AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

Acclaimed poet, novelist, and essayist Kazim Ali joins the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Milkweed Editions to launch his new memoir, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water. Northern Light, a sensitive and elegantly structured exploration of land and power, is told through Ali’s recollections of his childhood in Manitoba, and the relationships he built with the indigenous Pimicikamak community, his former neighbors and fierce environmental activists. Ali is joined in conversation by poet and scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt.

Join the Asian American Writers’ Workshop as we celebrate award-winning writer Chang-rae Lee’s electrifying new novel, My Year Abroad. A surprising, tender, and humorous work, My Year Abroad is a story unique to Chang-rae Lee’s immense talents as a writer, and explores the division between East and West, capitalism, mental health, mentorship, and much more. Chang-rae will be joined in conversation by Bryan Washington, award-winning author of Lot and Memorial.

AAWW is delighted to celebrate the launch of writer Nikesh Shukla’s new memoir, Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family, and Home. An intimate look at love, grief, and fatherhood, Shukla’s memoir “bears witness to our turbulent times” (Bernardine Evaristo) with humor, honesty, and hope. Shukla is joined in conversation by Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk.

In the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism!, Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman have collected a bold group of emerging writers whose prescient and intimate writing paints an expansive portrait of the experience of being women and femmes of color. The first edition of the anthology became an instant classic in 2002, and this updated 2019 edition was a protest to the political Trump regime in our country. The experiences and intellectual insights in Colonize This! help sharpen our analysis for the struggles ahead, regardless of who is in the White House. This audio is from the launch party of Colonize This!, from August 16, 2019.

Our series Radical Thinkers places radical academics directly in conversation with trailblazing writers, poets, and artists, creating and nurturing two-way dialogues that will interrogate some of the most pressing issues facing Asian and Asian diasporic communities today. Featuring an interdisciplinary lineup of scholars and creatives, these unexpected pairings will center revolutionary discourse and scholarship in an effort to demystify intellectual debates, collapse the divide between the ‘ivory tower’ and the public sphere, and ultimately envision a radical new future.

The first installment of this series in 2021 features novelist Simon Han (Nights When Nothing Happened) and scholar Tahseen Shams (Here, There, and Elsewhere) in conversation on their creative and scholarly processes, and immigrant relationships to time and place.

Watch the video version on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/QvhON7QvuyY

We're celebrating the release of Lee Isaac Chung's critically acclaimed film Minari, a tender portrait of a Korean-American family that moves to an Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. Today’s podcast features audio from our pre-release screening talkback with director Lee Isaac Chung and novelist Min Jin Lee.

Join the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for the official launch of Te-Ping Chen’s extraordinary debut short story collection, Land of Big Numbers. Assured and immersive, the stories in Land of Big Numbers move confidently between the United States and China, shifting from realism to magical realism, and forming intimate portraits that draw from Chen’s years of working as a journalist in China. For this launch event, Chen will be joined in conversation by Charles Yu, author of the National Book Award-winning Interior Chinatown.

What are the radical possibilities of catalyzing cross-racial feminist solidarities, imaginations, and substantive realities? What revolutions must we create within ourselves to dismantle our prejudices, discrimination, and silences to create the world we want to see?

Today’s podcast features audio from our recent event Siblings in Liberation, Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities, which celebrated the editorial collaboration between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective that found a home in AAWW’s digital magazine The Margins. Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities is an ongoing monthly series of critical essays, conversations, poetry, fiction, and more. The series looks to Black and Asian American feminist histories, practices, and frameworks on care, community, and survival as the tools and strategies to build towards collective liberation.

This episode features remarks and discussion with Jaimee Swift of Black Women Radicals and Tiffany Diane Tso, Senti Sojwal, Salonee Bhaman, and Rachel Kuo of the Asian American Feminist Collective; a poetry reading by Cecile Afable and Zuri Gordon; a conversation between sex work activists Kate Zen and SX Noir; and ending reflections with Dr. Margo Okazawa-Rey (aka DJ MOR Love & Joy).

Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities was originally live streamed on our YouTube channel last week on Thursday, January 28th. 

Read more about the collaboration on The Margins.

AAWW and London-based writer April Yee present a reading with two of the UK’s leading poets: Will Harris (RENDANG) and Romalyn Ante (Antiemetic for Homesickness). Following their reading, Will and Romalyn examine how Asian identity is constructed outside of the United States and discuss the ways British colonialism and capitalism continue to shape ideas of what and who belongs. Moderated by April Yee.

Join the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for our first event of the new year: a joint paperback launch of Gish Jen’s The Resisters and Meng Jin’s Little Gods. These two novels, released in early 2020, sketch out a dystopian near future that takes aim at several current catastrophes, and examine history, absence, and the passage of time as filtered through the individual immigrant experience. Together, these works break new ground for the dystopian and immigrant novels, and we hope you will join us as Gish and Meng discuss their work and craft.

Live Transcript:

Hi, everyone. Happy new year
and thank you for joining us online for this conversation
with Meng Jin and Gish Jen. My name is Lily Philpott. It is my pleasure
to welcome you to our virtual space. For those that are new
we are a nonprofit organization dedicated to
uplifting Asian literature and story telling. You can visit
aaw.org and follow us on twitter, I object Saturday
gram and YouTube. The recording of this event will
be posted. During the event we ask that all audience
members practice nonviolence in the chat. Comments will
be flagged and the person will be removed from this event.
We will have time for audience Q&A at the end of the night.
You can ask questions by the Q &A function at the bottom of
your screen. Books are for sale. You can find a link to
purchase in the chat. You can support our authorize and
independent book stores in doing so. I am going briefly introduce Meng and Gish.
Gish Jen is the author of 4 previous novels. Her honors
cloud the literary award for fiction and the American
academy of arts and sciences. She delivered the William E
Macy lecture at Harvard universitity. She teaches
from time to time in China and lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Harvard
and hunter college. "Little Gods" is her first novel. We
are delighted to celebrate " Little Gods" and "The
Resisters" back in paper back. Pick up those books, support
our authorize and enjoy the evening. Welcome Meng Jin to read.

» Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us tonight.
Thank you Lily for that lovely introduction. Thank to AAWW
for inviting Meng Jin to do this event. I
couldn't think of a more wonderful way to celebrate the
paper back launch of those books. I am so honored to be
here with Gish Jen who many of you might know was
one of the first Chinese American authorize that I read
when I started thinking about becoming a writer. Yeah, it's just kind of
mind blowing that we get to be here tonight together. I am
actually going to read from a photo essay that is published in the end
section of the paper back. I thought about reading this
because I took these photographs in 2016 in the
summer of 2016 when actually I saw Gish in person for the
first time. I don't know if we actually met. But Gish was
doing an event with some local writers and a friend of mine
invited me. So yeah, here are the -- here is the photo essay
. I am going to share my screen. Images of Shanghai I spent
6 weeks in my birth city Shanghai. I was there to
finish my novel "Little Gods". I left when I was a child. My
memories of the city are the memories of a child fleeting,
flashes of sensory knowledge, closer to the knowledge of a
dream than that of a photograph. Inside these
memories were images so intense and vivid I felt I
could reach out and touch them. But when I did reach for
them they disintegrated immediately. I hope to
stabilize my memory with images of the real city
outside my window the Shanghai of post cards was laid before
me sharp and glittering. This was a Shanghai that had
been built after my departure when the sky line was farmland
. Time changed me too. We faced each other as strangers.
Some days the city felt dense. It awed me with its layers of
complexity. Each time you peeled one another, you found
another just as teaming. The inner most layer was the one I
sought between the cracks of the buildings crowding the
feet of the sky line. We'ved weaved through the sit. I
knew I would never find the exact Shanghai I was looking
for. My childhood had been demolished. On previous
visits I had searched for its remnants in vein. The closest
I had gotten was confirmation of its non-existence. In a
translated directory I found the name of my neighborhood
with a single asterisk beside it. According to the note
note it meant has been obliterated. Still I walk the
streets where it should have been searching for glimmers glimmers that might bring my
childhood home back to me in one unbroken piece. Some
remain. In thosalies you can these allies you can see the
disruption of empire, technology and nature. The
architecture was pleasantly modeled colonel history the narrow allies are
made narrower by frequent stacks of junk. Not a
centimeter of space goes unused. Everywhere life is
spilling out of the doors. Most of the time, however
, the impossibility of my search was reflected back at
me. Since 2005 the Shanghai municipal government has been
modernizing the city through the demolition of the
neighborhoods. Select areas have been preserved for
historic value or rebuilt as tourist destinations. But
most are marked with. Sometimes instead of
Ti, I found buildings meaning they were empty. A paradox in
a city that is continually over filling. I found myself
photographing tis. I did not actively search. It is not
photo again I can or beautiful. I continued to photograph
with a vague imperative of duty to whom or what I didn't
know. I still don't understand what good these
images are for. They can't preserve anything. Not really
. And besides most of the residents would prefer to
collect their relocation checks and go. They certainly
can't bring back anybody's lost home. But there is
something about looking at a site you know will soon
disappear that compels to you keep looking. One day I unearthed a lost
photograph of my town taken in 2008 during the last visit to
the neighborhood before its demolition. I noticed an
unusual looking building in the background. Using street
view I was able to locate the exact spot where my town would
have been if it still stood. I went there. I saw that the
unusual building still stood. What's being built here I
asked some construction workers. A shopping mall they
replied cheerfully. Now when I imagine Shanghai I long for
no fixed image. Instead I see a city racing to an unknown
future at near light speed in whose wake I can only blink.
Thank you.

» Hi. Am I on screen now? First let me say Meng that was
beautiful. Just hearing your voice and images I can't even
tell you how much they meant to me. My family is also from
Shanghai an I also spent a lot of time looking for remnants
of the past. It's so interesting that even throw my
new book is very much concerned with the future,
just listen to go you and that Shanghai, I am aware how much
even this book is a loss. We'll be
talking about that. Let me just read a few minutes from
my book. My book as you know is called "The Resisters". It
is a post automation state baseball testimony enist dystopia. I am going to read to you
2 sections. One is longer than the other. And then we'
ll talk. So this is from the beginning of the bosk. The
book is narrated by the father in this family named grant.
He is talking about his daughter a gifted picture for
a daughter daughter. As her parents
should have known earlier, but Gwen was a preemie. That
meant oxygen at first and special checkups and her early
months were bumpy. She had jaun cidie. A heart murmur things
that distracted us. We were focused on her health to the
exclusion of all else. For us surplus the limit was one
pregnancy per couple and Eleanor was just out of jail.
Outside of the house she had a drone tracking her every move.
The message was clear she was not getting away with anything
. And we loved Gwen would never have wanted to replace
her. She was delicate that she might not consume the way
she needed to the way we all needed to. Charges of under
consumption couldn't be fought in the courts. This was auto
America after all for all the changes brought by AI and
automation now rolled up with the internet into the eye
burrito we called aunt Netty we still did have a
constitution. If anyone could defend what was left of our
rights it was Eleanor even the goose patrolled the
neighborhood. The pit bulls one might say were afraid.
But as Eleanor's incarceration brought home these battles had
a price. In the meanwhile worrying an weighing the
options distracted us from realizing other things things
we might have noticed earlier had Gwen had a sibling. It is
so hard for a new parent to imagine a child any different
from the one he or she has. Children do have their own
gravity. They are their own normal. And so it is only now
we can see that there are signs. All children take what
's in their crib and throw it for example. It is universal.
But Gwen through her stuffed animal straight through her
bedroom doorway. They shot out never grazing the door
frame and they always hit the wall or staircase at a certain
spot with a force they need today bounce forward and drop
clean down to the bottom of the stairwell. Was she 2 when
she did this? Not even. She was already a southpaw and she
seemed to have unusually long arms and long fingers or so I
remember remarking one day not that he will nor and I had so
many babies on which to base our comparison. Ours was just
an impression. But it was a strong impression. Her
fingers were long. I remember too having to round up own the
landing before starting up the stairs. The stuffed hippo
and tiger the stuffed turtle. I gathered them all into my
arm like the story book zoo Cooper of some kingdom. It
was as if I too by all rights be made plush. Of course our
house was automated as all surplus houses were required
to be by law. The animals could easily have been clear
floated. All I had to do is say the wall they would
immerse from the closet. Clear float now, aren't those
animals in your way and we can roll an clear if you prefer.
You have a choice. You always have a choice. The choice the
new feature of the program. To balance its more cyber
intimidation. If you shift it will be your own fault. Do
note that your choice is on the record. Nothing is being
hidden from you. Your choice is on the record. Meaning
that I was losing living points every time. Living
points being something like what we used to call brownie
points growing up. They are more critical than money from goating a
loan to getting Gwen into net u should we dream of doing
that a goal that involved tens of thousands or hundreds of
thousands of points. But I picked the animals up myself
any way as did Eleanor when it was she who came upon them her
silver hair and black eyes shining all because we wanted
to dump the animals into the crib and hear her laughter as
she set about hurling them. Everything was a game to her a
most wonderful loving endless game. Her spy eyes let up
with mischief. Her cheeks the pink on the under clouds. She
laughed so hard she fell grabbing the crib rails as
she scam peopled back up that the whole crib shook. Was
this delicate newborn we delicately tended. She wore
a soft yellow blanket sleeper with hand knit extra version
of a suit Eleanor remembered from her own childhood. None
of the baby over Gwen's Crib. She learned to blow on her
hands if she was cold and cuddle for us if she needed
warmth. We all wore sweaters to avoid turning on the zone
heat for which we were house scowled. Don't you find it
chilly? Why not turn on the zone heat you will be more
comfortable Eleanor especially. Don't you find it a bit
chilly? We ignored it. This is how the auto house started
with thermostats that sent to aunt Netty and videos then
drone deliverers and fruit stockers and global sitters.
Elder helpers and yard bots all of which report today
ought netty as any spy network recording our steps,
our pictures, you are relationships and when surplus
had them. She in turn took what she knew and applied it
prover ago long the way so will is and advice. Indeed in
the earlyize day automation I myself brought up ask aunt
Netty and can still remember her voice as she volunteered I
'm here and insisted I want to hear everything and reassured
me of course you feel that way , how could you not. You are
only human. I did laugh at you are only human. Now I am
going to read a short section from later on the book. Gwen
has gone on and now she and her teammates are getting
ready to play in the olympics against the Russia team. The Russia team
is terrifying partly because they have all been bio
engineered. That mean we are all switch hitters. Perhaps all of this was
fear pure and simple on the part of Gwen's teammate
feeding their obsession was the sense that baseball was
more than a sport. That it was a crown jewel. There were
people that said it wasn't even invented in America.
There were people who pointed out it was mentioned by Jane
Austin long before it was ever mentioned here. But if
baseball took on a hallowed meaning, it took on that
meaning in our American dreams. For was this not the level
playing field we envisioned, the field on which people
could show what they were made of? And didn't we Americans
believe above all that everyone should have a real
chance at bat? Didn't we believe with the good of the
team at heart something in us might just hit a ball off our
shoe tops? If Gwen's teammates were playing Russia
for something it was for this, for a chance to show my mother
would have said that even if we all returned to the dirt
and the wind and the rain like the plants and the animals, we
had a bigness in us, something beyond algorithm and beyond
upgrades. Something we were proud to call human or so it
seemed to me. Thank you. Did I say thank you loud
enough? Meng, great. So Meng, it is really a great,
great pleasure to share the event of you. I was a big fan
as you could tell by my review. It was a stunning debut. I
am hoping that a year later the joy is still with
you. How does it feel now that you have done it in hard
cover but the paper back? It is quite a moment for you.
Are you still aglow?
» Well, it's been quite a year
in between. Yeah, I think I have got a little bit of
distance and perspective this year because of how nuts the
world has been. I was reflecting on when the hard
cover came out in January of last year and the president
was getting impeached and it was very -- it was apparent
because one of my interviews was -- one of my radio
interviews was canceled because they were covering
impeachment all day. Oh, gray great. It is almost like no
time and all of the time in the year.

» I have had friends come out and publish books on 9/11.

» Yeah.

» You will soon discover
something is almost always happening in a funny kind of way it matters so much to you
but the rest of the world barely notices. Since this is
the writers workshop and people are so interested in
process we should talk about our books. I think we should
maybe -- maybe you could talk about your journey. I think a
lot of people in the audience would like to be you. They
are working on their first book and they are working on
their first book and they have roots maybe in Asia as you and
I do. Not everybody is from Shanghai, of course. But they
have all made -- as you know, they are making 2 journeys.
Often they are making one journey which is just from wow
, I have a blank page to like wow, how do these books get
written that is really long. In the beginning people go on
to write like 7 books? It seems to I am probable. That
is one journey which is just -- I bearly know
what point of view is to a finished book. For people
like you and me we have another journey. We have
roots in another culture where the whole narrative thing, the whole novel
tradition is not native. And we frequently -- there are
probably 3 journeys. The journey often we have parents
who often do not get this thing at all. Who really see
this whole enterprise as May more individualistic than
anything they would happen to them and their family. So
this kind of has 3 things going on. Your journey was my
journey at one point. I think interestingly I don't know how
many years out my first book came out in '91. I have been
at this for quite a while. I sat down to write in 1986 when
Asian American novel did not exist. I can still remember my
agent saying it is about people coming to America. It'
s about -- the term immigrant novelist did not hope to mind.
I wrote that book at a time when people believed Asian
Americans could not write novels. Max even had meant
the warrior to be a novel and forced to force it as a memoir
. Asian Americans did not write novels. I wrote it at
the bunting institute at Radcliff. I was asked every
day aren't you writing immigrant auto biography.
This was by educated people. Every day I had to say no,
actually I am writing a novel. Actually I'm producing not
artifact. It was another -- all of
these things today happily people presumably don't say
those things to you anymore. Today presumably people can
accept that you are writing a novel. If you can talk about
what it is like to enter this tradition or getting up the
nerve to tell your parents that you were going to be a
novelist, where you got this idea. We both went to Harvard, am I right?

» I guess so, yes. I was
actually her fighted of the English department at Harvard.
It was in the most intimidating building with all
of these deer heads on the wall.
I don't know if you remember that. And I took like 2 English
classes that were in the requirements. I studied
basically everything else. I studied social studies and I
did pre--med because I told my parents I have my plan B don't
worry. I can always go back on my pre-med requirements

» You will not be surprised to
hear that I was also pre-med and pre-law. I dropped out of
Stanford business school. This is very familiar too.
This is part of the story. 3 of us from Harvard we were all
about '77, '78. The 3 of us stood there and it was like a
trifecta. I had dropped out of business school. the other
one dropped out of law school and the other one dropped out
of med school. And there we were. But anyway, this is a
very familiar part of the story. Please say about what
did it mean at the time that you were doing it. We're like
the old school.
» No, I think honestly everything I have said sounds
familiar to me. I remember because I didn't really have a big humanities education or
background I wasn't really encouraged to read when I was
a kid, I remember when I decided after college I am
really going to try to do this and went abou
methodically making reading lists for myself Asian
American reading lists. I remember discovering your work
and the best short stories of the century and reading it and
being like oh, my God this is not just like we are Chinese
people drinking tea or we have so much tender
immigrant feelings. It's funny. It's ambitious. It looks
outside of just the Chinese American experience or the
experience of immigration. You were really one of the
writers that made me feel like okay, I don't necessarily have
to, you know, produce the kind of work that people are
expecting me to produce. I think I teach a little bit now
. It feels like my students are not going through as much
just as I am not going through as much of the you might be
writing your own story. Surely you can only be
expressing yourself not creating art. Surely you
must be like creating testimony and not a work of
art. I feel, yeah, when I
started writing I felt like I did get a lot of feedback.
It took me a long time in my writing workshops to get over
the fact that all of my professors and most of my
peers were white and that they were -- the parts of my
writing that they liked were the more exotic Chinese parts.
I literally had a teacher, I literally had a teacher who
gave me feedback that was like do more of the Chinese stuff. It took me a while to
understand how to sort of push back against that and to
ignore it and to come to my own sense of what I wanted my
writing to be. Because I think especially someone that
doesn't come from a literary background, please, tell me
what is good. A lot of writing, this book was
learning to ignore what other people thought and learning to
really listen to what it was inside me that wanted to
create and wanted to write.
» It is so interesting, I of
course have the letter from the Paris review that
literally the rejection letter says we prefer more exotic
work.
» Oh, wow.

» It is right out there. Today they might hesitate to
say that. But I think what you are describing and many
people in the audience can also relate. I think they can
see that there is a kind of salable commodity that
everybody sees in you and you have to really resist. For
me a lot of that meant I defined myself early as an
American writer. Everybody wanted to be right about China China. I didn't want to -- I
didn't want to become abdomen ambassador. There were a
couple of roles for you. One is exotic. Being an
ambassador of some sort. Another as things got more
political and being a professional victim. I don't want to be a
professional victim. I actually want to be a writer.
And it is kind of this mine field when you are negotiating
, negotiating. The very happy situation with you is that you
made it through. I think that maybe one of the things that
people might be interested to hear sounds like look you
could hear I also heard myself in the end. I ignored all of
those things just like you. I literally had a little ritual
that I would enact before I started working
where I would make a little icon of various people and
various opinions in my mind a little icon. I would
literally pick it up and put it in the trash. Or out in
the hall. But I would basically -- there were a lot
of these. They weren't all -- in other words some
people who wrote opinions were not bad people. I removed the
people with good opinions. John Updyke had a good opinion
of me. No sooner did I realize what a good opinion he
had of me did I have to put him in the hall. It was a
happy thing but I am not here to write for John Updyke. I
write for myself. If you are from an Asian background the
business of writing for yourself this is a radical act
. It doesn't come naturally to us for many, many reasons
that we can discuss. As you know I have written a lot
about that. It doesn't come naturally to us. So it is a
fight the whole way. I have had this little ritual. I am
wondering whether you had anything like that that you would be able to
share with the audience? How did you find your way? This
book is very striking. Very unlike any other Asian
American novel. It doesn't feel like oh, she has been
reading a lot Maxine Hunt Kingston. You kill the writers ahead of
you. She said I heard that you wanted to kill me. Maxine
is so sweet. But at some level what I really -- what
really was I had to put her out in the hall. I am sure
you had to put me out in the hall. You have to put
everybody out in the hall.. I wonder how you did that
whether you had rituals that you used, how you cleared the
space for yourself so you could hear yourself so you
could write this very singular book that is on one level very
identifiablely Asian American around another way unlike any
other Asian American or American novel. Where did you
find that? How did you do that? >> I love what you said
earlier. I loved hearing about you talking about you identified yourself
as an American writer. I think I had a similar sorts of
things that I would insist upon. One thing was
always that if anyone ever said that I was writing about
identity I would correct them and say I am writing about "
the self". Because I felt that identity was something
superficial that society imposed upon you and it is the
self's way of responding to others view of us. I wanted -
- I think I wanted from the start when I started writing I
knew that I wanted to be able to write with the sort of
freedom that I saw white guys writing with where I wasn't
sort of bound to write about anything basically except for
the things I wanted to write about. And I didn't -- I love
your ritual. I wish I had something as cute to share.
But I think mostly I just -- at a certain point my
work I think started really growing and becoming itself
when I realized that I hadn't read a book like
the one I wanted to write and that was a good thing. And that I should be writing
the book I wanted to read. So in my head I sort of -- I
think there was a point in which I shifted my imaginary
audience from whatever you imagine
American readers or the general readership to be. I
shifted that and I started writing for myself when I was
younger basically. I started writing for the person who was
reading and reading and trying to find the book that I craved
to read and then realizing that that book didn't exist
yet and I had to write it. So I think that was one of the
sort of Montras that I had that you are writing the book
that you want to read. That a version of yourself who basically has had the same
experiences and has the same - - is interested in the same
things, is delighted by the same things. Is moved by the
same things, hasn't had the exact same ideas you have had.
That really changed -- I think that really helped me and
changed my work because I was no longer explaining myself as
much as I was in my earlier work.

» It's interesting. Another thing I don't know that will
resonate with you. There are also books that talk about the
freedom of the white male writer. There are books that
are still in territory that is not out. That is not only
because we are Asian America but also because we are women.
So this business first of all my first book is called "
typical American". How can those people be typical
American. How can you be claiming to be the great
American novel. How can you be doing that. Even now so
many books in there is still territory that is not okay.
In in case the baseball novel. Coincidentally I am not the
only women. Emily did it at the same time. It is
interesting. What you can sort of see is a journey I
have been on, whatever, a generation and a half later
you will go on the same journey. People will fill
the same box. Why can't women write about baseball? With
baseball being extremely important because it is the
American sport. When women can't write about baseball you
are there is a whole portion of America that is fenced off
in some ways that is not yours. So it was kind of
interesting that Emily Neamans felt this kind of restriction
and also chose to write against it. Also did it as I
did with the sense that boy territory and we
knew -- we both had the sense you cannot get one detail
wrong. It is dangerous. You understand that the audience
is looking -- they are looking to find fault. They are looking to
question your authority. This is a question for you. I don'
t know if there is a point at which you realize that you
have kind of -- there was something in the -- there was
something out there that we need to get you. You realize
they didn't get me. I know for me it was when I passed
muster of any number of baseball biographers. When I
passed muster with Jane Nolan and James Levy. They wrote
and also with baseball fans. I put my book through the
biggest baseball fans I could find. I know the moment --
and I passed. It almost didn' t matter what the reviews said
. I knew that I had gotten in there and I actually don't
know that much about baseball. I knew -- I learned a lot
obviously. I did a lot of studying. I did a lot of
research. Nobody said to me that's not how pictures feel
or that is not how pitchers -- that's not how they act or
that's not how the game goes, any of those things, nobody
said any of that. Everybody said you must be a pitcher. I can't throw a ball from
here across the room.
» Neither can I. But I found
all of the baseball so delightful. I learned so
much about it. I was curious. I thought that surely you must
have a deep love for baseball and that's why you wanted to
write a baseball novel. But was there another reason?

» I do have a -- funny, I don' t play baseball myself. I don
't know it. Neither of my children. Is Gwen your
daughter? Neither of my children can catch or hit or
any of those things. They don't throw. They read
philosophy. They don't do any of those things. But it is
true that my mother was an avid, avid Yankee fan as many
immigrants are. When she first came to America this was
one of the first ways she performed to be an American
and learned what America was. This whole idea of the level
playing field being from Shan ghai that is not an idea you
grow up on. She became such an avid fan. She did die of
COVID this spring. I know.
» I'm so sorry. we did bury
her with a Yankee's cap. She was really a fan. My brother
could really pitch. Most of my siblings don't. But my
brother could really throw. It was something he would not have discovered
he could do. My father found a boy's club for him and
turned out he had quite a little childhood formed by
baseball. So I had some familiarity with it. Really
it was more it was something I wanted to write about, about
what I thought was happening to America as I was trying to
think about how to drama ties dramatise what we could be
losing and the danger to democracy and conveying that
dramatically. I said of course baseball. So I have an emotional feeling about it
but truly I hadn't thought about baseball in many, many
years. My family are still Yankee fans. From Boston we
are definitely not Yankee fans. I don't have the patience
to watch all of those games and they are watching that
every pitch. You know what I mean. I don't have the
patience for any of that. So it really was --

» I am more interested in baseball now than when I
started my book. Now that I know a little bit it it is
really interesting.

» You could really feel the tenderness in the way that you
wrote about it. I was especially drawn to how you
described the relationship between the catcher and the
pitcher which I had no idea because I have not watched
baseball. I am not really a baseball fan and how you use
that in this brilliant character dynamic between 2
best friends. It was one of those things that made me
think that you must know the sport deeply. It also made me
realize that Andey was as exciting a character as Gwen

» It is a little bit like the
relationship between Ju wun. She is like
the person that -- they are kind of related because each
one is the person that wun hoped she could be. The other
is the person she fears she could be. We could probably
go on. I warned you, Lily, that we had a lot to talk
about. We can go on very easily. We haven't scratched the surface.
I can see you are here and it is time to take questions from
the audience. I think the fact that -- I think honestly
for somebody out there that is looking for a little paper to
write there is a paper there.

» Another thing that I noticed was reading your book that
felt like a symbolotic relationship it is narrated
from the perspective of a par parent about the child. I can
't think of another book that' s told from that point of
view. That point of vow is just
unbearable for me to read. Unbearably heartbreaking. I
think a lot of times like my book obviously has a child
looking at a parent. That's a more typical sort of gaze especially when we are
talking about immigrants and the child looking backwards
looking at the past and I guess it makes sense that your
November Dystopian novel is looking into the future. The
way a parent must feel growing up in a horrible world and
want ing that child to have a bright future and wanting them
to have freedom and wanting to protect them.

» Well you got it. Lily is here and she is here to tell
us to take questions. I will say that here you are. Your
first book obviously many things -- many things to
pioneer and very exciting and many new things to write. I
will say that of course just the same way you write against things I write
against the older writer. There is a sense you must be
done because you wrote about the story being young growing
up. Actually there are many, many other stories to be
written. I feel so privileged to be an older writer who
still has a few things to say and a few of view that is
different. A point of view on the same experience. It is
so familiar but oddly enough from where I sit it looks
different. Anyway, Lily, I warned you we would have a lot
to say.
» I know. I feel like we
could go on forever. I am so grateful. There is lot in the
chat. I am grateful for the conversation. It is so
vibrant and I am so glad to hear you speak. I think we
have time for a few audience questions which I will read.
If you have any questions you can put them in the Q&A box in
Zoom and we will do our best. The first is from Rachel who
writes Shanghai is an ever changing city. In what ways
does it still feel like home?

» It's funny, I think one point in your book it is all
so Chinese. University like Meng I was
born in America. I evenly knew about Shanghai from my
mother. It really did feel like home. The things that
people are pre-occupied with. I could really sense the
difference between Shanghai and Beijing. Meng you have much more to
say. There is a whole Shanghai way of thinking.

» There definitely is.
» Including what they think of
other Chinese.
» My family isn't old school
Shanghai where my parents are migrated to Shanghai from the
provinces. So Shanghai is not in our blood but maybe
that means I can see it a little more. I have
definitely been on the hardened of that Shanghai
before on the receiving end. I haven't been back -- I haven
't been back in a really long time. I do think that there is just -- whenever
I go back to Shanghai or any part of China that my family
lives in, it just opens up a part of me that, you know,
perhaps lives in my memory and doesn't really exhibit itself in American context. It makes
me remember the language the smiles, everything that's
coming in from the environment of a place that's just
irreplaceable. It reminds me of a part of something that
has made me. I think that's so much why I write, too, is
just to capture those intangible and sort of
inexpressible feelings that I always feel like I am on the
verge of losing because a place is changing so quickly
or because I am changing or because I am running away from
it or going to a new place. Sny but Shanghai I will say
that one small antidote. Back in the days in the very early
days of development, many places in China if they took
your credit card or they had just gotten credit card.
They lanted your credit card always handed your credit card
back with 2 hand. Shanghai, they were like here is your
card. The shanghai attitude is back.

» We're Shanghai. That's true.

» They are not going to bow to you because you are an
American. Excuse me.
» In an apologetic way they
look and appraise. Don't look I am looking at your entire
outfit and I see you and I have judged you.

» What is the matter with Americans ? Why do you dress
like that? I mean they can't believe how we dress. If you
have ever showed up in Birkenstocks in a Shanghai
hotel you will know how broken we have from a fashion point
of view.
» Thank you both. I have a
couple more questions. The next one it is which books do
you consider the grandparents of your books? In other words
what are the two or 3 books without which your books would
not exist?

»
» Do you want to go first?

» That is such a hard question. For me it is not 2 or 3
books. I want to say it does not
have a narrative tradition that I'm sure that I would not
be able to master the novel without Shakespeare. King
Lear, 5 acts was foundational. I think Meng was talking about
this freedom to say whatever it is you want to say. I have
to say that I think I was very , very influenced by the
Jewish writers and I will say that would include all of them
. But especially maybe grace Paley. I think in terms of
work that was both actually art but actually engaged. For me she was the mold.
You could actually write stuff that was about society, very
engaged and yet it ain't journalism. That is leaving
out 100,000 books.
» I love that. Yeah, if we
had more time I would ask you about your humor and that sort
of answers it a little bit. I love that and I love grace
Paley too. For "Little Gods" in particular I would say there are I think 3ish
books that really come to mind that very directly helped me. One of them was the neopolitan novel. I was
very thrilled when you mentioned her in your review.
Thank you, Gish. The way that she writes about social
mobility and I think really there is not
another writer who can see the nuisances of people who leave with more
-- with more aquity. There is a book called "in the
height of what we know" which is modeled. It is about a
mathematician. Road ing that book gave me permission to 1,
write in long paragraphs. And 2, write about science in a
way that felt -- it gave me a model how to write about
science in a way that felt beautiful not just sort of sort Bill Nye the science guy
, science. The last book that influenced me was "a gesture
life". The narrator in that book has such a circular way
of thinking and such a sort of deflective way of thinking
that I really used when I was writing the section in this book.

» Thank you. I love those book recommendations. We have
time for only one more unfortunately. There are so
many good questions. We do need to wrap up in a moment.
One last question from M who writes I would love to hear
about what you are both working on next. Meng does "
write the book you want to read" hold for your second
book and does what you want to read change as you grow as a
writer and reader?
» Sure. Since there is a
direct question for me I will go first. I think so. Yes,
definitely what I want to read changes as I grow as a writer
and a reader. I feel like I got out a lot out of my system
with "Little Gods". I also feel that I put a lot into "
Little Gods". Sort of what we were talking about earlier,
Gish. There wasn't the expectation that I would be
able to do it again. I sort of felt like it was my one
shot and now I feel like it has -- because I have gotten
this out of my system, I feel like I can play, I can have
more fun. I am really interested in playing now more
with style and with humor and with provication, with writing that is a little
more out there stylisically and yeah. The next -- I'm working on a
novel called "mothers and girls" which I am calling a
fake memoir sort of as a tongue in cheek nod to our dear
Maxine and her fake memoir and it's a book that is about
building methodologies and tearing them down.

» Sounds wonderful. I can't wait. So I just placed a new
book so it will be out next year just about this time next
February. I haven't talked about it very much. Now that is in
editorial I can talk about it. It is a collection of linked
stories. I am out having a great time. It is a little
bit of a return. So this is a story -- it is linked as a
collection of linked stories through which you can see the
50 years since the opening of China refacted through the
various stories and various characters. It is called "
thank you Mr. Nixon". Next February.

» That's so exciting will. I hope we can celebrate both of
these books. Gish, I hope we can celebrate that book in
person next year. I want to thank you both for taking the
time for joining us this evening.

In November 2020 we co-hosted a screening with Film Forum of the documentary AGGIE, on the life of philanthropist Agnes Gund, founder of the Art For Justice Fund. Following the screening, we co-hosted a talkback with activists and Art For Justice grantees Adnan Khan and Mahogany Browne, and producer Tanya Selvaratnam, moderated by Rachel Kuo. Today, we're thrilled to share audio of that conversation with you.

This recording was originally shared on Film Forum's podcast 'Film Forum Presents' at https://filmforum.org/podcast.

Author Kavita Das joins Jafreen Uddin, Executive Director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in conversation about her book, Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar. Shankar, who was Grammy-nominated, was the most prominent Indian female musician in the movement that brought Indian music to the West in the late 1960’s.

This event, co-presented by Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the South Asia Institute in Chicago, explores Shankar’s musical evolution and more-than-seventy-year career creating within both South and North Indian musical traditions, as well as pop and fusion, and celebrate her life, legacy, and impact on South Asian diasporic communities.

We're launching a new virtual event series at AAWW. Presented quarterly, these virtual “fireside chats” will feature a renowned Asian diasporic author in conversation with our Executive Director Jafreen Uddin, sharing updates from AAWW, and discussing AAWW from a writer’s perspective. This series will kick off with a conversation led by R. O. Kwon, activist, NEA Fellow, and bestselling author of The Incendiaries.

This fall, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop is celebrating the art of the essay. Featuring longtime poets and fiction writers with debut essay collections out this year, this conversation will take an intersectional look at Asian American identity, genre, gender, race, publishing, and the way the essay form allows writers to dance, dodge, spar, and move through time and nature to tell important stories. Featuring Cathy Park Hong, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Sejal Shah, and moderated by Piyali Bhattacharya.

Buy the writers' books via our local independent bookstore partner Books Are Magic: https://booksaremagic.net/racing

AAWW, Kundiman, & Kaya Press combine to bring acclaimed novelist Ed Lin together with pioneering YA author of FINDING MY VOICE and co-founder of AAWW Marie Myung-Ok Lee, in conversation to celebrate the release of Ed Lin’s YA debut, DAVID TUNG CAN’T HAVE A GIRLFRIEND UNTIL HE GETS INTO AN IVY LEAGUE COLLEGE (Kaya Press, October 2020).

Moderated by Ruth Minah Buchwald, Ed Lin and Marie Lee’s dialogue will orbit themes, such as: Asian American study culture; the pitfalls of the “model minority” myth and how to challenge it; multiple standards and (mis)representations of Asian Americans in literature and the media; and coming-of-age in the Asian American diaspora while navigating relationships through race, class, young love, not to mention the confusing expectations of immigrant parental pressure.  

Support the writers! Buy their books via their publishers' websites:

https://kaya.com/books/david-tung-cant-have-a-girlfriend-until-he-gets-into-an-ivy-league-college/

https://sohopress.com/books/finding-my-voice/

We're celebrating the launch of Kazim Ali’s newest poetry collection, The Voice of Sheila Chandra. Following a reading from Ali’s innovative and musical new collection, he will be joined in conversation by Sheila Chandra and Rajiv Mohabir to discuss sound, silence, and embodied art-making practice, as they reflect on Ali’s poetry, Chandra’s music, and Mohabir’s poetry and translation. 

Support the writers! Buy their books via our local independent bookstore partner Books Are Magic

We’re very excited to bring you an audio long read of “Shithole Country Clubs” an essay by Nina Sharma, recently published in The Margins. Named an Editor’s Pick at Longreads, “Shithole Country Clubs” is a hilarious and critical essay about Trump's New Jersey country club — the very golf club where he recently infected everyone with Covid-19 — and Indian weddings. 

READ the original essay here in The Margins:  https://aaww.org/shithole-country-clubs/

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is thrilled to celebrate the launch of Akwaeke Emezi’s new book THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI and the recent release of Elizabeth Acevedo’s CLAP WHEN YOU LAND and WRITE YOURSELF A LANTERN: A JOURNAL INSPIRED BY THE POET X. The two authors read from their new works and have a moderated conversation with writer and Berkeley Center for New Media Events Coordinator Sophia Hussain.

Tina Chang and Mira Jacob join the Asian American Writers’ Workshop to celebrate the paperback releases of their books Hybrida and Good Talk. Following a reading from their work, they will speak to the intersections of their experiences and creative practices, discussing race, motherhood, and hybrid storytelling structures.

On this episode we are excited to repost a recent episode of Asian Americana, a podcast about Asian American culture and history hosted and produced by Quincy Surasmith. 

Letters for Black Lives is an ongoing crowdsourced effort to create and translate multilingual and culturally-aware resources that open a space for families and communities to have honest discussion about racial justice, police violence, and anti-Blackness. Quincy took part in a series for publication on AAWW's online magazine The Margins that collected process notes from several translator-contributors to the Letters for Black Lives to make visible some of the complexity of this project. You can check out these translator notes now at aaww.org.

In this episode of Asian Americana, Quincy follows a similar drive to explore the layers of linguistic and cultural nuance involved in this effort. Through interviews with some of the initial Letters for Black Lives organizers and translators, his conversations bring out the collective process and questions involved in navigating the urgency and sensitivity of the Letters for Black Lives. 

AAWW hosted the launch for K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, Bestiary, with a reading and conversation with K-Ming and Franny Choi. Exploring the ways writing about girlhood can reinvent our definitions of community and lineage, and the ways we can grapple with and imagine beyond threats of violence that often shape daughterhood, this conversation delves into family and queer girlhood as a generative space of resistance and reinvention, monstrousness and memory.

Welcome to our Love Letter to Chinatown Episode! We’re happy to feature Mei Lum, Diane Wong, and Huiying B. Chan, the curators of Homeward Bound: Global Intimacies in Converging Chinatowns, hosted at the Pao Arts Center in Boston. The exhibit tells the stories of displacement, migration, resilience and grassroots organizing in Chinatowns around the world through photography, found objects, oral histories, and poetry. 

Writer and organizer Huiying B. Chan travelled to Chinatowns in eight different countries, as well as their ancestors’ village, documenting global stories of migration and resilience across the diaspora. That same year, artist and scholar Diane Wong and Mei Lum, the fifth generation owner of Wing on Wo and the director of the Chinatown community arts org the WOW Project, went on a West Coast Solidarity tour to connect with tenants, organizers, workers, and artists in Chinatowns in San Francisco, LA, Vancouver, and Seattle. 

We talk about how the formation of Chinatowns across the world, how the pandemic is affecting Chinatowns, and make important connections between gentrification in immigrant communities across the US.

Visit the exhibit virtually here: hhttps://bcnc.net/events/homeward-bound-exhibition

Today is the legendary activist Yuri Kochiyama’s birthday! We’re celebrating by revisiting one of our favorite episodes of AAWW Radio, You Don’t Say No to Yuri Kochiyama. 

In 2005, scholar and activist Diane C. Fujino released the biography Heartbeat of Struggle: the Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama. An in-depth examination of Kochiyama's life, the book follows her early years in a concentration camp in Arkansas during World War II, to her friendship with Malcolm X in New York City, and her years of radical political activism. 

We hosted an event celebrating the release of this text in November 2005. Co-sponsored by the NYU A/P/A Institute, the event was curated by activist and musician Fred Ho. Fred Ho invited activists and political organizers Baba Herman Ferguson, Esperanza Martell, and Laura Whitehorn, all of whom had known and worked with Yuri over the years years, to discuss and celebrate her legacy. You’ll hear about how Yuri’s Harlem apartment was a social hub for activists in the 60s, the tireless work she did with the Jericho Movement to liberate political prisoners, fight for Puerto Rican independence, her prolific note taking, and more. Finally, Diane. C. Fujino will share the story of Yuri’s political awakening, and how she transformed from a budding activist to a symbol of revolutionary change.

One of our favorite episodes of AAWW Radio was from 2018 featuring Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in conversation with poet Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, author of SLINGSHOT. Leah reads from her work and together they discuss meaningful inclusion of disability justice, Intersectional disability, and the nuances and multitudes of the disability experiences.

Watch the full event on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UpQVlT2wCQ

We’re bringing back one of our favorite events from 2018 called Breaking Caste, featuring Sujatha Gidla, Neel Mukherjee, and Gaiutra Bahadur. The episode features a wonderful conversation at the end about Dalit exclusion in the publishing industry, the connection between caste and women’s oppression, Dalit solidarity with Black Americans, and much more.

Neel Mukherjee's novel A State of Freedom follows the lives of five characters born to different circumstances in India navigating deeply entrenched class and caste divisions. Dalit-author Sujatha Gidla wrote the debut memoir Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India.

Link to the video of this event on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIgKFl8Dpf8

This event was cosponsored by Equality Labs.

One of our favorite episodes is this reading and conversation from 2018 with brilliant experimental Asian American writers Anelise Chen, Patty Yumi Cottrell, and Eugene Lim. They read passages from their novels So Many Olympic Exertions, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, and Dear Cyborgs, all of which have unique perceptions on living and surviving in this difficult world. Following their readings they have an insightful and honest conversation with poet Lisa Chen about protest, immigrant narratives, and writing voice in fiction.

Watch the reading on our YouTube channel

Now that we’ve published over 50 episodes of AAWW Radio, we’re selecting a few of our favorites to republish for our new listeners. One of our earliest episodes is Migrant Father Fragment from 2017 featuring authors lê thị diễm thúy, Q.M. Zhang, and moderated by Hua Hsu. It features wonderful readings of their books The Gangster We Are All Looking For and Accomplice to Memory and an incisive conversation about their writing process and putting memories to paper.

Q.M. Zhang and lê thị diễm thúy, writers of fragmented, hybridic, family narratives explore themes of immigration, grief, and the father with The New Yorker’s Hua Hsu. A hybrid memoir/novel that’s part espionage, part historical documentary, Q.M. Zhang’s Accomplice to Memory tells the story of her father’s mysterious exodus from China during the country’s Civil War and WWII: all the silence and love that you’ve come to know from your Asian immigrant family, but with added subterfuge and geopolitics. Guggenheim Fellow lê thị diễm thúy, whose recent Asian American classic, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, tells the collage-like, semi-autobiographical story of a refugee family that immigrates to San Diego, leaving behind a stark past of war and liberation in Vietnam.

Watch the video for Migrant Father Fragment here. 

This episode is the second episode of our podcast series diving back into our 2016 Publishing Conference, which we held at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. The panel we’re sharing this week is titled “Breaking into Speculative Fiction”, featuring Jennifer Marie Brissett, author of the novel Elysium, and the upcoming 2020 novel Destroyer of Light, and Malka Older, author of the Centenal Cycle trilogy, which includes the novels Infomacracy, Null States, and State Tectonics. And last year Malka Older published the serial story Ninth Step Station. Their conversation on speculative fiction will be moderated by speculative fiction editor Tim O'Connell. 

Remember this audio is from 2016, so some parts of the conversation are interesting to hear in retrospect, like when they talk about the “upcoming 2016 election” !

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we’re time traveling through our archive, bringing you panel discussions from our 2016 Publishing Conference, which we held at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. The first panel we’re sharing this week is titled “What I Wish I Knew Before I Got My MFA”, featuring Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill and who received her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop-- Karim Dimechkie, author of Lifted by the Great Nothing and who received his MFA at the Michener Center, and Kaitlyn Greenidge, who received her MFA from Hunter College and is the author of the novel We Love You Charlie Freeman. Together they speak on their MFA experiences in a conversation moderated by Brooklyn Rail Editor Joseph Salvatore, who is the author of the short story collection To Assume a Pleasing Shape.

Keep in mind this audio is from 2016, but we find the conversation is still very relevant, and hopefully people on their MFA journey can find this helpful!

Since our last episode from October on poetry and disappearance in occupied Kashmir, a lot has happened. We've gotten through a long leadership transition and turned our focus inward, to care for AAWW. And earlier this year, we joyfully welcomed our new executive director, Jafreen Uddin.

Our staff is currently working from home. We know that it is the strength of our communities that keeps us resilient to help weather the COVID-19 pandemic and confront this difficult time. We also understand that the backbone of AAWW’s work is creating community through our in-person events. And so we're back on AAWW Radio, ready to beam you our audio events at this surreal moment. We know it’s not the same, but we’re hoping it’ll help you through this time of isolation.

Starting next week, we'll kick things off by reaching back into our archive, bringing you panel discussions from our 2016 Publishing Conference. We’ll hear from Kaitlin Greenidge, Jenny Zhang, Alice Sola Kim and a bunch of other established writers as they discuss topics like deciding on whether to do an MFA, finding your writing community, breaking into Speculative Fiction, and working in the publishing world. 

Then, for those of you who are new to our podcast and haven’t listened through our past 50 episodes, we’ll be picking a few of our personal favorites to republish for listening.

And beyond that, we’re brainstorming ideas for new original formats for future episodes! If you have any suggestions for us or have any feedback, feel free to reach out and email us at radio@aaww.org .

We hope everyone is staying safe, social distancing to protect those at risk, and helping each other out. See you next week.

How do you simultaneously disappear people and their hope? Can you keep that hope alive through writing?

On this episode of AAWW Radio, we dive into the current blackout of Indian-occupied Kashmir, the history of enforced disappearances that haunts Kashmiris, and how political writing and poetry, like the work of poet Agha Shahid Ali, connects the Kashmiri diaspora to their home.

We hear from several people at the forefront of Kashmiri diasporic literature and activism: Ather Zia, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at University of Northern Colorado Greeley and author of Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women's Activism in Kashmir, as well as Hafsa Kanjwal, Professor of South Asian History at Lafayette College and an organizer with Stand With Kashmir.

We also hear beautiful readings of Agha Shahid Ali's poetry by his sister Sameetah Agha, Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute.

Learn more about Kashmir's history and why the ongoing struggle for self-determination and liberation is just as critical today as it was more than 70 years ago. Stand With Kashmir has compiled resources on their website. Here's a snapshot of where to begin:

• Ten non-fiction and fiction books to read about Kashmir 
• 13 films to watch on Kashmir
• The Kashmir Syllabus: this list of material for teaching and learning about Kashmir foregrounds voices, histories, and aspirations of people from and within Kashmir.
• Wande Magazine, an online magazine of longform writing run by young Kashmiris: 
• Ather Zia’s ethnography Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women's Activism in Kashmir (2019) which was discussed in the podcast and follows mothers and "half-widows" as they step boldly into courts, military camps, and morgues in search of their disappeared kin.
• Ather Zia’s and Javaid Iqbal Bhat’s A Desolation Called Peace: Voices from Kashmir (2019) about the political aspirations of the people of Kashmir and the change in their perceptions since Independence.
• Kashmir Lit, an online journal of Kashmiri & Diasporic Writing

For more of Agha Shahid Ali's poetry:

• Agha Shahid Ali’s collection Rooms are Never Finished (2001), a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, excavates the devastation wrought upon Kashmir and the personal devastation of losing his mother
• Agha Shahid Ali’s The Country without a Post office, which takes its impetus from the 1990 Kashmiri uprising against India, which led to political violence and closed all the country’s post offices for seven months 
•  

How can you help?

Here is how you can help stand in solidarity with Kashmiris at this critical juncture:  https://www.standwithkashmir.org/stand-in-solidarity

Today marks the 18th anniversary of 9/11. We're bringing back our episode from April 9th, 2018 called Remixing Guantanamo Bay where former AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen interviews experimental poet Philip Metres. Philip Metres is the author of Sand Opera, the poetry collection that uses redacted texts from Department of Defense manuals for torture sites like Guantanamo Bay to create an aria for the victims of the War on Terror. Solmaz Sharif writes, “Philip Metres’s poetry collection Sand Opera is complex, an untamable polyvocal array of clipped narratives in post-9/11 (if we are to believe such historical markers) America.” 

It’s a great conversation diving deep into Metres’ research of the confined and tortured people at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and the influence of these documents in response to violence as a poet.

Also: Sorry for the delay on regular episodes, we're working on a couple of other things at the moment (including an original podcast episode!) Hope you are all well and thank you for listening. - R.O.R., AAWW AV Producer

Listen to writers Sahar Muradi, T Kira Madden, and Tina Chang  read works about mothers and motherhood. Sahar Muradi shares poems about mental health during pregnancy, T Kira Madden reads a scene from her memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, in which her mother tends to her daughter’s lice-infested head, and Tina Chang read from her latest collection Hybrida. AAWW Margins Fellows Pik-Shuen Fung and Jen Lue moderate a Q&A with the writers, who speak about their literary mothers, motherhood and multiplicity, and intergenerational healing.

This reading is in collaboration with the W.O.W. Project at Wing on Wo, where Pik-Shuen and Jen curate and host their Womxn Writers Series.

Learn more about Wing on Wo's W.O.W. Project here.

AAWW’s online magazine Open City documents metropolitan Asian America on the streets of New York City. Every year we grant two fellowships, the Neighborhoods fellowship and the Muslim Communities fellowship, to six writers to cover Asian American & Muslim American communities in New York City. We celebrated the end of our last cohort of Open City Fellows last month with a reading. 

Writers Mohamad Saleh, Maryam Mir, Syma Mohammed, Hannah Bae, Astha Rajvanshi, and Nora Salem read from pieces that you can find on Open City: on racial tensions in Bay Ridge, a Syrian baker in Brooklyn passionate for baking Baklava; a personal essay on childhood trauma and foster care as an Asian American, and much more. Afterwards, former Open City fellow Humera Afridi held a Q&A with the fellows on translation in reporting, how writing about immigrant communities has shaped their ideas of home, and how sharing your work in community with others improves your writing craft.

Sweet Refuge Video: https://youtu.be/6YKiwx6U2HU

Is language adequate to describe the harsh reality of incarceration? Which words are used too often, too lazily, not often enough? We’ll hear from four people who are writers, journalists, and professors, approaching these subjects surrounding incarceration from different angles; Sarah Wang, Aviva Stahl, Nicole R. Fleetwood, Madhu Kaza. They read and talk with AAWW's Prisons Editor Daniel A. Gross about the evolving language of 2019 and the way it shapes lives, going in-depth on subjects such as how bureaucratic prison language invalidates and harms trans people, the stigma of a murder conviction, how to use alternative language to subvert carceral language, and much more.

Watch the whole event (especially if you're curious about Nicole Fleetwood's slideshow) on our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9IhmEa46TQ

We hosted a reading and conversation with novelist Esmé Weijun Wang, author of the New York Times-bestselling new essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias. She was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and has won a Whiting Award. The Collected Schizophrenias, which won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, is, as NPR writes, “riveting, honest, and courageously allows for complexities in the reality of what living with illness is like.”

After reading from her work, Esmé has a conversation with Larissa Pham, writer and author of the novella Fantasian. Together they discuss how to write vulnerably while maintaining boundaries, little things we can do for each other when our friends and family are going through difficult times, and much more.

For Asian American poets, what is the relationship between bearing witness to history and giving voice to marginalized communities? At the 2019 AWP Conference and Bookfair held in Portland in March, AAWW hosted a panel titled Poets vs. Community vs. History, moderated by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello with E.J. Koh, Yanyi, Emily Jungmin Yoon, & Monica Sok. These multidisciplinary writers talk about how their work as poets, editors, translators, and scholars allows them to uncover intimacies among seemingly disparate colonial histories, and contextualize narratives of intergenerational trauma. They draw on their varied practices to explore how the individual pursuits of poets can build empathy and community.

E.J. Koh is the author of A Lesser Love, awarded the Pleiades Editors Prize, and her memoir The Magical Language of Others. Koh has accepted fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, MacDowell Colony, and elsewhere.

Yanyi is a poet and critic. The recipient of fellowships from Poets House and Asian American Writers' Workshop, his debut collection The Year of Blue Water was recently released in March. He serves as associate editor at Foundry.

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species and Ordinary Misfortunes, winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize. A PhD student at the University of Chicago, she is the poetry editor for the Asian American Writers' Workshop.

Monica Sok is the author of Year Zero. Her work has been recognized with a 2018 "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from Hedgebrook, Jerome Foundation, Kundiman, and NEA among others. She is a 2018–2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox, winner of the Donald Hall Poetry Prize and a Florida Book Award Bronze Medal. She has received fellowships from Kundiman and the American Literary Translators Association, and serves as a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.

In March, we co-presented a series of conversations with DVAN, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. For this podcast we’ll be listening to an introduction by DVAN founder and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer Viet Than Nguyen. Following this is a conversation around the concept of Vietnamese ghost stories moderated by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis and featuring authors Violet Kupersmith, Thanhha Lai, & Vu Tran. The order they’re listed here is the same order they answer the first question. Together, they dissect the concept of the ghost story, as a metaphor for the immigrant, a reflection of the self and one’s deepest fears and insecurities, and then broaden the conversation to talk about community and what a Vietnamese diasporic literary community looks like to them.

Violet Kupersmith is the author of The Frangipani Hotel, a collection of supernatural short stories about the legacy of the Vietnam War. She is writing a forthcoming novel about ghosts and American expats in modern-day Saigon. Thanhha Lai is the author of the National Book Award-winning novel Inside Out & Back Again and the novel Listen, Slowly.  Her third novel, Butterfly Yellow, will be published this fall. Vu Tran is the author of Dragonfish, which was a NY Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and an NEA Fellowship. Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis is curator of Asian Pacific American Studies at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. He is also founding Director of the Washington, DC-based arts nonprofit The Asian American Literary Review.

Co-sponsored by the APA Institute at NYU.

We're featuring audio from a 2017 event collaboration with the Tenement Museum. We celebrated the launch of author Min Jin Lee’s second novel Pachinko, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2017 and National Book Award Finalist. Pachinko follows one Korean family through generations. The story begins in Korea in the early 1900s and then moves to Japan. The family endures harsh discrimination, catastrophe, and poverty. They also encounter joy as they rise to meet the challenges their new home presents. Through desperate struggle and hard-won triumph, they are bound together by deep roots that are set as their family faces enduring questions of faith, family, and identity. Min Jin Lee reads from her novel and then is interviewed by Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers Workshop. They discuss her extensive research and interview process, how growing up in Queens, New York helped her write Pachinko, and much more.

Watch the full event on our YouTube channel, as well as our other past events.

Gina Apostol’s latest work of fiction, Insurrecto, is a tour de force about about the Philippines’ past and present told through rivaling scripts from an American filmmaker and her Filipino translator. The book was one of the New York Times’ Editor’s Choices for 2018 and won comparisons to Nabokov and Borges for its kaleidoscopic structure. With her trademark wit, uncommon humor, layering of forgotten histories and dueling narratives, Gina tells the story of the atrocities that faced Filipinos who rose up against their colonizers during the Philippine-American war at the turn of the 20th century.

Gina Apostol reads from Insurrecto and then is joined by Filipina-Australian writer Sabina Murray, author of the novel Valiant Gentlemen. Together they discuss weaving together nonlinear narratives, the uselessness of white guilt, Duterte reprising the role of the American colonizer in the Philippines through violence, and much more.

Featuring the songs Ang Lupa ang Dahilan & Agit Speech by Material Support, a Filipina-fronted agit punk band from New York City, agitated by state repression, government corruption, and patriarchy.

Watch the event on our YouTube Channel!

In 2017, we hosted novelists Kamila Shamsie and Hirsh Sawhney, both writers who released new novels about South Asian families fractured in the diaspora. Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire takes Sophocles’s classic tragedy Antigone as the starting point for her novel about political tensions in the War on Terror and the way it impacts Muslim families in the West. Hirsh Sawhney’s debut novel South Haven illustrates how grief complicates and splinters intimacy in an Indian-American family.

The two authors read from their work, and talk with journalist Rozina Ali about power structures, American Empire in literature, the collective grief following Partition in 1947, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, as well as speak to America’s complicity in the formation of ISIS, and debunk myths on the War on Terror.

The authors also do a deep dive on craft, and discuss authenticity and the responsible imagination; as well as how to control (and not control) when your audience misreads your writing.

We're featuring writers Rahul Mehta and SJ Sindu who read from debut novels No Other World and Marriage of a Thousand Lies featuring complex queer South Asian characters. They have a conversation with writer and Shoreline Review editor Sreshtha Sen about writing transnational narratives, how cultural trauma affects what we write, and resisting the common coming out story. How do you come out to family members whose language you don’t speak?

We’re reaching back over a decade into our archives to 2005, when Diane C. Fujino released Yuri Kochiyama's biography Heartbeat of Struggle. To celebrate the book's release, activist and saxophonist Fred Ho invited Yuri's friends & contemporaries Baba Herman Ferguson, Esperanza Martell, & Laura Whitehorn to our space to speak on Yuri Kochiyama's legacy as a radical Asian American political activist. Afterwards Diane C. Fujino talks about Yuri Kochiyama's political awakening from her early years in a concentration camp in Arkansas during World War II, to her friendship with Malcolm X in New York City, and her years after as a tireless advocate for political prisoners and countless struggles around the world.

Cosponsored by the NYU A/P/A/ Institute

How is resistance possible when reality itself is obscured? In an era of "fake news" and more facts than anyone could hope to grasp, authoritarians rely on this uncertainty to consolidate their hold on power.

This episode we're featuring audio from our 2017 event Speaking Truth to Power. Legendary journalist Raissa Robles joins us from the Philippines to share her work, Marcos Martial Law: Never Again, which reappraises the era of Marcos and applies it lessons to what is unfolding today. Former AAWW Open City Fellow and journalist Raad Rahman will share her research on state repression in Bangladesh, from the Rohingya refugees fleeing attacks in Myanmar to the persecution of LGBTQ Bangladeshis, and writer and translator Tenzin Dickie will discuss writing and translating work about Tibetans navigating the ongoing Chinese occupation.

Following the readings will be a Q&A moderated by Jeremy Tiang, acclaimed translator and author of State of Emergency, the award winning novel that traces leftist movements throughout Singapore’s history. Together they discuss the rise in authoritarianism as a symmetrical reaction to colonialism, and the importance of remembering the past -- with help from a few key books and resources.

We hear from Open City Neighborhood Fellows Roshan Abraham, Pearl Bhatnagar, and Huiying Bernice Chan, who have been documenting the pulse of metropolitan Asian America as it's being lived on the streets of New York right now, and our Muslim Communities fellows, Aber Kawas, Humera Afridi, and Sarah Moawad, who have been writing on the city's Muslim American communities over the past six months.

They read from their recently published pieces about a donation-based sufi in Brooklyn, immigration activist Ravi Ragbir, and Nepali Working Class Women fighting for TPS Status. You’ll also learn about the BDS-supporting, pro-Palestinian City Council candidate el-Yateem in Bay Ridge  how to search for your family roots as a Chinese American, and the annual pilgrimage people take to Malcolm X’s resting place.

Moderated by Roja Heydarpour.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice outlines what it means to create spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of color. In this episode of AAWW Radio, Leah reads from her essay collection and then has a conversation with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson about meaningful inclusion of disability justice, Intersectional disability, the nuances and multitudes of the disability experiences, and “crip wealth.”

We’re bringing you another episode of Poetry Potluck featuring audio from our favorite AAWW poetry events and showcasing exciting poets of the moment. In Poetry Potluck 3, we celebrate Emily Jungmin Yoon’s debut collection of poetry, A Cruelty Special to our Species. As the Poetry editor for The Margins, Emily has cultivated a special home for Asian American poetry in all its richness, and we’re thrilled to celebrate her collection.

Emily Jungmin Yoon collects testimony and confronts history in her debut collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species. The poems in this book are records of earthly and human violence—the sexual slavery of Korean comfort women, lives lost during natural disasters, and the everyday, accumulating ways that women hurt and are made to silently accept that pain. These are poems deeply invested in the minutiae of language, how one word leads to the next, connecting sound, rhythm, and meaning between languages, poets, and women.

She has invited three poets to read alongside her; Wo Chan, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, and Kristin Chang. They read poems about friendship on mushrooms, a roast duck elegy to restaurant families, and environmental erotica about condensation.

Here’s programs assistant Tiffany Tran Le, who introduces each writer. Thanks for listening.

In Poetry Potluck 2, we have Vivek Shraya and Fatimah Asghar, who read from their poetry books I’m Afraid of Men and If They Come For Us.

In Vivek Shraya’s I’m Afraid of Men, she explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl, and contemplates how we might reimagine gender for the twenty-first century. Vanity Fair writes, “Vivek Shraya transforms her long-festering fears of men into cultural rocket fuel … Shraya’s dispatches from the frontlines of life as a queer, trans woman of color are frequently illuminating, painfully honest, and, in spite of everything, hopeful.”

If They Come For Us is Fatimah Asghar’s debut poetry collection, where she captures her experience as a Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America, exploring identity, inheritance, and healing. The Library Journal writes, “Her story sweeps wide, becoming the history of India, Partition, genocidal hatred, and timeless misogyny. In the telling, she moves freely in form.”

Has your superstitious grandma ever told you myths that you haven’t been able to forget? In this episode of AAWW Radio, we have critically acclaimed cartoonist and Last Night’s Reading creator Kate Gavino, who has invited some of her favorite writers to read short stories about Asian grandmas. Kate Gavino’s new graphic novel Sanpaku explores the Japanese myth through the eyes of Marcine, an impressionable Filipina preteen who lives for her grandmother’s eccentric stories. She is joined by The Verge's Angela Chen, Little A editor Vivian Lee, Catapult's Matt Ortile, and editor and author Rakesh Satyal-- and together they share stories about their grandmothers, and all the feelings of love, loss, and guilt that come with them.

The Incendiaries is a dark, glittering, and obsessive new novel from R.O. Kwon. It’s a fractured love story, a inside look at a campus cult, and a literary thriller. It’s also already a bestseller.

The Incendiaries follows the journey of a Korean American college student who falls under the spell of grief. As she finds new love, she’s also lured to violence in a Christian cult tied to North Korea. 

R.O. Kwon spoke with Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night, and the new essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. R.O. told him about growing up Korean and Christian, and shares an unpopular opinion: that books should be shelved with the spine facing inwards. She also talks about losing her faith, both in religion and in art.

In this episode of AAWW Radio, join us as four authors—Lee Herrick, Tracy O’Neill, Matthew Salesses, and Sung J. Woo-read from new books that grapple with the realities of adoption, broken families, and the journeys we take to find out where we belong. The authors discuss the identity politics that go hand-in-hand with having a white name and a Korean self, small victories when it comes to adoptee visibility in everyday life, and the importance of seeing your own reflection. This conversation is moderated by Shinhee Han, who teaches Asian American literature at Columbia University and has written extensively on transnational adoption.

This event was co-sponsored by Also Known As, Sejong, and FCCNY.

In 2016, we hosted the New York launch of Scholar Christine Bacareza Balance’s book Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America, a vital exploration of post-WWII Filipinx literary and musical culture. In this episode of AAWW Radio, we’ll hear Christine read from her book as she asks, “How do Filipinos make music? And what else do these acts of music making do?” Opening for Christine is former AAWW Literary Award winner and Guggenheim Fellowship-winning poet Patrick Rosal, whose poetry and essays channel DJ culture, family history, and community to explore vital questions about race in America. Afterwards, they have a conversation moderated by novelist Jessica Hagedorn, author of Toxicology and former bandleader of The Gangster Choir. Together they discuss Pinoy DJs and turntabling (Shout out to DJ Qbert), the act of disobedient listening, and how immigrant parents remix their lives in order to survive.

Two years ago on this month, we celebrated the release of Solmaz Sharif's award-winning debut poetry collection Look. Her poetry bears witness to, in the words of NPR, “war in the Middle East, the war on terror, the devastation ravaged upon families in the name of freedom.” Featuring poets and artists Mariam Ghani, Cathy Park Hong, Rickey Laurentiis, and Solmaz Sharif herself, they read from their work analyze state sponsored violence through language, form poems from redacted letters to people imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, and parse what Rickey Laurentiis calls “the fault line from Ferguson to Palestine.” Moderated and introduced by AAWW Editorial Director Jyothi Natarajan.

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we’re celebrating the launch of Marianna’s Beauty Salon, Bushra Rehman’s debut poetry collection that captures the nuances and magic of growing up as a South Asian American femme in Queens. Bushra Rehman reads alongside writers Quincy Scott Jones, Sadia Shepard, and Jai Dulani. You’ll hear a hilarious story about a plane full of Pakistanis marooned in Charles De Gaulle airport, police brutality interpolated into James Brown lyrics, poetic reflections on resistance, and much more.

On this episode of AAWW Radio we hear from New York Times Hungry City columnist Ligaya Mishan, Number One Chinese Restaurant author Lilian Li, and Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race author Naben Ruthnum. They read from their work and have a conversation with writer and chef Rohan Kamicheril about "authentic" food, the power dynamics of cultural appropriation, and the role of food as a cultural gateway. Shout out to MSG.

In this episode of AAWW Radio, authors Yiyun Li and Porochista Khakpour discuss how depression and chronic illness have transformed their existence not only as writers, but as people. Author Elif Batuman guides us in a conversation exploring the relationship between trauma and physical illness, the authors’ influences, and for who they tell their stories.

Link to the video of this event on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/Epj7kP7gWKA 

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we host a reading on India and caste with writers Neel Mukherjee and Sujatha Gidla. Neel Mukherjee's latest novel, A State of Freedom, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2014, follows the lives of five characters born to different circumstances in India navigating deeply entrenched class and caste divisions. Dalit-author Sujatha Gidla wrote the critically-acclaimed debut memoir Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. The two authors read from their work, and afterwards have a conversation with Gaiutra Bahadur, the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. Together they discuss Dalit exclusion in the publishing industry, the connection between caste and women’s oppression, Dalit solidarity with Black Americans, their love of Samuel Beckett, and much more.

Link to the video of this event on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIgKFl8Dpf8

This event was cosponsored by Equality Labs.

AAWW’s online magazine Open City documents the pulse of metropolitan Asian America as it's being lived on the streets of New York City right now. For this episode of AAWW Radio, we listen to AAWW Muslim Community Fellows Roja Heydarpour, Raad Rahman, Sumaya Awad and Humera Afridi read their stories published in Open City about their own experiences as Muslim American women, and the unique experiences Muslim Americans face in the current xenophobic political climate.

Sarah Khan's documentary: http://opencitymag.aaww.org/collateral-damage/

Apply for Open City Fellowships: https://aaww.submittable.com/submit

On this episode of AAWW Radio, we’re featuring three Arab American writers exploring the boundaries between personal and political: novelist/poet Hala Alyan and poets Hayan Charara and Marwa Helal. From the Six-Day War and the invasion of Iraq to explosive poetic experimentations, these writers explore what it means to have a private self, a family space, and a home in the conditions of war, displacement, and migration. They read from their work and have a conversation with with novelist and former AAWW Open City Fellow Tanaïs.

This event was co-sponsored with Radius of Arab American Writers, Turning Point for Women and Families, and Alwan for the Arts.

Elaine Castillo's debut novel America is Not the Heart is a vibrant and starkly hilarious novel about the De Vera family who flees Marcos-era Philippines in stages for the immigrant suburbs of the Bay Area. Elaine Castillo joins poets Luis H. Francia and Joseph O. Legaspi for a special reading about Filipinx-American history, migration, queerness, and the elusive goal of cracking the American Dream for working-class immigrants. After reading they join author Gina Apostol, author of the Gun Dealer's Daughter, for a conversation about Carlos Bulosan, Filipinx as a synthetic identity, and writing for Asian Americans vs the white establishment.

Do you ever feel like your life is in a constant state of crisis? Do you feel like, nevertheless, you persist? On this episode of AAWW Radio, we're featuring three thrilling experimental novelists whose books are about pushing forward against life-killing forces, whether it’s capitalism, the political status quo, or more existential threats like grief and suicide. Novelists Patty Yumi Cottrell, Eugene Lim, and Anelise Chen all navigate the universe of crisis--all with a touch of bleak literary experimentation that would make Samuel Beckett proud! After reading from their work, poet Lisa Chen moderates a conversation about survival strategies, self-awareness, and the balance of tension in the books.

This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Iraq War, so for this episode of AAWW Radio we’re bringing you an interview that AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen hosted with experimental poet Philip Metres back in 2016. Phil Metres is the author of the poetry collection Sand Opera. Solmaz Sharif writes, “Philip Metres’s poetry collection Sand Opera is complex, an untamable polyvocal array of clipped narratives in post-9/11 (if we are to believe such historical markers) America.” It’s a great conversation diving deep into Metres’ research of the confined and tortured people at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and the influence of these documents in response to violence as a poet.

As an Asian American, what is your Wakanda? Did you ever consider it being the obscure 2005 Xbox game Jade Empire? On this episode, we're continuing to highlight the recent launch Go Home!, our anthology of Asian diasporic writers published in collaboration with the Feminist Press. Contributing writers Alexander Chee, Karissa Chen, Chaya Babu, Wendy Xu, Gina Apostol, & the anthology’s editor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan had a hilarious and heartwarming conversation and Q&A in the final act of our two-hour event. They talk about the first books that made them feel seen, the importance of community, and of course, appreciating Black Panther.

We’re highlighting the recent launch of Go Home!, our anthology published in collaboration with the Feminist Press, featuring Asian diasporic writers who imagine “home” in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. On March 12th, we hosted a release party at our event space in Manhattan with contributing writers Alexander Chee, Karissa Chen, Chaya Babu, Wendy Xu, Gina Apostol, & the anthology’s editor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan who read to a packed house. It was an incredible evening and we’re excited to share the audio with you. Because it was a two-hour event, we’re splitting it into two podcast episodes: this episode will feature the introduction and readings, including Alexander Chee on his first roommate and Gina Apostol on Kundimans.

We’re starting a new series called Poetry Potluck featuring audio from our favorite AAWW poetry events and showcasing exciting poets of the moment. In Poetry Potluck 1, we have poets Ocean Vuong, Janine Joseph, and Wendy Xu reading from their work and having a conversation about writing process, family, and the body. Jennifer Hayashida introduces and moderates the conversation.

We're featuring two Korean American novelists, Jimin Han and Yoojin Grace Wuertz, who read from their debut novels that interrogate 1970s and 1980s Korean politics. Both books follow university students in the US and in Seoul as they fall in love, build friendships, and understand how they relate to the turbulent changes in South Korean society. Wuertz’s novel, Everything Belongs to Us, centers around two Seoul National University students under President Park Chung-hee’s 1970s authoritarian industrialization, while Han’s novel, A Small Revolution, flashes back to the student protests that helped inculcate Korean democracy. Introduced and moderated by E. Tammy Kim, former AAWW Open City Fellow and Editor at The New Yorker.

We had Canadian experimental poets M. NourbeSe Philip and Phinder Dulai in our space for a reading and conversation on working between poetry and the archive. Phinder Dulai's dream / arteries remixes archival photos, ships manifests, passenger records, and interviews from the traumatic Komagata Maru event. M. NourbeSe Philip explodes genre boundaries with Zong!, Philip's response to the Zong slave ship massacre through legal poetry. Zong! is generally regarded as one of the most significant experimental poetry books of the last decade. Introduced and moderated by AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen.

We're featuring one of the country’s most prominent science fiction writers, Ted Chiang, the winner of four Locus awards, four Nebula awards, four Hugo Awards, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Junot Díaz wrote, “Ted Chiang is so exhilarating, so original, so stylish, he just leaves you speechless.” Chiang’s short story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, includes the Nebula Award-winning story “Story of Your Life,” of which the 2016 Academy Award-nominated film Arrival was based. After he reads, he has a discussion with Whiting Award winner Alice Sola Kim, whose work has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s Literary Quarterly, Buzzfeed Books, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. They discuss how each reprint of Stories of Your Life and Others affects Chiang, how his relationship with literary genre has evolved, and how expectations of race play into his fiction.

A special discussion about music and the ghosts of America’s racial past featuring two highly acclaimed authors. A murder mystery, a ghost story, and two cultural tourists collide in Hari Kunzru’s spellbinding novel White Tears, which connects contemporary cultural appropriation and white hawkers of black music with the history of racism and the forgotten geniuses of American music and Delta Mississippi Blues. Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Margo Jefferson’s classic work of cultural criticism, On Michael Jackson, a complex and tender portrait of the King of Pop, reckons with child stardom and the specter of racial ghosts that shaped his celebrity. She reads from her evolving work on Michael Jackson and current writing on jazz singers. After reading from their work, they have a deep discussion with GQ senior editor Kevin Nguyen about cultural appropriation.

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we’re celebrating the new edition of works by Nick Joaquin titled The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic. Nick Joaquin is one of the most important writers of the Philippines who is only recently being published in the United States for the first time by Penguin Classics. Born in 1917, Joaquin wrote a surreal, anguished sentence that cast an ironic eye at colonialism’s longue durée and Catholic rites, both of which he depicted through magical realism and baroque splendor. To read and discuss Joaquin’s work, we’re featuring Pen Open Book winning author Gina Apostol alongside legendary activist and author Ninotchka Rosca who was a friend of Joaquin’s, and Five-Under-35 winning author Alex Gilvarry. After these contributors read excerpts of their pieces, they are joined in a Q&A with writer and editor Melissa R. Sipin.

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we’re featuring writers and activists confronting our immigration system that threatens families of people of color in this age of xenophobic resurgence. In early 2017, Shanthi Sekaran released her newest novel Lucky Boy which follows an undocumented eighteen-year-old Chicano mother who winds up in immigration detention--causing her son to be adopted by an upper class Desi foster mother. To write the book, Shanthi relied partly on the "Shattered Families" report produced by the racial justice organization Race Forward. Race Forward Senior Strategist and author Rinku Sen also joins us to break down the mechanisms of structural racism and how immigration enforcement splits apart children from their families. Their conversation is moderated by Kavita Das, former Race Forward staff member and author of the upcoming biography Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar.

In late 2016 we celebrated the launch of Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion. This is the first anthology to examine the multiple facets of daughterhood in South Asian American families. The title, Good Girls Marry Doctors, is a tongue-in-cheek jab at the things Asian American mothers sometimes say. These first person essays are intimate, heart-breaking, political, and hilarious; and examine what it means to be the perfect Asian daughter. This episode features the editor of Good Girls Marry Doctors, Piyali Bhattacharya, alongside three of this anthology’s contributors: Swati Khurana is a visual artist and writer, Jyothi Natarajan is the Editorial Director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Ankita Rao is an editor at Vice. After these contributors read excerpts of their pieces, author Sejal Shah joins them for a Q&A.

In 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. A searing and subtly funny book about who gets to tell our stories, this feminist classic established themes and controversies central to Asian American literature today: what we carry from our homelands and pasts, the role of myths and family secrets, and what narratives are silenced. For the 40th anniversary of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, we brought her together with Monique Truong, AAWW board member and the author of the best-selling novel The Book of Salt, for a wonderful conversation about spirituality, titling the Woman Warrior, and Maxine hanging out with Alice Walker in jail by the Arizona border.

Watch the video for the full event here on our YouTube channel.

Music by Robert Rusli & Lu Yang. 

http://aaww.org

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we're exploring the craft of the short story with two authors who released short story collections in 2017. The quotidian stories in Akhil Sharma’s new book simmer with a barely hidden, devastatingly emotional undercurrent―and have earned him comparisons to Chekov. Reminiscent of Calvino and Borges, Kanishk Tharoor’s lush and inventive collection ranges from science fiction to historical pastiche, delving into what is lost from environmental collapse and language loss. After Akhil Sharma and Kanishk Tharoor read from their short story collections, they discuss the craft of the short story in a conversation with Meera Nair, cofounder of the reading series Queens Writers Resist and author of the novel Video won the won the 7th Annual Asian-American Literary Award and was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.

Travel writing is a genre rife with fantasies of escape, luxury, and finding oneself through an experience in an unfamiliar place—in other words, colonial tropes. Is it possible to write about travel while decolonizing the narrative? We’re featuring several writers whose work focuses on humanizing the people who become backdrops to western tourism. Canadian writer Farzana Doctor joins us for the US launch of All Inclusive, her book written from the perspective of a worker at a Mexican resort. Reading alongside her are queer travel writer and activist Bani Amor, and writer and professor Tiphanie Yanique, whose debut novel, Land and Love of Drowning chronicles the changes in the US Virgin Islands over the 20th century. They're joined by Julia Hori, a graduate student who researches the colonial underpinnings of tourism in the Caribbean.

Watch the video for the full event here on our YouTube channel.

Music by Robert Rusli & Lu Yang. 

http://aaww.org

In 2014, just after the publication of her landmark essay collection Bad Feminist we hosted Roxane Gay in conversation with writer Alexander Chee at our event, The Popular is Political. They spoke about the representation of people of color in pop culture and publishing, their favorite problematic TV shows, and Roxane's obsession with Ina Garten.

Music by Robert Rusli and Lu Yang

Q.M. Zhang and lê thị diễm thúy, writers of fragmented, hybridic, family narratives explore themes of immigration, grief, and the father with The New Yorker’s Hua Hsu. A hybrid memoir/novel that’s part espionage, part historical documentary, Q.M. Zhang’s Accomplice to Memory tells the story of her father’s mysterious exodus from China during the country’s Civil War and WWII: all the silence and love that you’ve come to know from your Asian immigrant family, but with added subterfuge and geopolitics. Guggenheim Fellow lê thị diễm thúy, whose recent Asian American classic, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, tells the collage-like, semi-autobiographical story of a refugee family that immigrates to San Diego, leaving behind a stark past of war and liberation in Vietnam.

Watch the video for Migrant Father Fragment here. 

Music by Robert Rusli & Lu Yang. 

http://aaww.org

Novelist Dina Nayeri, journalist Alia Malek, and poet Rami Karim's work surrounds Middle East politics, revolution, and the refugee experience. You may have read Iranian-American novelist Dina Nayeri’s viral story in The Guardian, “The Ungrateful Refugee: We Have No Debt to Pay.” She reads from her book Refuge, a powerful story of a daughter who leaves Iran, but leaves her father behind. Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek returned to Damascus to live in her grandfather’s home–just as the Syrian conflict started. She writes about it in The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria. They read with AAWW Margins Fellow Rami Karim, the author of lyric poems set against the Civil War in Lebanon. This mashup of poetry, fiction, and memoir speaks to the complex nature of home: a place that elusively remains in flux through return and exile. This event is moderated and introduced by AAWW Muslim Community Fellow Roja Heydarpour.

Watch the video for Searching for Home here.

Music by Robert Rusli & Lu Yang. 

http://aaww.org

Poets Patrick Rosal, Bao Phi, and Sokunthary Svay confront nationalist mythology with lyrical odes to the America we struggle against, and the one being built through struggle. Patrick Rosal—who the Academy of American Poets honored for writing the best book of poetry of the year—uncovers forgotten multi-racial histories through his family’s journey from the Phillipines to Brooklyn. Bao Phi and Sokunthary Svay trace their arrival into Minneapolis and the Bronx as refugees. They speak into existence defiant new American imaginaries, inspired by hip hop and the invisible Asian American urban poor. This event is briefly introduced by musician Taiyo Na.

Watch the video for Refugee Requiem here. 

Music by Robert Rusli & Lu Yang. 

http://aaww.org

AAWW Radio is the podcast of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, a national nonprofit dedicated to the idea that Asian American stories deserve to be told. Listen to AAWW Radio and you’ll hear selected audio from our live events. We’ve hosted established writers like Claudia Rankine, Maxine Hong Kingston, Roxane Gay, Amitav Ghosh, and Hanya Yanagihara, as well as more emerging writers like Ocean Vuong, Solmaz Sharif, and Jenny Zhang. Our events are intimate and intellectual, quirky yet curated, dedicated to social justice but with a sense of humor and weirdness. We curate our events to juxtapose novelists and activists, poets and intellectuals, and bring together people who usually wouldn’t be in the same room. We’ve got it all: from avant-garde poetry to post-colonial politics, feminist comics to lyric verse, literary fiction to dispatches from the racial justice left. AAWW Radio features curated audio from the literary events we hold weekly in our New York City reading room, a legendary downtown art space that hosted Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book party and where Junot Díaz used to play Super Nintendo. Founded in 1991, AAWW is an alternative literary arts space working at the intersection of race, migration, and social justice. A sanctuary for the immigrant imagination, we’re inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Learn more by visiting aaww.org.

Our first episode will be dropping some time in November, and we'll be releasing weekly episodes after our launch. Hit the subscribe button for immediate updates!

This podcast is produced by our AV Producer Robert Ouyang Rusli. This teaser episode is narrated by Nadia Q. Ahmad, writer and former AAWW Programs Associate.