When Outsourced premiered last fall filled with tired, overplayed jokes that relied on bad desi accents and references to sacred cows, it seemed that American popular cultural representations of India had officially shifted from the "land of the ashram" to "the land of the call center." Whether you laughed or cringed when watching Outsourced (or didn't tune-in at all!), we hope you'll join us for reflections in fiction and film about this "new India."

Acclaimed writer and "Grand Dame" of Indian literature Bharati Mukherjee reads from her new novel Miss New India, which follows 19-year-old Anjali Bose from her home in a lower middle-class town to the high-tech city of Bangalore. In a starred review, Booklist writes, "Who better to capture the seismic shifts under way in India as the digital revolution takes hold than laser-precise and sharply witty Mukherjee?" And award-winning independent filmmaker Prithi Gowda screens her captivating experimental short film Televisnu, about a young woman who finds work in a call center to ask the question, "What are the possibilities that arise when a moment of personal development converges with a moment of cultural liberation?"

Bharati Mukherjee is the author of seven novels, two story collections, and the coauthor of two books of nonfiction, including The Middleman and Other Stories, The Tree Bride, and Desirable Daughters. She has also written numerous essays on immigration and American culture and is the first naturalized U.S. citizen to have won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Best Fiction. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Prithi Gowda grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and spent summers in Bangalore, India. At 17, she moved to New York City to study drawing, returned to Detroit to work as a motion graphic designer for a news station, and then studied film at NYU. Her short thesis film Televisnu premiered at SXSW 2010 and was a Wasserman finalist at NYU’s First Run Film Festival in 2011. The film also received a grant from the National Board of Review. Prithi lives in New York City and freelances as a graphic designer and filmmaker. She has produced online spots for Nike and women’s wear designer Doo.Ri. She is currently developing a feature called White Flight.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Join comedian Jen Kwok and Ed Lin for our monthly open mic, Mouth to Mouth. This month, we feature two artists whose works straddle multiple genres and forms. Multidisciplinary artist Soomi Kim and singer-songer Jay Legaspi will dance, sing, perform, and recite. We hope you don't stay in your seats. Sign-up for a 5-minute slot before the night kicks off to share you voice with the crowd.

Soomi Kim is an actor/multidisciplinary artist based in NYC. She performs with several companies and artists including Ex.p girl and composer/choreographer Grisha Coleman. Her original play Lee/gendary (based on the life of Bruce Lee, written by Derek Nguyen and directed by Suzi Takahashi) garnered 6 New York Innovative Theater Awards nominations and received the 2009 award for Outstanding Production of a Play. Her new piece, Dictee, a new dance theater work, is based on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's seminal book of poetry.

Jay Legaspi is a singer-songwriter based in New York City. Very quiet as a child, Jay broke his silence and found his voice when he began writing his own songs on an old nylon string guitar. His style developed quickly, finding influence in everything from Hip Hop to Indie Rock to the Classical guitar work of his father. Jay has played a The Bitter End, Crash Mansion, and Arlene's Grocery, among other venues. His debut full-length, PICTURE PERFECT, was released in 2010.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

How has the form of memoir been utilized by women writers? What can memoir tell us about history? From 1970s Iran to 1900s China, these are the stories of exceptional women. Jasmin Darznik weaves the experiences of three generations of Iranian women to reflect on their struggle against political and personal oppression in her debut memoir. Pang-Mei Natasha Chang traces the life of her great-aunt Chang Yu-I (the first Chinese woman to secure a Western style divorce) in early 20th century China and Supriya Bhatnagar welcomes us into her single-mother headed childhood home in 1970s India through a series of elegant vignettes. Join us as the three writers discuss, invoke, and question the power of the memoir to tell the layered and complex stories of women who resist.

Supriya Bhatnagar is Director of Publications for The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) and the Editor of the Writer’s Chroncile. She received her MFA in Nonfiction from George Mason University. Her short stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Femina, 4Indianwoman.com, Perigee, and Artful Dodge.

Pang-Mei Natasha Chang is a Chinese-American memoirist and essayist who writes about identity, relationships, and the intersection of cultures, generations and the sexes. Her writings have been included in the New York Times Magazine, New Haven Review, and Saveur. She's on the board of the literary magazine, the New Haven Review, and has taught writing at Yale and Bard colleges.

Jasmin Darznik was born in Tehran, Iran. A former attorney, she received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She is a professor of English at Washington and Lee University and has also been a visiting professor of Iranian literature at the University of Virginia. The Good Daughter is her first book and will be published in twelve countries.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Over the last few years, new media platforms have transformed reporting in our communities: neighborhood-based blogs have informed news coverage; ethnic news organizations are collaborating in ways never seen before; and activists use social media to organize around important issues facing their community. Open City Project Director Lena Sze speaks along side Ed Litvak (The Lo-Down NYC), Jeff Yang (Our Chinatown), and Anthony Advincula (New American Media) in this panel discussion at the 4th Annual Asian American Community Development Conference, presented by Asian Americans For Equality. Moderated by Norman Eng (National Employment Law Project), the workshop focuses on how hyperlocal blogs and non-conventional media coverage can serve as resources for ethnic and immigrant communities.

@New York University
Kimmel Center
60 Washington Square South
New York, NY

open to the public
Registration required

Have you been following Open City our interdisciplinary blog and community project on gentrification and urban change? Interested in continuing the conversation about these complex issues face-to-face with bloggers, writers, and community members? In a collaboration with the New Museum's Festival of Ideas for the New City and the Museum of Chinese in America, Where is Chinatown? Narrative Remappings will explore the changing face of New York's Chinatowns, while working to document the histories and memories of the people and communities who have worked, lived, or crossed through these neighborhoods. Writers Henry Chang, Cristiana Baik, R.A. Villanueva, Ed Lin, Zohra Saed, and Kelly Tsai will share their reflections and read from their work from 11AM-12:30PM.

And whether you grew up playing ball at Columbus or Sara Roosevelt Park or are a newbie who now calls these communities home, we encourage you share your insights during the oral history open house from 12:30PM-5PM. Fellows and volunteers from Open City will be available to collect and record your stories about Chinatown. Translators for Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Hindi/Urdu, and Dari/Farsi are also available. Email lsze@aaww.org to sign up for an interview slot and bilingual interviewer, if needed.

@ Museum of Chinese in America
215 Centre Street

Admission to readings (11AM-12:30PM): $7 general; $4 Seniors and Students (w/ ID); Free for AAWW members, MOCA members, and children under 12 in groups less than 8
Oral history open house (12:30PM-4:30PM): Free and open to the public.

On May 6, NOTICE, a series of readings and performances exploring the moment of stepping off the cliff and into the abyss, comes to the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Join us for an intoxicating evening navigating fear, resolve, panic, exhilaration, death, and rebirth as featured artists Joseph O. Legaspi, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Samantha Thornhill, Samantha Chanse, and Bushra Rehman creatively announce, investigate, and question their next bold moves.

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago, a poetry collection, from CavanKerry Press. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Gulf Coast, Crab Orchard Review, and Bloomsbury Review and the anthologies Contemporary Voices of the Eastern World, PinoyPoetics, and Titling the Continent. A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Joseph co-founded Kundiman(www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets.

Kamilah Aisha Moon's work has been featured or is forthcoming in several journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, jubilat, Sou’wester, Oxford American, Gathering Ground, Callaloo, and Bloom. A featured poet in conferences and venues around the country, Moon is looking forward to working on her novel at the Vermont Studio Center in June, interspersed with bouts of good mischief.

Samantha Thornhill is an international poet whose work has been featured in Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, and Poets and Writers Magazine, among other publications. She travels the globe performing regularly at universities, schools, and festival stages from Budapest to Brooklyn—the borough where she resides. Samantha teaches poetry at the Juilliard School and also serves as writer in residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters. Her young adult novel, Seventeen Seasons, is forthcoming from Penguin/Putnam.

Samantha Chanse is a writer/performer, theater artist, educator, and arts organizer based in New York and San Francisco. A member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and currently a playwriting MFA candidate at Columbia University, her work has been presented with the New York International Fringe Festival, HERE Arts Center, Bowery Poetry Club, and others. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission, an Artist In Motion residency from Footloose/Shotwell Studio, and an Emerging Artists Residency from Tofte Lake Center. She also co-runs a multidisciplinary, bicoastal salon series called Laundry Party. Her first solo play, Lydia's Funeral Video, will be published by Kaya Press in 2011.

Bushra Rehman's mother says Bushra was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her father is not so sure, but it would explain a few things. Bushra was a vagabond poet who traveled for years with nothing more than a greyhound ticket and a book bag full of poems. She is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism(Seal Press 2002). She has been featured on BBC Radio 4, KPFA, the Brian Lehrer Show and in theNew York Times, India Currents, and NY Newsday. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Crab Orchard Review, Sepia Mutiny, andColor Lines, and in several anthologies including Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry and Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

From the Indian Ocean to the American west, three daring fiction writers tell the story of the dispossessed. Like many characters in postcolonial lit., their protagonists have been cut off from motherlands by war, prison and migration. But the terrain of dislocation these writers explore--spanning the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, an imagined concentration camp for Arab Americans and the pathways between 1980s California and a war-torn Punjab--is startlingly new.

One of France's foremost emerging authors, Nathacha Appanah reads from her novel The Last Brother, which tells the little known story of Jewish refugees who are refused entrance to Palestine and imprisoned on Mauritius. This "important story, lyrical, grave and gorgeously told" (Victoria Redel) tells the story of two boys--one Indian, one Jewish--and their deeply moving attempts to escape both prison camp and the terrifying wilderness that surrounds it.

Science fiction meets post-9/11 civil liberties in Youmna Chlala'sstunning short story about concentration camps in the American southwest. Playwright Ranbir Sidhu reads from his recently completed novel The Open Country. The book focuses on a family of Sikh immigrants in 1980s California and is set partly against the distant events in the Punjab in India, where a civil war is raging.

Nathacha Appanah, a French-Mauritian of Indian origin, was born in Mauritius and worked there as a journalist before moving to France in 1998. The Last Brother, her fourth novel, won the Prix de la FNAC 2007 and the Grand Prix des Lecteurs de L’Express 2008.

Youmna Chlala, a Beirut-born artist and writer, is the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art and a recipient of the Joseph Jackson Award for poetry. Her writing has appeared in the MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies, XCP: Journal of Cross Cultural Poetics, Arab and Arab American Feminisms, and for the NPR Project for the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Her art work has been exhibited in the United States and Canada and across the Arab World and Europe, in venues that include the San Jose Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Tehran Biennale.

Ranbir Sidhu is a winner of the Pushcart Prize and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. His stories appear in Fence, The Georgia Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. He is the author of the plays "Conquistadors," "True East," and "Sangeet," and the recipient of a 2010/11 new theater commission from the New York State Council for the Arts. Learn more at www.ranbirsidhu.com.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Join us for an intimate lunch with writer Hanif Kureishi, hailed by the New York Times as one of 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Kureishi’s newly released Collected Essays presents decades of his writings on topics intimate (the making of his Oscar-nominated film My Beautiful Laundrette), literary (the nature of the essay), and political (the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the relationship between Islam and the West). Likened to the work of James Baldwin and George Orwell, the collection reveals Kureishi as the conscience of a post-imperial multi-racial England. It also tells the story of Kureishi’s childhood--how he grew up half-English, half-Pakistani in suburban England and escaped from 1970s skinhead fascism through the magic of literature. As he says, “As a teenager, I began to write. I wrote for my life.” Come hear Kureishi in conversation with Amitava Kumar, author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. This intimate meal will be held at Yuva, an acclaimed restaurant specializing in Northwest Indian Frontier cuisine.

Hanif Kureishi, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, is a novelist, filmmaker, and playwright, whose work includes the novels Intimacy and the Whitbread winner The Buddha of Suburbia, two Oscar-nominated screenplays, and pornography. His screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette, about a young Pakistani man in Thatcher's London who falls for a right-wing extremist, was nominated for an Academy Award, as was his most recent screenplay, Venus.

Amitava Kumar's most recent book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, was described in The New York Times as a "perceptive and soulful . . . meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions." He is also the author of the memoir Husband of a Fanatic, which was a New York Times editor's choice, several works of social criticism and fiction, and a collection of poetry, No Tears for the N.R.I. Kumar is a professor of English at Vassar College.

@ Yuva Frontier Indian Grill
230 East 58th Street
Between 2nd and 3rd Avenues

We will be closing ticket sales at Tuesday, May 26 at 9PM and will have a list of names available at the door for those who already bought tickets. Please arrive early or promptly so we can begin the event in a timely matter. We will begin admitting guests to the event at noon.

$20 includes lunch at Yuva & admission to event
open to the public.

Tired of cliched narratives of diasporic homecomings? Longing for an honest and irreverent story of coming, going, and never quite arriving? Don't miss the chance to hear R. Zamora Linmark read from his newest novel Leche--a witty, lyrical tale of a young man's return to the place of his birth and sequel to Linmark's critically acclaimed Rolling The R's.

It was 1978 when Vince De Los Reyes left the Philippines for Hawaii. Thirteen years later, he lands in Manila and finds himself reckoning with his balikbayan (U.S.-based Filipino) status, the realities of postcolonialism, childhood memories, a rebellious nun named Sister Marie, transnational identities, and the daughter of the country's president.

Incorporating prose (in English, Hawaiian Pidgin, and Tagalog), photographs, dictionary entries, postcards written to his friends in Hawaii, and lists of facetious tourist tips ("Don't use Spanish on them because their Spanish is not your Spanish"), Linmark skillfully weaves the sights and sounds of present-day Manila with flashbacks of Vince's seemingly claustrophobic life in Honolulu. Longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Award, Leche was praised by Publishers Weekly: “As quirky and funny as its oddball characters, Linmark's latest is a unique, colorful portrait of cross-cultural experience and a view into the complexities of modern-day Philippines through the prism of an ex-pat's self-discovery and quasi-homecoming." Join Linmark in conversation with Gayatri Gopinath at the AAWW to celebrate the NYC-launch of Leche.

Poet, novelist, and playwright R. Zamora Linmark is the author of the best-selling novel Rolling the R’s (Kaya Press) and three collections of poetry, Prime Time Apparitions, The Evolution of a Sigh, and the forthcoming Drive By Vigils, all from Hanging Loose Press. His stage adaptation of Rolling the R’s premiered in Honolulu in 2008 and was a critical and commercial success. Linmark divides his time between Honolulu and Manila.

Gayatri Gopinath is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Culture (Duke University Press), which has been called, "a landmark piece of scholarship." An Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at New York University, her research interests include Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Feminist Theory.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Our monthly open mic party is always a riot. April 15 will be no exception. New York City-born poet Bushra Rehman, who Ishle Yi Park has called "a little bundle of magic," and performance artist and playwright Tom X. Chao, who, according to Richard Yates, is the "author of at least one unforgettable story," join Mouth to Mouth hosts Ed Lin and Jen Kwok. Come for laughs, booze, and more!

Bushra Rehman was born and raised in New York City, but also lived in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. She is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Seal Press) and author of the collection of poetry, Marianna’s Beauty Salon (Vagabond Press). In her work, Bushra tells stories of her immigrant upbringing in Queens, the aunties, bodegas, stray dogs, and street life of children with both humor and sincerity. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha says, “Rehman’s poems are prayers of remembrance shot with lyrical power.” Bushra has been featured on BBC Radio 4, WBAI, and The Brian Lehrer Show. She is a teaching artist for Teachers & Wrters Collaborative, Urban Word NYC, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Tom X. Chao has written, directed, and performed theatrical shows for over 15 years. He most recently created Callous Cad, a one-act comedy presented by Dixon Place. Other recent shows include The Alternative Lifestyle Fair in the Ontological Theater's Tiny Theater festival and The Peculiar Utterance of the Day: Live on Stage at the Frigid Festival. Chao toured with his "greatest hits" show, Freak Out Under the Apple Tree, to the Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg Fringe Festivals in 2005. He has staged original pieces at the invitation of P.S.122, Surf Reality, BRIC Studio, Confluence Theatre Company, and The Brick Theater, among others and performed comedic monologues and sketches at numerous New York City venues. He lives in Manhattan.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public
sign up at 8:30 PM for a 5 minute slot

In this special 20th Anniversary Workshop reading, we honor Luis H. Francia, poet, journalist, professor, and former board member of The Asian American Writers' Workshop. Francia will be reading from his just published chapbook The Beauty of Ghosts, alongside writer/friends. Linda Faigao Hall, Nita Noveno, Susan Soriano, and R.A. Villanueva will read selections from Francia's works, as well as from their own works that resonate with his.

Poet, journalist, and nonfiction writer, Luis H. Francia teaches at Hunter College, and New York University as well as creative writing at the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Iowa summer writing program. Informed by an idiosyncratic sense of personal and collective history, his published writings include the poetry collections Museum of Absences, and The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems; the memoir Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, winner of both the 2002 PEN Center Open Book and the 2002 Asian American Writers literary awards; Memories of Overdevelopment (1998), a collection of essays and reviews; and A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos (2010). He edited Brown River, White Ocean, an anthology of Philippine literature in English, and co-edited Flippin': Filipinos on America, and Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999. His work has appeared in several literary anthologies as well as in The Village Voice, The Nation, Far Eastern Economic Review, and Asiaweek. He writes an online column for Manila's Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Nita Noveno was born and raised in Southeast Alaska. She is a graduate of the New School MFA Creative Writing Program in Creative Nonfiction, and is the founder and co-host of Sunday Salon (www.sundaysalon.com), a monthly prose reading series in its ninth year in NYC. She also edits the online literary zine, Salonzine. Her writing has appeared in The MacGuffin and Ducts.org, amongst other places. She is working on a collection of stories that merge tropical and temperate landscapes and the disparate lives of a father and daughter. Nita teaches English Composition at Lehman College and LaGuardia Community College.

R.A. Villanueva lives in Brooklyn. A finalist for the 2010 Alice James Books/Kundiman Poetry Prize, his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, DIAGRAM, Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He is currently a Language Lecturer at New York University.

Linda Faigao-Hall’s most recent production was God, Sex and Blue Water at the Lion Theater. Other produced plays include Sparrow, The A –Word, The FeMale Heart, Woman From the Other Side of the World (most recently done in Khobar, Saudi Arabia), and State Without Grace. Her current full-length play, Dying in Boulder, was read recently at the Ensemble Studio Theater with Laila Robbins in the lead directed by Ian Morgan, Artistic Associate Director of the New Group. Her current work in progress Lay of the Land will be read at the New Group on April 26, 2011. She is currently teaching English at the College of New Rochelle and also runs the Writing Center at Mercy College.

As a media executive and PR consultant, Susan Soriano has worked at Pantheon Books, Conde Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, New York, Parenting and Time magazines. She earned a graduate degree from the University of Chicago and has studied poetry with with Luis Francia, Miranda Field, and Marie Ponsot. She lives and works in New York City and Hastings-on-Hudson where she is serving a 5-year term on the town’s recently revived Village Arts Commission.

@ The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

We have all been struck by the unimaginable loss and despair caused by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and deadly tsunami that struck Japan on March 11. To support the relief effort, we're hosting poet, musician, and new mother Ishle Yi Park, who's flying into town from Kauai, Hawai'i. The New York Times writes, "Ms. Park has an angelic face and the soul of a rock star." She'll be joined by poet-activist Suheir Hammad whose work Naomi Shihab Nye has called "a brave flag over the dispossessed." Musician Taiyo Na, writer and editor Chiwan Choi, and others will also share the stage.

Proceeds from the event will be donated to Save the Children, which has launched a $5 million dollar appeal on behalf of the children of Japan. We'll be marking 100 days since the birth of Ishle's young daughter, Sulei, and raising funds for disaster relief in Japan.

Issil (Ishle Yi Park) is a mother, poet, singer, and soul surfer whose name means morning dew in Corean. Once upon a time she was the the Poet Laureate of Queens, New York, and now she lives in Kauai, Hawai'i. Her first book, The Temperature of This Water, is the winner of the PEN America Open Book Award for Outstanding Writers of Color. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Manoa, The Beacon Best, and Best American Poetry. Ishle was a touring cast member of Def Poetry Jam & regular on the HBO series, and has opened for artists such as KRS-One, Ben Harper, De La Soul, and Saul Williams.

Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian-American poet, author and political activist who was born on October 1973 in Amman, Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents and immigrated with her family to Brooklyn, New York City when she was five years old. She is the author of breaking poems (recipient of a 2009 American Book Award), ZaatarDiva, Born Palestinian, Born Black and Drops of This Story. An original writer and performer in the TONY award winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Suheir appears in the 2008 Cannes Film Festival Official Selection, Salt of This Sea.

Honored by Governor David A. Paterson and the State of New York for his "legacy of leadership to the Asian American community and the Empire State" in May 2010, Taiyo Na is a singer, songwriter, MC, and producer. His debut album Love Is Growth (Issilah Productions, 2008) established himself as "a multidimensional talent with a unique creative voice that fuses the rhythms of the city that raised him with the soul of the Asian immigrant culture that birthed him."

Chiwan Choi is a writer, editor, teacher, and publisher. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including ONTHEBUS, Esquire, and circa.Chiwan's first major collection of poetry, The Flood, was published by Tía Chucha Press in April, 2010. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School at NYU, and now lives in Los Angeles, where he and his wife recently launched Writ Large Press.

Lankan Tamil Blood, Manchester Born, Texas bred and Brooklyn steeped, YaliniDream is a performance artist, activist, and facilitator. She conjures spirit through her unique blend of poetry, theater, song, and dance-- reshaping reality and seeking peace through justice in the lands of earth, psyche, soul, and dream. One of the South Asian American community’s most prominent performance poets, YaliniDream has toured nationally throughout the US as well as performing in Canada, Europe & South Asia. She has performed in numerous venues ranging from NYC's Lincoln Center and Dance Theater Workshop to subway cars to street protests to universities to independent theaters to the hottest clubs in the New York underground. YaliniDream was a 2006 Mid-Atlantic Artists in Community Fellow, a panelist for the Leeway Foundation's 2007 Transformation Awards, a 2008 Urban Arts Initiative Fellow & currently a recipient of the Jerome Foundation's Travel & Study Award in Literature.

@ The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU

Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, is giving walking tours of New York City's Chinatown street food as a fundraiser for the Asian American Writers' Workshop. It's a 2.5 hour tour that includes (depending on availability) Xi'an Famous Foods, Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, Xinjiang skewers, banh mi, pulled noodles and more. Must be willing to share portions. Please wear comfortable shoes. Meet Saturday, April 2 at 2 pm in front of the Chinatown's Museum of Chinese in America at 215 Centre Street. There is also possibility of April 3 if there is enough demand. Food costs are included in the tour. Reserve your spot!

@ Meet in front of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
215 Centre Street

$88 donation to the Asian American Writers' Workshop
open to the public

From Central Asia to Iran to Brooklyn, a mutli-genre literary reading to celebrate Nowruz, our common New Year, with ground-breaking writers from the Afghan and Iranian American diasporas. Acknowledging the deeply entwined histories of our peoples and the overlapping richness of our literary traditions, this reading is inspired by desire to forge new artistic collaborations in the US, where the breadth and insight of our many stories are most urgently needed.

Najila Naderi works in the history department at Columbia University, and is earning her MA in English form Queens College. She is currently working on a collection of short stories. Najila dreams of one day returning to Afghanistan and becoming a teacher.

Narges Bajoghli is currently a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at New York University, where her research focuses on the production of media and popular culture in Iran. In the summer of 2007, she curated the sister exhibitions of TRANSFORM/ NATION: Contemporary Art of Iran and Its Diaspora, in Washington DC and Tehran. Narges spent three semesters researching at the University of Tehran's Faculty of Law and Political Science as a Susan Knafel Fellow, where she developed programs to support victims of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. Following her research, she was awarded a place at the Hedgebrook Writer's Residency. Narges has worked extensively with non- profit organizations in Iran and Latin America. She is co-founder of the non-profit Iranian Alliances Across Borders and developed the International Conferences on the Iranian Diaspora and the Iranian-American Youth Leadership: Camp Ayandeh.

Sara Goudarzi is a New York City writer, performer of poetry, and teacher. She was born in Tehran and grew up in Iran, Kenya, and the US. Her nonfiction and poetry have appeared in The Adirondack Review, National Geographic News, The Christian Science Monitor, Terry and Drunken Boat, among others. She is the founder and co-editor of /One/ The Journal of Literature, Art and Ideas. Sara teaches writing at NYU and Mediabistro, and is currently working on a first novel.

@ Zora Space
315 4th Avenue
Brooklyn, NY

$5 suggested donation open to the public

Co-sponsored by the Association of Iranian American Writers and the Association of Afghan American Writers

Waiting for the warmer weather? Join us for this month's Mouth to Mouth Open Mic which is sure to raise the temperature. NEA award winning composer and violinist Jason Kao Hwang will give a special acoustic performance, and performer Becky Yamamoto, called "priceless" by The New York Times and "expertly deadpan" by The New Yorker, will surely have us in laughs.

Jason Kao Hwang (composer, violinist) has created works ranging from jazz, classical, "new" and world music. His octet, Burning Bridge, recently performed at the Chicago World Music Festival and the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. His jazz quartet, EDGE, has released two CDs, most recently Stories Before Within (2008, Innova), which was chosen as one of the Top Ten CDs of 2008 by Coda Magazine. Mr. Hwang's chamber opera, The Floating Box, A Story in Chinatown (New World Records), presented by the Asia Society in 2001, was named one of the top ten opera recordings of 2005 by Opera News. As violinist, Mr. Hwang has worked with Reggie Workman, William Parker, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill and others. Mr. Hwang has received support from Meet the Composer/New Residencies, the National Endowment for the Arts, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and others. Mr. Hwang was recently awarded grants from Chamber Music America, US Artists International and the American Music Center

Becky Yamamoto is a comedic performer. She has performed in venues all around New York such as P.S. 122, Ars Nova, UCB Theater, Here Arts Center, to name a few. She has also toured internationally with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public
sign up at 8:30 PM for a 5 minute slot

In a nation with fast and vast demographic changes, what is the role of musicians and their fans in moving beyond hatred? Is SB 1070 in Arizona only the tip of the anti-immigrant movement iceberg? Artists and activists join together to discuss the Sound Strike and their commitment to working together to raise awareness and opposition to the treatment of immigrants in Arizona. Featuring Soundstrike's Javier Gonzalez, multiple Grammy award winner Rene Perez of Calle 13, Can't Stop Won't Stop author and Wordstrike Jeff Chang, Roco of Maldita, and artist Favianna Rodriguez.

@ South by Southwest
Austin Convention Center, Room 9ABC
Austin, Texas

If America is a nation of immigrants, it's also a nation of aliens. What has it meant historically to be a traveler or a migrant, or to exist as an outsider within a cultural landscape? What does it mean now? We're celebrating the launch of Granta Issue #114: Aliens with editor John Freeman and writers Catherine Chung and Julie Otsuka, whose works appear in the publication. In this intimate and eclectic evening, our readers will expand a dialogue on citizenship and migration that remains stubbornly relevant today.

Catherine Chung graduated with a degree in mathematics from The University of Chicago, and has taught creative writing at The University of Leipzig and Cornell University, where she received her MFA. She was recently named one of Granta's New Voices. A fellow of The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and The Camargo Foundation, her first novel, Forgotten Country, will be published by Riverhead Books in January 2012.

Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. She is a graduate of Yale University and received her M.F.A. from Columbia. Her debut novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, won the American Library Association Alex Award and the New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age Award. She is the winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and lives in New York City.

@ The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Join us for a delectable evening with NYC food and fashion writer Cheryl Tan and NY Times Urban Foraging Columnist Ava Chin as they explore the relationship between food, family, and memory. Cheryl Tan will read from and discuss her new memoir, A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, which Kirkus Review places in the lineage of "two different memoirs, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Julie Powell's Julie & Julia." After years at the Wall Street Journal, Tan journeyed home to Singapore to spend a year learning to cook the recipes she had taken for granted as a child, learning from her aunties hidden truths about her family and about herself that she would never otherwise have discovered. And you can taste some of the Singaporean treats in the memoir with food provided by Cafe Asean!

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York City-based food and fashion writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, InStyle, Marie Claire, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Family Circle, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and many other outlets. She is a regular contributor to the Atlantic Food Channel. Born and raised in Singapore, Tan graduated from Northwestern University and completed two residencies at Yaddo, the artists' colony. A Tiger in the Kitchen is her first book. Follow her at: twitter.com/cheryltan88.

Ava Chin writes the Urban Forager column for the New York Times City Room, and is the editor of the anthology Split: Stories from a Generation Raised on Divorce, described by Booklist as a "brave and insightful collection of essays." She has written for the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, and Spin magazine, among others. She received her Masters from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and her PhD from the University of Southern California; she is an Assistant Professor in Creative Non-fiction and Journalism at the College of Staten Island.

@ The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Co-sponsored by Cafe Asean

2011 is starting off with a bang! We're ushering in the new year with a Mouth to Mouth Open Mic featuring activist and spoken word artist Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai and poet Ocean Vuong. So, come, bring a friend, and be ready to get your socks rocked off by poetry.

Ocean Vuong born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, is the author of Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press 2010) and is currently an undergraduate English Major at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beatrice Dubin Rose Award, the Connecticut Poetry Society's Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. His work appear in Word Riot, the Kartika Review, Lantern Review, SOFTBLOW, Asia Literary Review, and PANK among others. Poems have also been translated into Hindi, Russian, Korean, and Vietnamese. He lives in Brooklyn and is an avid supporter of animal rights and Veganism.

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai has been featured in over 450 performances worldwide at venues including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the House of Blues, the Apollo Theater, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and three seasons of the award-winning "Russell Simmons Presents HBO Def Poetry." The author of Inside Outside Outside Inside (2004), Thought Crimes (2005), No Sugar Please (2008), and The CD's Infinity Breaks (2007) and Further She Wrote (2010), Tsai has shared stages with Mos Def, KRS-One, Sonia Sanchez, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Amiri Baraka, Harry Belafonte, and many more.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public
8:30 sign-up for 5 minute slot

Contemporary Chinese poet Cai Tianxin gives a talk on the history of Chinese Poetry, reads from his own avant work, and discusses his place in the continuum of Chinese poetry with poetry legend Bob Holman. A columnist of the monthly magazine Book City in Shanghai, which is considered the Chinese New Yorker, and founder of Appolinaire, the leading underground literary magazine in China, Cai will offer a rare insight into contemporary Chinese poetry.

Cai Tianxin , considered to be among the most active young Chinese avant-garde authors, was born in Huangyan, in the South East of the People's Republic of China, in 1963. He studied mathematics and received a doctorate with a dissertation on number theory from Shandong University in 1987. He has participated in international poetry festivals in Medellin, Colombia, and Rosario, Argentina, as well as in Zurich, Genoa, Vilenica, Slovenia, and Durban, South Africa. Since the publication of his first volume of poetry Bi An(t: Shore) in 1992, another three volumes have appeared in China. Since 1995, Cai Tianxin has been editing the biannual literary magazine Apollinaire, which has developed into one of the most important underground magazines in China. Cai Tianxin lives in Hangzhou, where he is a professor of mathematics at Zhejiang University. Cai's poems have been translated into more than 20 languages, with books published in English, French, Spanish, Korean, Turkish and Serbo-Croatian. His most recent publication is the autobiography Little Memories: My Childhood in Mao's Times. He also translates poems from English and Spanish into Chinese.

Bob Holman has published six books, most recently A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture, 2006), praise poems paired with photographs of artists by Chuck Close. He's also put poetry on television, radio and the Web, producing The United States of Poetry for PBS, appearing on MTV's Spoken Word Unplugged and HBO's Def Poetry Jam, and serving as poetry commentator on WNYC and NPR. Currently, he teaches "Exploding Text: Poetry in Performance" at Columbia University and is the founder and proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

Over the past twenty years, the Asian American Writers' Workshop has grown from a Greek diner meeting into a preeminent intellectual sanctuary for Asian American literature. Join us for a cross-genre, cross-generational reading celebrating the Workshop's twentieth year. Writers will read from their work and talk about the Workshop's influence and history.

@AWP
Virginia B Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level

From Hmong to Iran to Turkmenistan, Asian American literature is broadening its terrain. The Asian American Writers' Workshop is at the fore of this conversation on "radical inclusivity." But what unifies these cultures and aesthetics? Join an eclectic group of Asian American Writers in conversation as they come together to discuss the future of the Asian American arts movement in a post multi-cultural world.

@AWP
Empire Ballroom
Omni Shoreham Hotel, West Lobby

Commonwealth Prize-winning author Rana Dasgupta will be in conversation with writer and artist Naeem Mohaiemen, reading from and discussing his novel, Solo. Come hear why Salman Rushdie has called Solo a "novel of exceptional, astonishing strangeness," and argues the novel "confirms Rana Dasgupta as the most unexpected and original Indian writer of his generation."

Rana Dasgupta was born in Canterbury, England in 1971 and studied at Balliol College, Oxford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After his studies he worked for a marketing consultancy firm which took him to London, Kuala Lumpur and then New York. In 2001, he moved to Delhi to write. His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled, appeared in 2005 and was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. His second novel Solo (2009) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. His essays have appeared in such places as Granta, The Missouri Review and the New Statesman. Rana now lives permanently in Delhi, and is at present working on a book about his adopted city.

Naeem Mohaiemen is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in Sound Unbound (MIT Press), Nobody Passes (Seal Press), Secret Identities: Asian American Superhero Comics (New Press), Granta (Pakistan issue), etc. He is editor of Between Ashes and Hope: Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism. Excerpts from his research on the 1970s ultra left were shown at Frieze Art Fair and will show at the 2011 Sharjah Biennial.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
112 W 27th Street, Ste 600
Btwn 6th and 7th Avenues

"'You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'" So began The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston's first book, heralding a writer who, possibly more than any, has defined what Asian American literature has meant over the last several decades. The creative memoir sent shockwaves through American letters, establishing themes and controversies central to Asian American literature today: what we carry from our homelands and pasts, the role of myths and family secrets, what narratives are silenced and adventures in genre and gender. We're proud to kick off The Asian American Writers' Workshop's twentieth anniversary and ring in the Lunar New Year by featuring Kingston's ambitious new memoir in verse, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. In Margin, Kingston has built a poem animated by a soul large enough to take in the full vista of life: age and mortality; wonderful friends and loved ones, both alive and passed away; and journeys through China and America and through the languages of Hawaiian pidgin, Cantonese, and Thoreau and Whitman.

Winner of our first Asian American Lifetime Achievement Award, Kingston will read and answer questions at one of the finest Chinese art galleries in Chelsea. Prior to the reading, guests for our cocktail reception will be able to sip a signature cocktail custom-mixed by Eddie Huang of BaoHaus (pictured left) in her honor and snap a photo with her in our photo booth. And after the reading, we'll be holding an intimate dinner of dishes prepared and selected by Chef Huang in her honor—seating will be limited, so please reserve your seat today. Help us celebrate the Year of the Rabbit and our own birthday with one of the central writers of American letters.

Maxine Hong Kingston is the daughter of Chinese immigrants who operated a gambling house in the 1940s, when she was born, and then a laundry where Kingston and her brothers and sisters toiled long hours. Her books—such as The Woman Warrior, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and China Men, winner of the National Book Award—are classics of contemporary literature. The Woman Warrior has been identified by the Modern Language Association as possibly the most frequently assigned twentieth-century literary text by a living writer. Kingston's awards include the PEN West Award for Fiction, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the National Humanities Medal, which was conferred by President Clinton, as well as the title "Living Treasure of Hawai'i" bestowed by a Honolulu Buddhist church. Kingston is currently Senior Lecturer Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.

@ Chambers Fine Arts
522 West 19th Street (btwn 9th and 10th Avenues)
New York, NY 10011

Dinner held the home of Lydia Andre and Campbell Wilson
352 W 20th St (at 9th Ave)
New York, NY 10011

Ticketing:

• 6-7PM Cocktail reception (comes with AAWW membership, photo with Maxine Hong Kingston, and reading admission) - $50
• 7-8PM Reading - $15
• 8:30-10PM Dinner (comes with AAWW membership, cocktail and reading admission, and listing as Benefit Committee member) - $250

Does your mom leave desperate voicemails asking you to "please pick up phone? hello? are you there?" or take twenty-four more napkins than she needs at Taco Bell? Your mom may be a fob. What began in 2008 as a blog featuring endearing and nosy texts and emails from Teresa Wu and Serena Wu's mothers has evolved into a collective archive of all our delightfully fobby mothers. We'll be kicking off the book version of My Mom is a Fob with Teresa and Serena over tasty booze and bao. Ring in Mother's Day early this year as Jennifer 8. Lee, Ed Lin, Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, and Eddie Huang share stories of their favorite mother-moments.

Teresa Wu and Serena Wu are the creators of mymomisafob.com and mydadisafob.com. Both spent their childhood years in Fremont, California, home to a thriving community of fobby moms. Teresa graduated from the University of California, San Diego and her writing has appeared on Glamour.com, Lemondrop.com, CNNGo.com, and more. She currently lives in New York City and blogs at byteresawu.com. Serena graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and now works as a web designer and game artist in San Francisco. To learn more about Serena, please visit serenastudio.com.

Jennifer 8. Lee was a reporter at The New York Times for nine years, where she covered poverty, the environment, crime, politics, and technology. She harbors a deep obsession for Chinese food, the product of which is The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, 2008), which explores how Chinese food is all-American. NPR has called her "conceptual scoop artist."

Ed Lin is the author of Waylaid (2002) and This Is a Bust (2007), both published by Kaya Press. Snakes Can't Run (2010), the sequel to This Is a Bust, is published by Minotaur Books. Lin, who is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, holds degrees in mining engineering and journalism from Columbia University. He lives in New York with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung.

Spoken word artist Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai has been featured in over 450 performances worldwide at venues including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the House of Blues, the Apollo Theater, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and three seasons of the award-winning "Russell Simmons Presents HBO Def Poetry." The author of Inside Outside Outside Inside (2004), Thought Crimes (2005), No Sugar Please (2008), and the CD's Infinity Breaks (2007) and Further She Wrote (2010), Tsai has shared stages with Mos Def, KRS-One, Sonia Sanchez, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Amiri Baraka, Harry Belafonte, and many more.

Open for just over a year, Eddie Huang's restaurant, Baohaus, has received critical acclaim and coverage from the New York Times, Time Magazine, The New York Post, New York Magazine, Serious Eats, Time Out New York, and many more. The closest Eddie came to “formal” cooking training was from his mother. Influenced by her style, he developed his own unique recipes and techniques by eating out, taking notes and recreating dishes at home. He believes that everyone has three cooking classes-a-day: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner. He is a culinary outsider who became an insider by creating his own opportunities. Before Baohaus, Eddie enjoyed various professions including writer, lawyer and stand-up comedian. In his spare time, Eddie enjoys watching the Redskins, Knicks, hitting the roor, and hollering at birds. Photo credit: Phil Chang

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
112 W 27th Street, Ste 600
Btwn 6th and 7th Avenues

$25 for dinner and reading 7-9PM
$15 bring a mom to dinner and reading! 7-9PM
$10 for reading 8-9PM

Online ticket sales are closed. Tickets will be available at the door.

Our last open mic of 2010 features two New York-based musicians and poets Taiyo Na and Koba Sounds. Come hear them and spit a rhyme yourself! Or a poem, or a story, or some comedy— we've got room for it all if you can fit it in 5 minutes!

Honored by Governor David A. Paterson and the State of New York for his "legacy of leadership to the Asian American community and the Empire State" in May 2010, Taiyo Na is a singer, songwriter, MC and producer. His debut album Love is Growth (Issilah Productions, 2008) established himself as "a multidimensional talent with a unique creative voice that fuses the rhythms of the city that raised him with the soul of the Asian immigrant culture that birthed him" (Okayplayer.com). The album features the song "Lovely To Me (Immigrant Mother),' whose music video to the song was heralded by MTV Iggy as "the realest thing seen in a while." In June 2010, he released a collaboration album entitled Home:Word with hip-hop duo Magnetic North. AngryAsianMan.com has described the record as "one of my favorite albums of the year."

Koba Sounds says his name means "ferocious panda," which combines ferocity, assault, and hatred for systematic injustice and exploitation with a soft, gentle soul and altruistic love. Hailing from Harlem, he has been part of the Asian American hip-hop group, Kontrast, which released the album Pencils, and in 2008 he debuted his solo album Culture War. City Scoops Magazine writes, "His music takes listeners back to a time when hip-hop was about creating poetry and art, and at the same time ushers them forward with modern beats and skillful rhymes. His raw and energetic performances with the legendary DJ Boo are not to be missed." Inventive, irreverent, and unrepentantly radical, Koba uses his new musical synthesis of gritty Southern gumbo and honeyed melodies to combat the increasingly corporate and homogeneous hip-hop genre of bling, dramatization of thug life and the objectification of women.

$5 suggested donation
Open to the public
8:30pm sign-up for 5 minute slot

Michael Syjuco's Ilustrado won the Man Asian Prize before it was even published, and has been called a "literary landmark for the Philippines and beyond" by Booklist. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, Ilustrado is a family saga of four generations tracing 150 years of Philippine history forged under the Spanish, Americans, and Filipinos themselves. Woven into Miguel's accounts of his return to the Philippines is a history of the postwar Philippines, revolution, social change, heroism, cowardice, regret, faith, exile, nationalism, and the narrator's coming-of-age story. According to the New York Times, "Ilustrado is being presented as a tracing of 150 years of Philippine history, but it's considerably more than that...Spiced with surprises and leavened with uproariously funny moments, it is punctuated with serious philosophical musings." Syjuco will be in conversation with Luis Francia, author of History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos, in an intimate look at how a novelist can write history and mystery, write away from one's without the pitfalls of exotification.

Miguel Syjuco received the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the Philippines' highest literary honor, the Palanca Award, for the unpublished manuscript of Ilustrado. Born and raised in Manila, he currently lives in Montreal.

Luis Francia is a poet, journalist, and nonfiction writer. His semiautobiographical account of growing up in the Philippines, Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, won both the 2002 PEN Open Book and the 2002 Asian American Writers literary awards. He is co-editor of Flippin': Filipinos on America and of Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999.

@ The Asia Society
750 Park Avenue
at 70th street

If you open your mouth and the AAWW is around, will you make a sound? Will these sounds make sense? Will they make a story? You've got questions, we've got answers at our open to the public open mic series. This week we welcome poet and first time novelist, Juliet S. Kono, whose latest novel, Anshu: Dark Sorrow follows an unmarried Hilo teenager, Himiko Aoki, from the cane fields of Hawai'i to Tokyo during the bombing of Hiroshima, stand-up comedian Negin Farsad, Fred Chao, and others! Come to find out the winner to our Members' Choice Award.

Juliet S. Kono is the author of two books of poetry, a short story collection, Ho'olulu Park and the Pepsodent Smile, and a children's book, The Bravest 'Opihi. The recipient of several awards, including the US/Japan Friendship Commission Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship, she has been anthologized widely, most recently in Imagine What It's Like: A Literature and Medicine Anthology. In 2006, she won the Hawai'i Award for Literature. Born and raised in Hilo, Hawai'i, she now lives in Honolulu with her husband and teaches composition and creative writing at Leeward Community College.

Negin Farsad is a comedian who's written and performed for Comedy Central, MTV, IFC and PBS. She has performed standup all over the country, opening for the likes of (Senator) Al Franken in venues ranging from the Comedy Store in Los Angeles to Town Hall on Broadway. She's also the director/producer of current feature film release, "Nerdcore Rising."

Fred Chao is the writer/artist of the graphic novel Johnny Hiro {half asian, all hero}. An excerpt of the book was included in The Best American Comics 2010. His comics have also been included in the anthology Found: Requiem For A Paper Bag.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public
7:30 sign-up for 5 minute slot

Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Craig Santos Perez probe the identities of the outcast, the displaced in poems that experiment with everything from internet news sources to the Book of Genesis and Tagalog tradition. In Diwata, Reyes inherits the responsibility of remembering from her grandfather, a survivor of World War II and the Bataan Death March, in a collection that, according to Nick Carbo, "would have raised the hairs on the nape of Emily Dickinson's head." Lee, whose words Brenda Iijima says "full of finesse, radiance and are unsettlingly real," reads from Underground National, an experiment across the DMZ. Perez's latest book, from unincorporated territory [saina], illuminates the history of the Chamorro, the native people of Guam, in lyrics of personal and political memory. The SF Examiner says "It is impossible to read [saina] and not feel moved by Perez's capacity to take pain and truths that should be embittering, even crippling, and fashion light out of them."

Barbara Jane Reyes is author of two previous poetry collections including Poeta enSan Francisco which was awarded the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as adjunct professor in Philippine Studies atUniversity of San Francisco.

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of two poetry books: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010). He received the Poets & Writers California Writer's Exchange Award in 2010. He earned an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up 3 miles from the CIA. She is a poet, scholar, and editor. Currently, she lives in Philadelphia where she edits Corollary Press, a chapbook series devoted to multi-ethnic, innovative writing. Her first collection of poems, That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut Press), is a study of celebrity and the Asian figure in mass media. Her second collection, Underground National (Factory School), explores how national structures and identities affect human psyches, taking Korea as its primary staging ground.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Xu Xi has been called a "pioneer writer from Asia in English" by the New York Times, and a pioneer of a distinct kind of diasporic language. Shortlisted for the Man Asia award, her latest work, Habit of a Foreign Sky, moves between Hong Kong and New York, as the biracial female protagonist, Gail, loses her mother and only child and is left with her career as an executive at a global investment bank. Don Lee, author of Yellow calls the novel "Smart, eloquent" and "a scintillating accomplishment." Join the author for an intimate conversation at Asia Society with her editor, Anna Sherman, on the genesis of this global novel and how we find direction when we think we've lost everything.

Xu Xi, an award-winning fiction writer and essayist, has also edited several literary anthologies including Fifty-Fifty: New Hong Kong Writing. She currently teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is Writer-in-Residence at City University of Hong Kong, where she founded the first international MFA program that specializes in Asian writing in English.

Anna Sherman is an Asia-based freelance editor. Her work for Haven Books includes the world poetry anthology Not a Muse and Xu Xi's Habit of a Foreign Sky.

@ Asia Society
725 Park Ave
New York, NY 10021
Between 70th and 71st Streets

Charlie Chan, a fictional Chinese detective played by white men on the silver screen, captivated American audiences for decades with one-liners like "tongue often hang man quicker than rope" and is today seen as a yellowface relic. In Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, Yunte Huang attempts to recast the maligned icon. Frank Chin, a founding father of Asian American literature, has called Charlie Chan movies "parables of racial order." But is Charlie Chan racist or remarkable? Come decide for yourself as Huang maps Charlie Chan's evolution from real-life Cantonese-Hawaiian legend to cinematic icon to despised postmodern symbol, and, in the process, reshapes the way we will view the controversial figure again. The New York Times calls Huang's retelling of Charlie Chan a "very original, good-humored and passionately researched book." Join him in conversation with LANGUAGE poet and scholar Charles Bernstein as they discuss the ways we can complicate notions of identity and performance and decide the place for yellowface.

Yunte Huang came to the U.S. in 1991 after graduating from Peking University with a B.A. in English. He received his Ph.D. from the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo in 1999 and taught as an Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University from 1999-2003. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics, CRIBS, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature, and Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry, and the translator into Chinese of Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos.

Charles Bernstein is the author of 40 books in a number of formats, most recently All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, Girly Man, With Strings, and Republics of Reality: 1975-1995. He is the co-founder and co-editor of PENNsound; and editor/co-founder of The Electronic Poetry Center. With Bruce Andrews, he edited L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which was anthologized as The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. In 2006, Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Our riotous Open Mic this week features Master (of comedy and karate) Lee and Sung (playwright genius) Rno. Open your mouth and say ahh—or say a poem! Or say a story! Or say a skat! Say anything! The sky (or at least the tin ceiling of Chelsea digs) is the limit at our open mic series.

Master Lee began as a street performer in Washington Square Park. He went on to do stand-up comedy, appearing on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, MTV, Showtime at the Apollo and Sesame Street. Master Lee has taught storytelling at the Rubin Museum of Art and Performance Art at New York University.

Sung Rno's plays and poems are included in the anthologies But Still, Like Air, I'll Rise; Premonitions; Echoes Upon Echoes, and The Nuyorasian Anthology. Honors include an NEA/TCG playwriting fellowship, Whitfield Cook Prize, New York Fringe Festival Best Overall Production Award (for Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen, directed by the author), Van Lier/New Dramatists fellowship. and commissions from the New York Shakespeare Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, Mark Taper Forum, Ma-Yi Theater Company, and Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan Foundation. He received a BA from Harvard and an MFA from Brown.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public
sign up at 8:30 PM for a 5 minute slot

Gish Jen's latest novel, World and Town, explores new starts and shifting American towns in what Publisher's Weekly heralds as an "expansive story of identity and acceptance." Hattie Kong loses her husband and best friend in the same year—"like having twins. She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium." Resettling in Riverlake, a town of family farms and Christian fundamentalists, she forges unexpected companionships with an ex-lover and the Cambodian American family living in a trailer next door. Named one of the best novelists writing in the US today by Elaine Showalter in The Guardian, Jen will be in conversation with Billie Tsien, the much lauded architect behind the Neuroscience Institute, the American Folk Art Museum, and Cranbrook.

Gish Jen is the author of three previous novels—Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife—and a collection of stories, Who's Irish. The recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living from American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is also a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Billie Tsien studied Fine Arts in Yale in 1971 and Architecture in UCLA. In 1986 she co-founded Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. In 2002 her design for the American Folk Art Museum, the first new museum built in New York in over three decades, won the Arup World Architecture Award for the Best Building in the World. Her office has also been the recipients of the Brunner Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Medal of Honor from the New York City AIA, the President's Medal from the Architectural League of New York and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture. Billie serves on the advisory council for the Wexner Prize, and is a Director of the Public Art Fund and of the Architectural League of New York.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Five Filipino New Yorkers, Hossannah Asuncion, Joseph O. Legaspi, Bino Realuyo, Lara Stapleton, and R.A. Villanueva, read poetry and prose. From the Philippines and across the United States, these award-winning poets and novelists share their work.

Bino A. Realuyo is the author of The Umbrella Country, a novel, and The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, a poetry collection. His works have appeared in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, New Letters, and several anthologies. For the past fifteen years, he has worked as an Adult Educator and Community Organizer in underserved communities in New York City. He recently founded a social enterprise for low-skilled, low-wage immigrant workers, We Speak America, and can also be found on the web here.

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago. He co-founded Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving Asian American poetry.

R.A. Villanueva's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, The Collagist, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman Fellow, he is currently a Language Lecturer at New York University.

Hossannah Asuncion is a Kundiman fellow. Her most recent work has appeared in The Collagist, Lungfull!, and Tuesday: An Art Project. Kimiko Hahn selected her manuscript for one of The Poetry Society's 2010 National Chapbook Fellowships. She currently lives in Brooklyn via Los Angeles via Manila.

Lara Stapleton is the author of The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing, an Open Book Committee Selection and an Independent Booksellers Selection. She has edited two anthologies: Juncture and Thirdest World. She was born and raised in East Lansing, Michigan but New York City is her beloved home, and the Philippines her motherland.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Join Mae Ngai and Aziz Rana as they discuss family lives and legal battles that offer insight into the Chinese-American experience. Called an "absorbing story" by The New York Times, The Lucky Ones, the latest book by historian and Guggenheim fellow Mae Ngai, is a compelling account of three generations of the Tape family, whose patriarch, Jeu Dip, arrives by himself on "Gold Mountain" as a young teenage immigrant from China and becomes Joesph Tape. He, his children, and his grandchildren go on to play pivotal roles in the Chinese American community, illuminating the legacy of the immigrant experience for all Americans. In The Two Faces of American Freedom, legal scholar Aziz Rana argues that America's origins as a settler society have defined how we think of freedom and rights for three centuries. Taking a close look at the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (an act that the first "lucky" Tape generation barely missed) Rana shows the practices of liberty and exclusion that form a central tension in the American political tradition. Legal scholar Jedidiah Purdy calls The Two Faces of Freedom "[a] strikingly original and powerful account of American political culture." This rare multi-genre reading and conversation will look at the Chinese in America from inside and out, revealing their centrality to the American narrative.

Mae M. Ngai is a professor at Columbia University. She is author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, which won the Frederick Jackson Turner award, and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America. She has also written on immigration history and policy for The Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The Boston Review.

Aziz Rana received his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard College and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Prior to joining the Cornell Law School faculty, he was an Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellow in Law at Yale. Much of his writing focuses on how notions of republicanism and expansion shaped U.S. constitutional development.

@ Asia Society
725 Park Ave
New York, NY 10021
Between 70th and 71st Streets

Linh Dinh and Cihan Kaan create landscapes where Coney Island meets Mars, post-war Saigon backdrops lovelorn characters, and rich boys pay to be Muslim for a day. In Love Like Hate, Linh Dinh, who writer Ed Park calls "one of the secret masters of short fiction," uses his deadpan humor to explore family dysfunction and Saigon in the last half of the 20th century. In Halal Pork and Other Stories, Kaan spins five urban Sufi tales in the swirling graffiti of Brooklyn, creating an avant-garde, post-9/11 world from the perspective of a young Muslim New Yorker. As Moustafa Bayoumi says about this debut: "What do you mean you'd never even thought about reading American Tatar Turkish Russian Muslim immigrant Brooklyn post-colonial sci-fi punk-rock short fiction before?"

Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the US in 1975. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap, and three books of poems, All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts, and Borderless Bodies. His work has been collected in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other anthologies. He is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam and Three Vietnamese Poets, and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker:The Poetry of Phan Nhien Hao.

Cihan Kaan is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-raised writer and filmmaker. A multi-talented artist, his first work of video art premiered as part of an ensemble show at MoMA at the age of 17. By 21, Cihan (pronounced Je'han) Kaan had directed several music videos in rotation on MTV. His short films She's Got an Atomic Bomb and Shuffle Mode have won multiple awards. His book, Halal Pork and Other Stories, can be described as a collection of urban Sufi myths from the streets of New York City. His day job is in interactive digital media. He is the first American fiction author of Crimean Tatar descent.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Yiyun Li has recently been named a MacArthur genius and featured as one of the Top 20 Writers under 40 by The New Yorker. Her latest collection of short stories, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, has been heralded as "brilliant" by Publishers Weekly and "further proof that [she] deserves to be considered among the best living fiction writers" by Kirkus Review. The nine stories describe the rich tableaux of China and Chinese America, intermingling transnational politics and folklore, surrogate mothers and a private detective agency of feisty old women, and creating a dazzling world as vast as the human condition. This reading will be followed by a conversation with editor Brigid Hughes.

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space, and teaches at University of California, Davis.

Brigid Hughes is the founding editor of A Public Space. Previously, she was editor of The Paris Review. She also co-curates the Between the Lines series at BAM.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
Open to the public Co-sponsored by A Public Space

Join hosts and curators Tina Chang and Tracy K. Smith for the fifth annual collaboration between Cave Canem and the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Featuring readings by Ken Chen, Eric Gamalinda, Tyehimba Jess and Patricia Smith.

Detroit native Tyehimba Jess's leadbelly was a 2004 National Poetry Series selection. Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2005." Additional honors include a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2004-5 fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, a 2006 Whiting fellowship, a 2000-2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, and the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and New York University alumnus, he is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten Island.

Patricia Smith is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and she has received a Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a dance/theater production based on Blood Dazzler and the verse memoir Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah. Smith is a professor at the City University of New York/College of Staten Island, and is on the faculty of both Cave Canem and the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.

Ken Chen's debut collection, Juvenilia, was selected for the 2009 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Yale University Press, 2010). His work has been published or recognized in Best American Essays 2006, Best American Essays 2007, and The Boston Review of Books. He is a former editor of Arts & Letters Daily, which he helped found in 1998, and in 2002, he established the monthly arts magazine Satellite. Chen is a graduate of Yale Law School, and he is the executive director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop. He resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Eric Gamalinda was born and educated in Manila and lives in New York City. He has won several awards and grants for his writing and experimental films, including the Asian American Literary Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Philippine Centennial Literary Prize, the Philippine National Book Award, the Asiaweek short story prize. His poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published in the Philippines, the US, and Europe, and have been anthologized in various journals around the world. He has received fellowships in multiple countries including residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public

Already sick of schoolwork? Ditch your #2 pencil, pick up you guitar and join New York natives actress Natalie Kim and writer and performer Samantha Chanse on Friday night: bring your best work (or your worst)—either way, drinks on us.

Actress and New York native Natalie Kim recently completed a successful run of her solo show, YO GIRL! Ms. Kim's experience includes acting in productions based with New York groups such as Ensemble Studio Theatre, The New Dramatists, and Ma-Yi as well as HBO's Bored to Death, independent film West 32nd Street, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

Samantha Chanse is a writer & performer, teacher, and arts organizer who's been based in San Francisco since 2001. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission, resulting in the 2008 SF/NY productions of her first solo play, Lydia's Funeral Video. She co-founded multidisciplinary artist salon series Laundry Party, served as KSW's artistic director, and recently embarked on a bicoastal lifestyle to pursue a MFA in playwriting at her native NYC's Columbia University.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

$5 suggested donation
open to the public
sign up at 8:30 PM for a 5 minute slot

Q&A with Steve Coll, New America Foundation

Fatima Bhutto's third book, Songs of Blood and Sword, details her complicated childhood in Pakistan, wrestling with national history—from Partition to the post 9/11 "War on Terror"—and its relationship to her father's assassination and her family's political dynasty. Join Steve Coll, President of New America Foundation, as he speaks with one of Pakistan's most provocative voices.

Fatima Bhutto lives and writes in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of countless articles, published by New Statesman, Daily Beast, Guardian, and The Caravan Magazine, among others. She wrote Whispers of the Desert, a volume of poetry, which was published in 1997 she was 15 years old and 8.50 a.m. 8 October 2005, a collection of first-hand accounts from survivors of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan.

@ Asia Society
725 Park Ave
New York, NY 10021
Between 70th and 71st Streets

Frank O'Hara famously said most poets were worse than the movies, but then he'd never heard of Movietelling. It's a multimedia literary performance genre that's as new as Youtube and video art and as old as 1920s Japan, where storytellers would "talk" over silent films in lieuof intertitles. Meera Nair (Video), Marilyn Nelson (The Homeplace and The Fields of Praise), and Queens Poet Laureate Paolo Javier (60 lv Bo(e)mbs) read pieces they've written in response to the moving image.

@ Brooklyn Book Festival
Brooklyn Borough Hall
Conference Room
209 Joralemon Street

Why do we want to escape the places we were raised? How much do its bleachers and stadiums, its nosy neighbors and long-distance phone calls shape our coming-of-age? Poet Tishani Doshi reads from her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers. Called "captivating, delightful" by Salman Rushdie, The Pleasure Seekers follows the cross-cultural love affair sparked by a young man's solitary move from Madras to London and the tupsy-turvy Patel-Jones family that ensues. In Picking Bones from Ash Marie Mutsuki Mockett builds a lavish world in which characters journey from Buddhist temples to the black market of international antiques in California, tracing generations of women through different locales with different expectations on who they should become. Oliver de la Paz's Requiem for the Orchard, poems follow a speaker's boyhood to fatherhood where he wants to take his son back "to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers / open for him, and look."

Tishani Doshi is a poet and dancer based in Madras, India. Her first collection of poetry, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection in 2006. The Pleasure Seekers is her first novel.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born in Carmel, California to a Japanese mother and American father and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian studies. Her work often focuses on the intersection between spirituality and modernity, and the manner in which Japan and America have responded to unprecedented materialism and success. Her essay, Letter from a Japanese Crematorium, originally published in Agni 65, was cited as notable in the 2008 Best American Essays and published in Creative Nonfiction 3. Picking Bones from Ash, published by Graywolf, is her debut novel and was shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was a finalist for the Paterson Award for Fiction.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2001, 2007), and the forthcoming Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press 2010), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martin Espada. He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry. A recipient of a NYFA Fellowship Award and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. He teaches at Western Washington University.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

Open to the public
$5 suggested donation

Lan Samantha Chang's new novel, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, follows the trials of a class of emerging writers, their love/intimidation relationship with their brilliant poet professor, and the different ways they sacrifice their lives for writing. As Booklist praises, "it is [Chang's] indelible portrait of the loneliness of artistic endeavor that will haunt readers the most in this exquisitely written novel about the poet's lot." In honor of the book's portrait of emerging writers, young writers from New York City will read, and possibly read works that would horrify their workshop peers.

Lan Samantha Chang's fiction has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Story and The Best American Short Stories 1994 and 1996. Chang is the author of the award-winning books Hunger and Inheritance, and the novel All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. She is the recipient of the Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote fellowships at Stanford University. She also received, from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Teaching-Writing fellowship and a Michener-Copernicus fellowship. Her many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she directs the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600

Open to the public
$5 suggested donation

In June 2001, novelist Rahna Reiko Rizzuto left her two sons and husband in New York for a six-month visit to Hiroshima in search of testimony from survivors of the atomic bombing. The rehearsed and guarded memories offered by the hibakusha—literally, the "bomb-affected people"—break open after the shared trauma of 9/11 into intimate, difficult remembrances. Join us in celebrating this genre-stretching memoir, which weaves together the personal and historic, Hiroshima and 9/11, past and present. Get your party-favor note pad, grab a glass of lemonade, and listen to her advice on how to collect difficult stories from strangers and families, and anecdotes on what she wish she had and had not asked the survivors, showing us how to write our own histories. Please join us for the celebration!

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's first novel, Why She Left Us (HarperCollins, 2003), won an American Book Award in 2000. In 2001, Rizzuto was awarded a US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. She spent eight months living in Hiroshima, Japan to research her second and third novels, inspiring her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning (Feminist Press, 2010). A faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, she is an active member of the Asian American Writers Workshop, where she has taught workshops, judged awards, and served as Associate Editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City.

@The Asian American Writers' Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
Open to the public

Co-sponsored by JAANY

A story of family secrets and discovery, of confession and revelation, Monique Truong's second novel Bitter in the Mouth follows Linda Hammerick, who has a secret sense—she can "taste" words. She falls for names and what they evoke: Canned peaches. Dill. Orange sherbet. Parsnip (to her great regret). In this celebration, actress Cindy Cheung will appear as Linda Hammerick in a reading followed by a miracle berry taste-a-thon. What will you taste after eating the fruit that makes everything sweet?

Monique Truong's first novel, The Book of Salt, was a New York Times Notable book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction, a Village Voice 25 Favorite book, and a Miami Herald Top 10 book of 2003. Truong was also the recipient of the Bard Fiction Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Stonewall Book Award, the PEN American-Robert Bingham Fellowship, the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Award, and the Asian American Literary Award, among other honors. Truong was a contributing co-editor of Watermark: An Anthology of Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose published by the Asian American Writers' Workshop (1998). Most recently, she was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University (academic year 2007-08). Born in Saigon, Monique Truong came to the United States in 1975 at the age six. She graduated from Yale College and the Columbia University School of Law, going on to specialize in intellectual property. Truong lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Cindy Cheung is an actress and singer from Los Angeles and has worked in NYC for over a decade in theater, film and TV. Her film credits include Children of Invention (Sundance 2009), Lady In The Water, Robot Stories and Falling For Grace. TV appearances include "White Collar," "Fringe," all three "Law and Orders," "One Life To Live" and "Sex and the City." She lives in NY with her husband, novelist Ed Lin.

The dress code is casual, and the alert level definitely high for this celebration of the release of Amitava Kumar's latest books, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb (non-fiction) and Nobody Does the Right Thing (fiction). Part reportage and part protest, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb is an inquiry into the cultural logic and global repercussions of the war on terror. In his New York Times review, Dwight Garner called it in turns an "angry and artful" and a "perceptive and soulful" meditation on "the cultural and human repercussions" of the global war on terror. Kumar will be in conversation with writer Lorraine Adams, and artists Martha Rosler, Jill Magid, and Margot Herster, whose works exploring the surveillance in a war-on-terror world will be on display.

(Security provided by the highly professional team at the South Asian Journalists Association; drinks laced with the truth serum made available with the generous help of The Asian American Writers' Workshop.)

Amitava Kumar grew up in Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. He is the author of Husband of a Fanatic (The New Press, 2005), an "Editors' Choice" book at the New York Times. He is also the author of Bombay-London-New York (Routledge, 2002), and Passport Photos (University of California Press, 2000). His novel, Home Products (Picador-India, 2007) was a finalist for India's premier literary award, Vodafone Crossword Prize. Kumar's forthcoming book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, is a writer's report on the global war on terror. Currently, he is Professor of English at Vassar College.

@ Aicon Gallery
35 Great Jones Street, New York City
Off Lafayette Street in NoHo

Programs supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts. Events this season were also sponsored by Beerlao and The Chinatown Ice Cream Factory.

           

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