work following an introduction by
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise GlŸck, who says,
ÒLike only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a
new category.Ó Close friends will embarrass Ken with
intimate stories, booze and snacks will be served and a surprise
musical performance will round off the evening. For more information
about the book, click here.
To honor
the vivacious collection, we ask that you come dressed as one of the
characters from Juvenilia, including but not limited to:
Your
Mother
Your
Father
Your
Ex
Lovelorn
Emo Poet
God
Adulterer
Executioner
Marcel
Proust
Ken
Chen
Doctor
with Hair Plugs
Batman
Robert
Johnson
A
Tetris Block
Chinese
Mermaid
Werewolf
Secretary
Vincent
Van Gogh
Miserable
Angel
Super
Mario
Time
Itself
Or
at the very least, throw on an outrageous outfit, your Eyes
Wide Shut mask or your last
Halloween costume. Best costume will win a free autographed copy of Juvenilia.
Books will be sold at the event.
Please
RSVP to this event by emailing ssharif@aaww.org
with the subject heading ÒRSVP
Ken Chen Book PartyÓ
by April 6 so we will have an idea of how many freaks clad in sequins
we will be serving liquor to. WeÕll send you location and
directions in the RSVP.
Friday, April 9,
2010 @ 7PM The
Asian American WritersÕ Workshop Group Reading at AAAS
Special
out-of-town edition! Join us for an all-star group reading featuring
writers Tsering Wangmo Dhompa,
Jennifer Hayashida, Juliette Lee, Jackelyn M. Mariano, Hoa Nguyen,
Karen Tei Yamashita, and Timothy Yu.
This event will be held at the Association for Asian American Studies
Conference in Austin, Texas.
@ AAAS
Bouquet Room, Omni Austin Hotel Downtown
700 San Jacinto Boulevard
Wednesday, April
14, 2010 @ 7PM The
Asian American Avant-Garde: John Yau, Jennifer Hayashida and Mei-Mei
Berssenbrugge
WeÕre
used to thinking of poetry as either experimental or ethnic, political
or formalist. But legendary poets John Yau and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
challenge the very existence of poetic camps. Their ground-breaking
work, influenced as much by visual arts as verbal, pushes American
letters to its threshold. This special reading and conversation on the
Asian American avant-garde will be led by John YauÕs former
student, who is currently the Director of the Asian American Studies
Department at Hunter College, poet Jennifer Hayashida.
Mei-Mei
Berssennbrugge was born in
Beijing and raised in Massachusetts. Intimately engaged with the New
York School and Language poets, BerssenbruggeÕs honors
include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two
American Book Awards, and honors from the Asian American Writers
Workshop. Berssenbrugge is the author of several volumes of poetry,
most recently I Love Artists:
New and Selected Poems
(University of California Press, 2006) and Concordance (Kelsey St.
Press, 2006), a collaboration with the sculptor Kiki Smith. Her other
collections include Nest
(2003); The Four Year Old Girl
(1998); Endocrinology
(1997), an earlier collaboration with Kiki Smith, which won the
WorkshopÕs Asian American Literary Award in poetry.
Jennifer
Hayashida is the translator of
Fredrik NybergÕs A
Different Practice (Ugly
Duckling Presse, 2007) and Eva SjšdinÕs Inner
China (Litmus Press, 2005).
Additional work has appeared in journals and art exhibitions
domestically and abroad, most recently in the Spring 2009 issue of Salt
Hill and as part of the 2009
LuleΠBiennial. She is currently a 2009 NYFA Fellow in
Poetry, and has been an LMCC Writer-in-Residence, a MacDowell Colony
Fellow, as well as the recipient of a Jerome Foundation Travel and
Study Grant. She recently completed A
Machine Wrote This Song, a
manuscript of poems, and is now at work on a long essay entitled
ÒThe Autonomic System.Ó She lives in Brooklyn and
is Acting Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter
College, The City University of New York. Her website can be found at www.jenniferhayashida.info.
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.
Co-sponsored
by The Creative Writing Program at NYU
@ Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues
Sponsored
by:
Thursday, April 15,
2010 @ 7PM Eyes
Up Front: Students and Teachers Read
Who says
writing is all extracurricular? Tonight teachers, writers, students
join together to read from their mixed-bag experiences of schooling.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum reads from her quirky novel-in-stories Ms.
Hempel Chronicles, that follows
seventh-grade teacher Ms. Hempel through her human struggles with
teaching. As Time
magazine puts it, ÒitÕs a pleasure to be in her
class.Ó Poets R. Erica Doyle and Bushra Rehman read
alongside mentors and mentees from Girls Write Now and Teachers and
Writers. This cross-generational reading will take down some barriers
between teachers and students, reminding you of what it was like to
walk those hallways between class.
R.
Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn
to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and has lived in Washington, D.C.,
Farmington, Connecticut, and La Marsa, Tunisia. Her work has appeared
in Best American Poetry, Our
Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles,
Callaloo, Ploughshares, Best Black Women's Erotica, Bum Rush the Page,
and Ms.
Magazine. She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright
Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and fellowships from the
New York Foundation for the Arts and from Cave Canem: A Workshop and
Retreat for Black Writers. Her manuscript, proxy, was a finalist for
the 2007 Cave Cavem Poetry Prize, selected by Claudia Rankine. She
received her MFA in Poetry from the New School, and she lives in New
York City, where she is at work on a novel, Fortune.
Erica is a NYC public school teacher and the facilitator of Tongues
Afire: A Creative Writing Workshop for queer women and trans- and
gender- non-conforming people of color.
Suji
Kim attends Millennium High
School, where she works with Teachers and Writers. She lived in
Pennsylvania until she came to New York almost two years ago. Now she
lives in an apartment in Park Slope with her dad, stepmom, two cats,
and a pug.
The first
cover letter Nancy Mercado
ever wrote began like this: ÒMy friends are worried about
me. It seems my current bookshelf resembles that of a ten year old
girl.Ó That letter got her an interview at Scholastic Books,
where she worked for four years, which led her to Penguin where she
worked for six. She is currently an executive editor at Roaring Brook
Press, working on middle grade and young adult novels. Born and raised
in Staten Island and a graduate of SUNY Albany with a major in Spanish,
this is NancyÕs first year with Girls Write Now.
Anna
Poon is a second year Girls
Write Now mentee. She lives in Brooklyn, but goes to school in
Manhattan, where she is a junior at Hunter College High School. As she
says, ÒIÕve got a voice, an overactive
imagination, and they can only be used to tell stories.Ó
Kirthana
Ramisetti once put herself on a
pop culture diet to try to curtail the amount of time she spent reading
entertainment news and celebrity gossip. That didn't work out so
well—she eventually joined NextWeb Media, where as managing
editor she now reads nearly every website in the universe, from Perez
Hilton to Politico. Though she never envisioned that an MFA degree in
creative writing from Emerson College would lead to a career that
indulges her pop culture addiction, she enjoys working in the mobile
media industry overseeing SMS-based trivia games. Kirthana has also
been published in a variety of print and online publications, including
Entertainment
Weekly, East West Magazine, PopMatters
and West Side Spirit.
This is her first year with Girls Write Now.
Bushra
Rehman is author of the
collection of poetry, Marianna's
Beauty Salon (Vagabond Press,
2001), and co-editor of Colonize
This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism
(Seal Press, 2002). She performs her work around the country and is
currently working on an on-the-road adventure novel. Bushra's work has
been featured on BBC Radio 4, KPFA, WBAI and in the New
York Times, NY Newsday, Color Lines, Curve,
and SAMAR.
To read excerpts visit bushrarehman.com.
Syeda
Showkat was born in
Bangladesh—Òa tiny speck of dirt off the coast of
India.Ó She came to the United States as a four year old and
is now living in it as a Bengali-American-Muslim teenager. In her first
year as a Girls Write Now mentee, she writes because Òmy
mind wonÕt leave me alone!Ó
Sarah
Shun-lien BynumÕs
first novel, Madeleine Is
Sleeping, was a finalist for the
National Book Award and winner of the Kafka Prize for fiction by an
American woman. Her work has appeared in several journals and
anthologies, including The New
Yorker, Tin House, and The
Best American Short Stories. The
recipient of a Whiting WritersÕ Award and a NEA Fellowship,
she teaches writing and literature at the University of California, San
Diego. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Co-sponsored
by Teachers and Writers and Girls Write Now
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Friday, April 16,
2010 @ 9PM Mouth
to Mouth Open Mic featuring Ed Lin reading from Snakes
CanÕt Run
Our third
Open Mic of the year will feature our very own Ed Lin and Jen Kwok! Ed,
winner of the most MembersÕ Choice awards in Workshop
history, will read from his latest novel Snakes CanÕt Run.
It's a hot summer in New York's Chinatown in 1976 and Robert Chow, the
Chinese-American detective son of an illegal immigrant, takes on a new
breed of ruthless human smugglersÐsnakeheadsÐwhen two
bodies of smuggled Chinese are found dead under the Brooklyn Bridge
overpass. But as Robert comes closer to finding some answers, he
discovers a dark secret in his own family's past. Then check out the
live screening of "Take
You Home" by Jen Kwok, featuring
Miss
CKC.
This followup to "Date
an Asian" takes on the dating
world at large, and winks equally at both girly dance pop and "panty
dropper" genres. Directed by Ballard
Boyd,
Music Produced by soce, the
elemental wizard.
Sign up
at 8:30 PM
Open Mic at 9:00 PM
$5 suggested donation; open to the public
Sunday, April 18,
2010 @ 4PM Book
party - David L. Eng's The
Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy
and Ed Cohen's A Body Worth
Defending: Immunity, Politics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body
Our bodies,
our selves? Join us as we celebrate the publication of two provocative
new books exploring the intersection of race, gender, sexuality,
physicality, and politics. David
L. Eng is Professor of English
and Comparative Literature and a core faculty member of Asian American
Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Ed
Cohen teaches cultural studies
and directs the graduate program in Women's and Gender Studies at
Rutgers University.
Sponsored
by:
Thursday, April 22,
2010 @ 7PM The Voice
that Speaks Across the Distance: A Celebration of Meena Alexander's Poetics
of Dislocation and Reetika
Vazirani's Radha Says
Meena
Alexander and Reetika Vazirani have played a pivotal role in naming a
collective language of loss and migration. In Poetics
of Dislocation, Guggenheim
fellow Meena AlexanderÕs essays on poetry discuss what it
means to become an American poet and to make your own place in a time
of violence. The essays offer a rare look into the process of a real
force in Asian American poetry. We also honor Radha
Says, Reetika
VaziraniÕs posthumous collection of poems and the first book
published by Drunken Boat.
A book of absence and lyrical triumph, VaziraniÕs poems rise
above her premature passing from suicide in 2003 to a key place in
contemporary poetry. Introduced by Drunken
Boat managing editor Leslie
McGrath. Former friends and colleagues, including poets Patrick Rosal
and Harriet Levin, will read from VaziraniÕs work.
Meena
Alexander, poet, novelist,
scholar, and essayist, is winner of multiple awards and fellowships,
including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright
Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Arts Council of England. Her
six volumes of poetry include the collection, Illiterate
Heart (Triquarterly, 2002),
which won the PEN Open Book Award. Her autobiography, Fault
Lines, chosen as one of
Publishers WeeklyÕs Best Books of 1993, and is now regarded
as a post-colonial classic. She is Distinguished Professor of English
at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Leslie
McGrath is the managing editor
of Drunken Boat,
an online journal of the arts. Her poems have appeared in Agni
online, Alimentum, Beloit Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, Poetry Ireland,
and elsewhere. Her literary interviews have appeared in the WriterÕs
Chronicle and on public radio.
Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, her first collection
of poetry, Opulent Hunger,
Opulent Rage, was published by
Main Street Rag Press (2009.) She is also the editor, along with Ravi
Shankar, of Radha Says, the posthumous poetry collection of Reetika
Vazirani, published by Drunken Boat Press.
Harriet
Levin is the author of The
Christmas Show (Beacon Press,
1997), Philadelphia Inquirer Notable Book of the Year and winner of a
Barnard New Women Poet's Prize, a Poetry Society of America Alice Fay
di Catagnola Award and an Ellen LaForge Memorial Poetry Prize. A new
collection, Girl in Cap and
Gown (Mammoth Books) was a 2009
National Poetry Series Finalist. Recent work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Iowa Review,
Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, Drunken Boat, Ploughshares,
Prairie Schooner and Harvard
Review. She lives in
Philadelphia, where she is Writing Program Director at Drexel
University and a founder of The Reunion Project, which reunites Lost
Boys and Girls of Sudan with their mothers.
Patrick
Rosal is the author of two
full-length poetry collections, Uprock
Headspin Scramble and Dive,
which won the Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers'
Workshop, and more recently, My
American Kundiman, which won the
Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry as well
as the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award. His poems and essays have
been published widely in journals and anthologies including American
Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Harvard Review, Crab Orchard Review,
Indiana Review, North American Review, The Literary Review,
Pindledyboz, Black Renaissance Noire, Brevity: A Journal of Concise
Literary Non-Fiction. Awarded a
2009 Fulbright grant,, he has received teaching appointments at Penn
State Altoona, Centre College, the University of Texas, Austin, and
Drew University.
Reetika
Vazirani was born in India in
1962 and emigrated to the United States with her family as a child. She
received her BA from Wellesley College and her MFA from the University
of Virginia. Her first collection of poetry, White
Elephants, (Beacon Press, 1996)
won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Her second collection, World
Hotel, (Copper Canyon Press,
2002) won the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Vazirani received a
Pushcart Prize, a Poets & Writers Exchange Program Award, the
Glenna Luchei Award from Prairie Schooner, and a
ÒDiscoveryÓ/The Nation award. She was
writer-in-residence at Sweet Briar College and later at the College of
William and Mary in 2002. Vazirani took her own life and that of her
son, Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa, on July 16, 2003. Her posthumous
collection, Radha Says, edited by Leslie McGrath and Ravi Shankar, was
published by Drunken Boat in January.
$5
suggested donation; open to the public
Friday, April 23,
2010 @
12:30PM Now Talks:
Memories of China Pearl S.
Buck's China: Tea with Anchee Min
Raised in
the height of the Cultural Revolution, Anchee Min was taught to
denounce Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The
Good Earth. Buck, who lived in
China and is known for her depictions of Chinese life prior to
communism, was considered by Mao-era China to be a Western infiltrator.
In 1984, after years on a brutal labor camp and a stint as an actress
in a propaganda film produced by Madame Mao, Min fled to the United
States, where she taught herself English and finally read Pearl S.
Buck. The result is her novel Pearl
of China, a celebration of Buck
through the eyes of a fiercely loyal friend, Willow Yee. Over tea at
the Asia Society, Min discusses what it means to rediscover a writer
deemed an enemy, and what it means for all of us to write in the shadow
of the Cultural Revolution. Purchase your tickets here.
Anchee
MinÕs first book, the
memoir Red Azalea,
became an international bestseller. She has also published five
previous novels: Empress Orchid
and The Last Empress,
set during the last years of Imperial China; and Katherine,
Becoming Madame Mao, and Wild
Ginger, set during the Cultural
Revolution and its aftermath.
Free for
Asia Society and AAWW members
$10 Non-Members; $5 Students with ID; $5 Seniors
Co-sponsored
by Asia Society
Location: 725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street)
New York, NY 10021
Sponsored
by:
Program
supported in part by the C.J. Huang Foundation
Thursday, April 29,
2010, @
7PM Now Talks:
Special Immigration Series Not a
Tourist: The New Terrain of Asian America
Fundamentalist
parents, dot-com millionaires, ukuleles on YouTube, and The Great
WallÑyou can see the landscape of Asian America in its
multiplicity. Four writers navigate this complicated terrain, as their
protagonists journey to keep it all together across multiple cities. In
Children of
Dust, Ali EterazÕs
debut memoir, we follow him from a student in a Pakistani madrassa to a
young adult coming to his own understanding of Islam. In Deanna
FeiÕs A Thread of
Sky, three generations of women
take a family tour of mainland China and begin challenging the silences
of their lives. In Wena PoonÕs surprising short story
collection Lions in Winter,
Singapore and the West are not culturally opposed, but a share a
landscape of compassion and wit. In Asian
Americans in the Twenty-first Century: Oral Histories of First- to
Fourth-generation Americans from China, Japan, India, Korea, the
Philippines, Vietnam, and Laos,
Joanne Faung Jean Lee collects testimony from a wide swath of Asian
America, from liquor store owners to stay-at-home moms. Rethink what it
means represent Asian America today with four writers, four genres, and
dozens of lives.
Wena
Poon, 36, is a Singapore-born
American fiction writer. Her first book, Lions
In Winter, about Asians in the
West, appeared in the Top 10 Bestseller List for Fiction in The Straits
Times in Singapore, and was nominated for the Popular
ReadersÕ Choice Awards in Malaysia. Her four volume literary
sci-fi series, The Biophilia Omnibus, was voted Best Book Gift of the
Year (CNN Singapore). She has recently published The
Proper Care of Foxes, about
transatlantic life, and a new novel, Alex
y Robert, about an American
woman matador in Spain, will be released this summer. Her work, Shinto
Rabbit, will be exhibited in 14
Asian cities as part of the Moleskine Passions Book Exhibition in 2010.
WenaÕs fiction has been listed for Frank OÕConnor
International Short Story Award in Ireland, the Willesden International
Short Story Award in England, and the Singapore Literature Prize.
Ali
Eteraz is a graduate of Emory
University, where he collected high honors in Philosophy, and Temple
University Law School. His first prose work, Children
of Dust (HarperOne, 2009), was
called ÒcompellingÓ by the Washington Post and
chosen for the Fall Reading List of O:
The Oprah Magazine. It was also
listed among the 2009 Books of the Year by New
Statesman, and has been
translated into Italian.
Deanna
Fei was born in Flushing, NY,
and has lived in Beijing and Shanghai, China. A graduate of Amherst
College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has received a Fulbright
Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Chinese
Cultural Scholarship, among other awards. She currently lives in
Brooklyn and is a NYC public school teacher. A
Thread of Sky is her first
novel.
Joann
Lee is a professor and
journalist. Asian Americans in
the 21st Century (New Press,
2009) marks LeeÕs third book of Asian American oral history,
causing one reviewer to refer to her as the Studs Terkel of Asian
Americans. She is currently Professor and Chairperson of the
Communication Department at William Paterson University. As a
journalist, Lee was the first Asian American reporter hired by CNN, as
well as its first New York Correspondent, covering Wall Street, the
United Nations, and the court system. The Chinese Historical Society of
America named her as one of its first honorees for its Chinese American
Pioneers in Broadcast Award. Her first book, Asian
Americans, was selected as
Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human
Rights in the United States.
$5
suggested donation; open to the public
Sponsored
by:
Program
supported in part by the C.J. Huang Foundation
Friday, May 7, 2010 @
7PM Do You Copy:
War according to Poets Wing Tek Lum, Luis Francia, and Kaveh Bassiri
The
violence of war is often followed by a shadow: a violence against
language itself. So how do poets engage with narratives of war? From
the Philippines to Iran, displacement and trauma at the hands of
warfare effects Asian writing in the United States today. Tonight, the
legendary Wing Tek Lum
reads from his latest poems, written largely in the voices of Japanese
soldiers during the Nanjing Massacre. Luis
Francia, editor of
groundbreaking historical compilation The
Vestiges of War, sheds light on
the largely-ignored 1899 Philippine-American War. And Kaveh
Bassiri writes on conflict in
Iran.
Wing
Tek Lum was born in
HawaiÕi. He has an undergraduate degree in engineering, a
masterÕs degree in divinity, and has been a social worker
and a businessman. His debut poetry collection, Expounding
the Doubtful Points, won a 1988
American Book Award.
Luis
Francia was born and raised in
Manila. He is the author of autobiographical travelogue Eye
of the Fish, and teaches at NYU.
Kaveh
Bassiri was born in Iran. He is
the co-founder of Triptych Readings and the Literary Art Director for
the Persian Arts Festival.
@
The Asian American Writers' Workshop new
home
110-112 W 27th Street, 6th Floor
Btwn 6th and 7th Avenues
Monday, May 10, 2010
@ 6:30
p.m. Now Talks:
Memories of China Belle Yang:
Forget Sorrow
Writer
and artist Belle Yang began her graphic memoir, Forget
Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale,
during time spent at her parentsÕ home escaping the
harassment of an abusive ex-boyfriend. Sequestered with her family,
Yang used the time to explore their rich and tumultuous past, through
famine, war, and changing fortunes in 19th century China. In her
ancestral history, Yang finds the strength to overcome personal
obstacles and, as her Chinese name Xuan
to dictates, Òforget
sorrow.Ó
Belle
Yang was born in Taiwan and
raised in Japan and the United States. During a year in Scotland, Yang
rejected a planned career as a doctor and decided instead to emulate
her father and become an artist. Her arrival in China in order to study
at the Academy of Traditional Painting constituted a certain
homecoming—one which was rudely shattered by the events at
Tienanmen. Subsequently she returned to the United States, beginning a
successful career as a writer and illustrator. She now lives in Carmel,
California, and counts Blake and Sun-Tzu among her favorite authors.
The event
will be moderated by Eisner-nominated graphic novelist Christine
Norrie, author of Cheat
and Breaking Up.
Reserve your spot through Asia SocietyÕs ticketing
site.
Co-sponsored
by Asia Society
Location: 725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street)
New York, NY 10021
Sponsored
by:
Friday, May 14, 2010
@ 7 p.m. Now Talks:
Special Immigration Series Jean Kwok: Girl
in Translation
Jean
KwokÕsGirl
in
Translation is an archetypal
immigrant success story: the daughter of a Chinatown sweatshop laborer
learns English and works hard to put herself through Harvard and
Columbia. This special mother-and-daughter story vividly captures what
itÕs like to grow up as an immigrant between languages and
between cultures: the conflicts between Chinese and American identity,
practical poverty and intellectual richness, language and
miscommunication, and family responsibility and following
oneÕs own heart. The book is unique in its literary ambition
(Jean ages the narrator twenty years in 300 pages), its deft portrayal
of Chinese American factory life with both heartbreak and a wry humor,
and the way it illuminates what it means for all of us to be American.
As Min Jin Lee, author of the bestselling Food
for Millionaires, writes,
ÒThe possibility of Kimberly ChangÕs
extraordinary struggle and achievement is what makes America a great
nationÑgenerous, forgiving and full of hope. Kwok perfectly
captures the voice and perspective of a young immigrant, and the result
is a powerful work about love, sacrifice and faith.Ó
Treat
yourself to a special night with a heart-breaking story of an immigrant
girl and her motherÑa story thatÕll suck you in
with its warmth, humor and vitality. As The
Believer editor Vendela Vida
writes, ÒGirl in Translation took me completely by surprise:
I started it at midnight, thinking I would read a few pages, and found
myself, hours later, completely absorbed in the story...This is an
incredibly impressive debut." DonÕt miss our special night
featuring Girl in Translation, which has been selected as a
ÒDiscover Great New WritersÓ pick for Barnes and
Noble and named by Entertainment
Weekly as one of the
ÒBooks We CanÕt Wait to Read This
Summer.Ó
Jean
Kwok was born in Hong Kong.
Although Girl in Translation
is a work of fiction and not a memoir, Jean also moved to New York as a
young girl and worked in a sweatshop in Chinatown. Leaving this life
behind, Jean attended Harvard and has worked as a dishwasher,
blind-reader, summer program director, ballroom dancer, media advisor,
and ESL teacher, but currently lives in the Netherlands, where she is
finally able to write full-time. She can neither drive nor swim. You
can read her blog here.
@The Asian
American WritersÕ Workshop new home
110-112 W 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Fall 2009
Events
this season sponsored by:
Beerlao and The Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
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.
Sponsored
by: Program
supported in part by the C.J. Huang Foundation
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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.
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.
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)
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)
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)
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
Summer 2009
Events
this season sponsored by:
Beerlao and The Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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.
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)
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)
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
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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.
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)
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
Ã’Twenty 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
Ã’punchy 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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
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)
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
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)
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
Program
supported in part by the C.J. Huang Foundation
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)
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
Program
supported in part by the C.J. Huang Foundation
Fall
2008
Events
this season sponsored by:
Singha Beer and The Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
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)
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.
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)
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 ara–a
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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.
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!
In Henry
Chang'sYear
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)
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)
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.
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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.
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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)
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)
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)
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.
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)
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)
"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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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'sBehind
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 ForchÂŽ has
written"Language for a New Century [is] a field guide to the human
condition in our time."
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)
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)
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.
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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 G—mez 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.
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)
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.
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)
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)
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
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
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).
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)
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
Please
join us for a screening of Vincent
Who?, followed by a discussion with Curtis Chin, one of the founders of
Asian Pacific Americans for Progress and producer of the documentary
for a Q and A after the film. Light refreshments will be served.
The
moon may be waning, but our lunacy is
just beginning. Swing by the Workshop on Friday, February 12 to read
your poems of heartbreak and new beginnings. You may even be reading
between some of your favorite writers! Check back later, or better yet,
show up, to find out who our special guests will be this year. 
Help
us celebrate Jason KooÕs
debut collection of poems, Man on Extremely Small Island, which Denise
Duhamel calls "an absurdly funny meditation on loneliness, desire and
the silences between us". Winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize,
Koo's highly engaging collection includes thoughts on practically
everything, from baseball to sandwiches to hippos to love. Koo will
read briefly from his work and answer questions afterward and sign
books. Food and drinks will be provided. Come listen to the work of a
poet whose vision Bob Hicok calls "expansive and humane". 
Jason Koo was born in
New York City and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his BA in
English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from the University of
Houston and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University
of Missouri-Columbia. The recipient of fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, he has published
his poetry and prose in numerous journals, including The Yale Review,
North American Review and The Missouri Review. He teaches at NYU and
Lehman College and serves as Poetry Editor of Low Rent. He lives in
Brooklyn. 
merican
Writers' Workshop presents
MATCHMAKER, a special event about how we meet, mingle, and marry in
Asian America. You don't have to be Asian American to attend!
Photo
by Brigitte Sire 
Photo
by Robin Holland 
Who says
writing is all extracurricular? Tonight teachers, writers, students
join together to read from their mixed-bag experiences of schooling.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum reads from her quirky novel-in-stories Ms.
Hempel Chronicles, that follows
seventh-grade teacher Ms. Hempel through her human struggles with
teaching. As Time
magazine puts it, ÒitÕs a pleasure to be in her
class.Ó Poets R. Erica Doyle and Bushra Rehman read
alongside mentors and mentees from Girls Write Now and Teachers and
Writers. This cross-generational reading will take down some barriers
between teachers and students, reminding you of what it was like to
walk those hallways between class.
R.
Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn
to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and has lived in Washington, D.C.,
Farmington, Connecticut, and La Marsa, Tunisia. Her work has appeared
in Best American Poetry, Our
Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles,
Callaloo, Ploughshares, Best Black Women's Erotica, Bum Rush the Page,
and Ms.
Magazine. She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright
Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and fellowships from the
New York Foundation for the Arts and from Cave Canem: A Workshop and
Retreat for Black Writers. Her manuscript, proxy, was a finalist for
the 2007 Cave Cavem Poetry Prize, selected by Claudia Rankine. She
received her MFA in Poetry from the New School, and she lives in New
York City, where she is at work on a novel, Fortune.
Erica is a NYC public school teacher and the facilitator of Tongues
Afire: A Creative Writing Workshop for queer women and trans- and
gender- non-conforming people of color. 
Our bodies,
our selves? Join us as we celebrate the publication of two provocative
new books exploring the intersection of race, gender, sexuality,
physicality, and politics. David
L. Eng is Professor of English
and Comparative Literature and a core faculty member of Asian American
Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Ed
Cohen teaches cultural studies
and directs the graduate program in Women's and Gender Studies at
Rutgers University.
Meena
Alexander, poet, novelist,
scholar, and essayist, is winner of multiple awards and fellowships,
including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright
Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Arts Council of England. Her
six volumes of poetry include the collection, Illiterate
Heart (Triquarterly, 2002),
which won the PEN Open Book Award. Her autobiography, Fault
Lines, chosen as one of
Publishers WeeklyÕs Best Books of 1993, and is now regarded
as a post-colonial classic. She is Distinguished Professor of English
at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. 
Leslie
McGrath is the managing editor
of Drunken Boat,
an online journal of the arts. Her poems have appeared in Agni
online, Alimentum, Beloit Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, Poetry Ireland,
and elsewhere. Her literary interviews have appeared in the WriterÕs
Chronicle and on public radio.
Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, her first collection
of poetry, Opulent Hunger,
Opulent Rage, was published by
Main Street Rag Press (2009.) She is also the editor, along with Ravi
Shankar, of Radha Says, the posthumous poetry collection of Reetika
Vazirani, published by Drunken Boat Press. 
Patrick
Rosal is the author of two
full-length poetry collections, Uprock
Headspin Scramble and Dive,
which won the Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers'
Workshop, and more recently, My
American Kundiman, which won the
Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry as well
as the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award. His poems and essays have
been published widely in journals and anthologies including American
Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Harvard Review, Crab Orchard Review,
Indiana Review, North American Review, The Literary Review,
Pindledyboz, Black Renaissance Noire, Brevity: A Journal of Concise
Literary Non-Fiction. Awarded a
2009 Fulbright grant,, he has received teaching appointments at Penn
State Altoona, Centre College, the University of Texas, Austin, and
Drew University. 
Reetika
Vazirani was born in India in
1962 and emigrated to the United States with her family as a child. She
received her BA from Wellesley College and her MFA from the University
of Virginia. Her first collection of poetry, White
Elephants, (Beacon Press, 1996)
won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Her second collection, World
Hotel, (Copper Canyon Press,
2002) won the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Vazirani received a
Pushcart Prize, a Poets & Writers Exchange Program Award, the
Glenna Luchei Award from Prairie Schooner, and a
ÒDiscoveryÓ/The Nation award. She was
writer-in-residence at Sweet Briar College and later at the College of
William and Mary in 2002. Vazirani took her own life and that of her
son, Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa, on July 16, 2003. Her posthumous
collection, Radha Says, edited by Leslie McGrath and Ravi Shankar, was
published by Drunken Boat in January. 
Wena
Poon, 36, is a Singapore-born
American fiction writer. Her first book, Lions
In Winter, about Asians in the
West, appeared in the Top 10 Bestseller List for Fiction in The Straits
Times in Singapore, and was nominated for the Popular
ReadersÕ Choice Awards in Malaysia. Her four volume literary
sci-fi series, The Biophilia Omnibus, was voted Best Book Gift of the
Year (CNN Singapore). She has recently published The
Proper Care of Foxes, about
transatlantic life, and a new novel, Alex
y Robert, about an American
woman matador in Spain, will be released this summer. Her work, Shinto
Rabbit, will be exhibited in 14
Asian cities as part of the Moleskine Passions Book Exhibition in 2010.
WenaÕs fiction has been listed for Frank OÕConnor
International Short Story Award in Ireland, the Willesden International
Short Story Award in England, and the Singapore Literature Prize. 
Ali
Eteraz is a graduate of Emory
University, where he collected high honors in Philosophy, and Temple
University Law School. His first prose work, Children
of Dust (HarperOne, 2009), was
called ÒcompellingÓ by the Washington Post and
chosen for the Fall Reading List of O:
The Oprah Magazine. It was also
listed among the 2009 Books of the Year by New
Statesman, and has been
translated into Italian. 
Deanna
Fei was born in Flushing, NY,
and has lived in Beijing and Shanghai, China. A graduate of Amherst
College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has received a Fulbright
Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Chinese
Cultural Scholarship, among other awards. She currently lives in
Brooklyn and is a NYC public school teacher. A
Thread of Sky is her first
novel. 
Joann
Lee is a professor and
journalist. Asian Americans in
the 21st Century (New Press,
2009) marks LeeÕs third book of Asian American oral history,
causing one reviewer to refer to her as the Studs Terkel of Asian
Americans. She is currently Professor and Chairperson of the
Communication Department at William Paterson University. As a
journalist, Lee was the first Asian American reporter hired by CNN, as
well as its first New York Correspondent, covering Wall Street, the
United Nations, and the court system. The Chinese Historical Society of
America named her as one of its first honorees for its Chinese American
Pioneers in Broadcast Award. Her first book, Asian
Americans, was selected as
Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human
Rights in the United States. 
Belle
Yang was born in Taiwan and
raised in Japan and the United States. During a year in Scotland, Yang
rejected a planned career as a doctor and decided instead to emulate
her father and become an artist. Her arrival in China in order to study
at the Academy of Traditional Painting constituted a certain
homecoming—one which was rudely shattered by the events at
Tienanmen. Subsequently she returned to the United States, beginning a
successful career as a writer and illustrator. She now lives in Carmel,
California, and counts Blake and Sun-Tzu among her favorite authors. 
Treat
yourself to a special night with a heart-breaking story of an immigrant
girl and her motherÑa story thatÕll suck you in
with its warmth, humor and vitality. As The
Believer editor Vendela Vida
writes, ÒGirl in Translation took me completely by surprise:
I started it at midnight, thinking I would read a few pages, and found
myself, hours later, completely absorbed in the story...This is an
incredibly impressive debut." DonÕt miss our special night
featuring Girl in Translation, which has been selected as a
ÒDiscover Great New WritersÓ pick for Barnes and
Noble and named by Entertainment
Weekly as one of the
ÒBooks We CanÕt Wait to Read This
Summer.Ó 
Jean
Kwok was born in Hong Kong.
Although Girl in Translation
is a work of fiction and not a memoir, Jean also moved to New York as a
young girl and worked in a sweatshop in Chinatown. Leaving this life
behind, Jean attended Harvard and has worked as a dishwasher,
blind-reader, summer program director, ballroom dancer, media advisor,
and ESL teacher, but currently lives in the Netherlands, where she is
finally able to write full-time. She can neither drive nor swim. You
can read her blog 
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. 
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.
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. 
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.
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.
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.
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.
NYU
Conference: Panel Discussions 
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.
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.
