How does what we know influence our quest for love? Three years into a graduate program in science, the narrator of Weike Wang’s critically-acclaimed Chemistry (Knopf, 2017) cooly compares receiving a marriage proposal from her boyfriend to the careful problem solving that occurs between lab partners. The eccentric protagonist of Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) — the last in a line of “anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts” who took refuge in books amidst the tragedy of regime change and exile — mines the wisdom of her literary icons and takes on various pilgrimages to come to terms with her lost family and the possibility of a love. Come for a reading with these two authors and a discussion about their compelling and unusual coming-of-age novels. In conversation with Madhu Kaza. 

RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novels Fra Keeler and Call Me Zebra, and an Assistant Professor in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. She is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, as well as residency fellowships from MacDowell and Ledig House. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Guernica, Granta, BOMB, and elsewhere. She has lived in New York, Los Angeles, Tehran, Dubai, Valencia, Barcelona, and currently splits her time between South Bend, Indiana and Florence, Italy.

Weike Wang is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health. She received her MFA from Boston University. Her fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The Journal, Ploughshares, Redivider, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She is a 2017 “5 Under 35” honoree of the National Book Foundation.

Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is the co-editor of the recent anthology, What We Love, and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores the connection between translation and migration and which features immigrant, diasporic and poc translators. She directs the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University.

This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.

NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.

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