We're presenting Salman Rushdie with our lifetime achievement award.. MORE
A book event with theater, film, and community forum presented by afro-latin@ forum, Asian American Writer's Workshop, and the Schombug Center for Research in Black Culture... MORE
Pay tribute to H.T. Tsiang's experimental, proletarian novel on Depression-era New York... MORE
Join us at the Aicon Gallery for an evening of literary erotica, sex trivia, and other surprises! .. MORE
Writer/performer Anna Khaja sheds light on the historical and political forces surrounding Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007 while attempting to reunite a nation bitterly divided over the ideals of Islam and democracy. Through the monologues of eight characters that take place in the minutes before Bhutto's death—including Condoleezza Rice and Bhutto herself—we see how Bhutto's life and death resonate far beyond the boundaries of Pakistan,.. MORE
Literary administrators of color are still a rarity. Representatives will discuss diversifying the field on a collegial and programmatic level, as well as the retention and recruitment of minority administrators within the literary nonprofit industry, the academy, and beyond. The discussion will be followed by a brief Q&A with the audience... MORE
Writing from life can be a tricky business. There are people to protect, faulty memories of events, and the pitfalls of self-censorship and self-aggrandizement. In this workshop, we will employ techniques of poetry and fiction to create works of Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction. Through original writing exercises, we will learn literary techniques including character, dialogue, setting and story arc. In our writing, we will draw upon both the truths and lies of our experience because our lives are too rich not to write about and our imaginations are too strong to ignore. All levels of writers are welcome... MORE
Chef Eddie Huang of VICE food travelogue “Fresh Off the Boat” talks about his new memoir of the same name with Hot 97 deejay, Miss Info. Fresh Off the Boat is a true foodie’s journey, taking readers from theme-park America to Baohaus, the East Village Taiwanese street food joint Huang owns. Considered a.. MORE
CANCELLED DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER .. MORE
The Annual Asian American Literary Awards honor Asian American writers for excellence in three categories: (1) fiction,(2) poetry, and (3) nonfiction. Literary awards recipients are determined by a national panel of judges who are selected on the basis of expertise in a literary genre and/or experience in academic environments relevant to Asian American literature; residence in the U.S. and ethnic background as to create a diverse committee. To qualify for our.. MORE
Join Drunken Boat, one of the world's oldest e-literary journals, and Open City as they celebrate its 16th issue with special folios on Art, Barry Hannah, Exploration, Fiction, Asian American Urbanisms, Sound Art/Dissonance, Speculative and Trance Poetics. Contributors will read pieces featured in the issue... MORE
You're a writer. We know it. You know it. We also know that sometimes the hardest part isn't getting your ideas down on paper, but getting your manuscript out of the slush pile. It's hard to know where to start, especially if you've got a full-time job or are raising a kid. Enroll in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop's first annual publishing conference and meet veteran agents and editors and publishers.. MORE
Postponed-new date coming soon.. MORE
Join us for a night of translation as we welcome award winning translators and writers: Fady Joudah, Sinan Antoon, Susan Bernofsky, Jeffrey Yang, and Ghassan Zaqtan. Renowned writers in their own right, they will read literature spanning China and Japan to new innovations in Palestinian poetry, including work by Mahmoud Darwish and Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, arguably two of the most significant world writers in recent years. Ghassan Zaqtan‘s tenth poetry.. MORE
Tarun Tejpal, founder of Tehelka—India’s leading political magazine, guides us through the corridors of power and into the belly of India’s forgotten underclass in his novel The Story of My Assassins. Recently released in the United States, The Story of My Assassins follows a journalist’s investigation into the plot of his own attempted murder. The protagonist delves into the lives of his would-be hitmen; incidentally, each falls along India's fault.. MORE
“Kitamura’s words are tough, and her characters are tied to the tails of wounded beasts: mother countries, the land itself, and hierarchies both out of steam and out of date...Kitamura makes the end of history— many histories—seem both casual and immediate,” says Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker. Set in unnamed colonial territory of an unspecified time period, Katie Kitamura’s second novel Gone to the Forest is a mash-up of.. MORE
American Book Award-winning author Jeff Biggers joins us on the East Coast to report on the situation on the ground of Arizona post- SB 1070. In his new book, State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream, Biggers diagnoses the root of the problem in Arizona’s past—attributing the 48th state’s current nativist anxieties to its turbulent entry into the Union and identity crisis as.. MORE
Much-anticipated for its “fierce, fresh language,” Jay Caspian Kang’s debut novel melds pop culture, sports fandom, and high literature into a trippy neo-noir novel. Join us on for a reading and discussion with Grantland editor Jay Caspian Kang and writer Hua Hsu. Meet Phil Kim- twentysomething MFA grad and online Personal Break-Up Coach. His mundane pattern of smoking joints in between emails to broken-hearted men is interrupted when he find himself.. MORE
Long overdue is our salute to Sikh Americans’ contributions to stand-up comedy and spoken word. Jen Kwok and Ed Lin host a night of levity and healing on the inauspicious 9/11. Polish off your jokes and rhymes to join the open mic roll call and showcase your talents. Harnessing socially-conscious poetry, diasporic politics, and high-energy comedy, one half of performance duo BROWNSTAR, NORTHSTAR a.k.a. Pushkar Sharma, attempts to unite South Asia.. MORE
It's easy to bat around issues about character, plot, point of view, description, dialogue, setting, pacing, voice and theme (whew!) in terms of writing. But Ed Lin promises to spend as little time as possible talking about those concepts. Lin believes writing is akin to playing a musical instrument that no one else has ever seen or heard before, and that authors are generally right even when they aren't sure.. MORE
This Saturday, September 8th from 2-4 PM, join our very own Open City magazine in Brooklyn to hear AAWW homies Ed Lin, Anelise Chen, and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto read new work, as well as a spoken word performance by Buendia, a local grassroots Sunset Park artists collective. Open City is co-hosting this event with the NARS Foundation and Brooklyn Museum’s GO Project,.. MORE
Gina Apostol and Sabina Murray, two storytellers, whose works are steeped in history and its fractured retellings, will discuss latest projects, rewriting the past, and stumbling upon new worlds and the same old imperial ones. Join us for a dual reading, where Apostol and Murray will pick each other’s brain in a special one-on-one. Gina Apostol’s latest novel Gun Dealers’ Daughter is a recuperation of a nation’s troubled past and its.. MORE
What: Photographs by E. Tammy Kim documenting the lives of tenants organized through CAAAV. Part of ACF's "OUR HAUS" series on housing and public space. When: August 13 to 19, 2012 @ 11 East 52nd Street, NYC (Austrian Cultural Forum). Opening Wednesday, August 15th, at 6:30 PM. Regular viewing 10 AM to 6 PM. Why: The Residents of 11 Allen Street were delivered eviction notices in January 2011. The reason:.. MORE
What do MIA, Adam Yauch, Jay Electronica, Christian Hosoi, Rondo, and the Kardashians all have in common? Grantland staff writer and Atlantic magazine regular Hua Hsu has written incisive criticism about all of them. Want to learn to write about your favorite (or most hated) cultural icons? This three-session course will help you grapple with the most pressing questions facing cultural journalists today -- from the philosophical (the changing meaning.. MORE
Ed Lin and Jen Kwok are back with an All-Stars Edition of Mouth to Mouth Open Mic! For one night only, we’re bringing you the best of the best—so spectacular that open mic slots are only available by lottery! Will you be the lucky winner of one of the five coveted spots? Click here for Exclusive video highlights! Founder of The.. MORE
What if there were Bangalore call centers, not for tech support, but to outsource your pain, depression, and guilt? Emotional engineering firms where specialists got paid $12 an hour, jobs in which the hazards included permanent brain damage? Or if there was a manual for alien impersonations of humans—Body Snatchers style? What if characters in video games had minds of their own, suffering from existential crises amidst violent battles and.. MORE
Spanning 1980s Midwest to imperial court China, our second installment of Bricolage—a salon-style multimedia show-n-tell—takes us into the brilliant minds of novelists on journeys of recovery. American Book Award-winner Don Lee’s The Collective is a gripping tale of friendship, loss, and the “melancholy burden of unfulfilled dreams” (Publishers’ Weekly). After a tragic suicide, the novel retraces the struggles of three aspiring artists.. MORE
The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is launching three new magazines about race and immigration. We’re having a free party (with RSVP) at projective space in Chinatown to celebrate on June 28th with Ashok Kondabolu of Art Core Hip Hop Trio Das Racist, Julio Salgado, Tao Lin, Cognac Cocktails, Tiger Beer, and art swag tote bags by artist Tania Bruguera of Immigrant Movement International... MORE
A lonely spinster marries a ghost. A live-at-home son writes dispatches from his basement. A laid-off techie tries his hand at doctoring day laborers without a license. These are the tales of antiheroes, itinerant workers and gender refugees in Tania James, Rajesh Parameswaran, and Xu Xi’s newest short story collections... MORE
Have you tried to write a novel and found yourself paralyzed by the task? Are you unmotivated, or aimless in your literary pursuit? In this class, we’ll go over some of the basic steps, approaches, and methods for the beginning of novels and their drafting, how to organize your life differently, approaches to plotting and structure, how to work with an outline, and how to know when to drop your outline... MORE
We want you to help celebrate our launch by posting photos of your immigrant parents and grandparents to Twitter--or anyone else in your family!--along with a short narrative tweet that will tell us what the person in the picture meant to you... MORE
Why did Indian Americans, wearing turbans and carrying the Indian republic flag, march in New York’s St Patrick’s Day parade in 1920? What’s the connection between the Israel lobby in the US and the rise of the Hindu lobby? And how did multiculturalism facilitate the growth of rightist Hindu groups on US college campuses? Vijay Prashad’s takes on these questions in his latest book Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today... MORE
Leave your dancing monkey at home and meet Spike Lee/Jonah Hill collaborator Trevor Zhou and Mr. Asian America, Jeff Yang of The Wall Street Journal. Trevor is the face of Verizon FiOS and starring in Spike Lee's The Girl is in Trouble and the upcoming 20th Century Fox feature The Sitter with Jonah Hill. Trevor Zhou is not only in front of the lens, but behind it as well.. MORE
Take a load off and join special guests Nora Chau and Cihan Kaan at our next rib-tickling Mouth to Mouth event. Nora Chau- Ma-Yi Writer's Lab member and ABC/Disney New Talent Screenwriting grant recipient- will mystify you with her unique brand of vaudevillian storytelling 'til your jaw drops and your eyes bulge. Award-winning video artist and author Cihan Kaan will recite laugh-tastic monologues. He’ll read selections from his wickedly humorous short-story collection, Halal Pork, in which.. MORE
Join us for our inaugural edition of Bricolage, our salon-style multimedia show-n-tell, where your favorite authors and artists present the images that have been haunting their writing. We have an incredible line-up of critically-acclaimed artists to kick off the first Bricolage. You’ll be serenaded by cowboy ballads, nostalgic for beloved villains, and dazzled by experimental theatre. Nationally acclaimed poet Cathy Park Hong will read from Engine Empire, a poetic guide through.. MORE
Join us for our first ever husband-and-wife reading to celebrate the release of One Red Bastard, the novel. Ed Lin's sequel to the highly acclaimed Snakes Can’t Run and the latest installment of the Robert Chow series about the travails of a Chinatown beat cop in 1976 New York City. Actress Cindy Cheung will accompany Lin in performing a dramatic rendition of Detective Chow’s latest mission, as he is swept.. MORE
CultureStrike coordinator Favianna Rodriguez teams up with other creative minds for UndocuNation: An Artistic Response to the Immigration Crisis. With talks, food, revelry and rabble-rousing, the event offers “an evening of culture jamming, visual art, and performances addressing the devastating consequences of our country’s broken immigration system.” Sponsored by CultureStrike, Center for New Community, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), UndocuNation will use various media platforms.. MORE
Join us for a night of ambient poetics with three experimental writers who probe the relationship between art-making and found technologies from parking garage reverberations to the neon glow of TV broadcasts. Treat your ears to Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt, Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Underground National. Williams College professor Dorothy Wang will moderate and Triple Canopy Editor, Lucy Ives, will live-blog the event.. MORE
Once known for its majestic snow-capped Himalayas, Kashmir now hosts a militarized hotbed of insurgency and conflict between India, Pakistan, and China. Join us for an inter-disciplinary dialogue between three guests whose work shed light on Kashmir’s complex identity. You’ll hear stories of pre-partition India, lyrical accounts of village life, and one artist’s juxtaposition of dense urban environment with idyllic vistas. BBC journalist and author Mirza Waheed will read from.. MORE
Come join us for an Asian American all-star comedy festival! AAWW favorite Jen Kwok, the velvety voice that brought you Date an Asian and Ballad of the Tiger Mom, will bring her ukulele and extraordinary talent. Relish the sharp stylings of Sheng Wang, who won top honors at NBC Universal's Stand Up For Diversity. Enjoy the brains and beauty behind Nerdcore Rising, producer Negin Farsad, who has been named one.. MORE
A discussion with Robert Casper, Ken Chen, Mya Spalter, Patrick Ryan, and Sarah LaPolla. Robert Casper is the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. He is also publisher of the literary magazine, jubilat, and co-founder of the jubilat/Jones Reading Series in Amherst, Massachusetts. Ken Chen’s debut collection of poems, Juvenilia, was selected for the Yale Series of Young Poets competition in 2009. Chen is the executive.. MORE
We know- we can't believe it's time for another one of our lavishly funny Open Mics! This month we are delighted to host talented singer/songwriter Chris Grace as well as sassy documentarian ManSee Kong. Chris's seductive vocals will knock you flat and ManSee Kong’s sharp chops will glue you to your seat. Our favorites and yours, comedienne Jen Kwok and novelist Ed Lin will be MC'ing and pumping you up!.. MORE
Krys Lee’s debut short story collection, Drifting House, explores the heartbreaking forgings of Korean identity in the wake of war and economic collapse. Haunted by their tragic past, Lee’s cast of characters include a spurned wife who seeks to rescue her kidnapped daughter in America and a tenant who believes his mother has been reincarnated in his pet goose. The much heralded Drifting House is a portrait of the enduring.. MORE
Join us for our sixth annual collaboration between Asian American Writers' Workshop and Cave Canem featuring the dynamic talent from four all-star female poets! Winner of two American Book Awards, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge molds language with her keen sensibility for visual art. Characteristic of her style is a lush mix of abstract language, collaged images, cultural and political investigation, and unexpected shifts between the meditative and the particular. Tamiko Beyer’s work.. MORE
Join us in celebration of Lysley Tenorio's Monstress, a dazzling debut short-story collection featuring lepers, healers, and celebrities going incognito. Monstress alternates between the Philippines and San Francisco, where we encounter a Filipino B-movie horror actress from the 1960s striving for chance at stardom, a transgender sibling’s revelation at his father’s funeral, and former fans in Manila conspiring to murder The Beatles. In Monstress, identity is a constant experiment in.. MORE
DJ hit replay! Or shall we manually rewind this nostalgic cassette tape with a discerning finger to your favorite awkward 1990s multiculti blunders? The '90s gave us “Sister Souljah moments,” the OJ Simpson hearings, the rise of xenophobic legislation (Prop 187 and 209), and homophobic punditry on national television (Jerry Falwell vs the Teletubbies). Carolina González (WNYC, Nueva York: the Complete Guide to Latino Life in the Five Boroughs).. MORE
How can poets mobilize poetry as a change agent? These poets demonstrate the ways that the arts can contribute to the defense of the environment, workers, and oppose war. Philip Metres will discuss the ways in which projects such as Peace Show (Cleveland) and the “Stories of War and Peace Oral Narratives Project” have become counternarratives to war. Jonathan Skinner will present how engaged poets have responded to environmental catastrophe,.. MORE
We all think we know the answer to this question--Asians are not black, right? But in the nineteenth century, one California court actually determined that Chinese Americans were black--since they were not, after all, white. This panel--titled after Janine Young Kim’s seminal essay, itself a ‘90s product--discusses how Asians and Blacks have been positioned as not just different, but set against each other, whether in the L.A. Riots or college.. MORE
Two decades ago, Rodney King famously asked, “Why can’t we all just get along?” The question might as well have served as the defining question of the multicultural moment, in which the US attempted to dream about what a pluralistic society would look like--from GOP Family Values to the black middle-class aplomb of Family Matters, whether in elite college admissions or Star Trek: The Next Generation. Hua Hsu (Grantland, The.. MORE
Torn between poetry and fiction? Wandering in a world of metaphors and similes? Aching to capture your family's stories, but just can't make it "write"? Join us and National Book Award winner Thanhha Lai, for an in depth look at prose poetry. Lai is the author of Inside Out and Back Again, which was described by Kirkus Review as "an enlightening, poignant and unexpectedly funny novel in verse" and is.. MORE
Titled after Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which identity politics reaches its reductio ad absurdum in a Hitler Studies department, our second AFTER 1989 installment explores the curious phenomenon of white ethnic identity in the 1990s. Think back to a time when Bill Clinton was called the “first African American President,” when Samuel Huntington claimed we were in a “Clash of Civilizations,” when the militia movement erupted in the Waco.. MORE
Last month, authors Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar caused an international controversy. They did so by reading aloud from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. The book is banned in India for its controversial portrayal of Muslims, and Rushdie himself had called off a visit to the Jaipur Literary Festival in India when he received death threats. Upon hearing this news, Kunzru and Kumar decided to convert their festival panel into.. MORE
Much of ‘90s multiculturalism was less about race than inventing polite ways to talk about racial taboos. Terms like “diversity” and “political correctness” blunted the unsavory aspects of dealing with racism, even as the right struggled to make English the national language and tamp down transgressive art, multicultural threats to the canon, and Ebonics. To kick off AFTER 1989, Ego Trip Magazine, the folks who gave us The Big.. MORE
Marilyn Chin said: ‘Our poetry is not a static enterprise but a thriving, historical progression.’ As we look at Asian American poetry today, much as changed, yet much has stayed the same. This panel will feature a group of diverse literary critics, anthologists, and poets in a vibrant discussion to grapple with questions such as: What is Asian American poetry, Where have we been, Where are we now, and what.. MORE
The next installment of our blindingly fun Mouth to Mouth Open Mic is here! Brave the mad March weather to hear Leah Winkler and Annie Choi at our monthly party. Leah, a current member of Youngblood Theater Company, is a talented playwright and director. The New York Times praised her most recent play, The Internet, saying it "effectively skewers the false personas and banal self-descriptions on dating Web sites.. MORE
Don Lee, Ken Chen, Prageeta Sharma, and Nami Mun read new work and the life behind their literature: private writing rituals; relationships with mentors and peers; favorite books, songs on iTunes repeat and performance-enhancing alcoholic drinks; social media and other procrastination devices. Ask nicely and they’ll talk about writing as Asian Americans when only 5% of the authors reviewed in the New York Times are writers of color. Presented by.. MORE
Bringing together the best of two worlds -- poetry and noraebang --"Real Karaoke People" is a literary reading/karaoke event that will harmonize, shake, split, and excavate the deeper musical notes of diasporic narratives centered on community, family, the romantic, and immigration. Inspired by Ed Bok Lee’s Real Karaoke People, this event will feature readings by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Grace Cho, followed by a line-up of works gathered through a.. MORE
Does your knowledge about the Ramayana come entirely from comics your mom bought you from Jackson Heights? Or are you a comic book fan interested in engaging with one of the bestselling comics in both Asia and the world? Party down with the Workshop’s tribute to Amar Chitra Katha, the beloved Indian comic that’s sold more than 90 million copies, often featuring lovelorn maidens, fearless saints, and mythical kings romping.. MORE
Does Valentine’s Day have you all atwitter? Ease into your “mahal kita” with an afternoon of stellar performances from acclaimed Filipino poets and writers. The featured performances from Hossannah Asuncion, Joseph O. Legaspi, Nita Noveno, Bino Realuyo, Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, and Lara Stapleton, as well as performances from Filipino community members, immigrants, and Fil-Am youth to celebrate love stories, Philippine Independence, and the thriving Filipino-American community in Queens. There will.. MORE
Add power to your poetic punches and fleetness to your formal footwork. These classes will focus on adding techniques, tension, and twists to your expressive toolbox. Specific classes will focus on landing leaps, torquing turns, and the uses and abuses of certain voids. There will be a weekly writing assignment and workshop as well as assigned readings from contemporary poets and other artists offering varied approaches to the week's topic... MORE
Not ready for the New Year festivities to end just yet? Celebrate the Lunar New Year with hosts Ed Lin and Jen Kwok at our first open mic of 2012, featuring the brilliantly funny sketch comedian Angel Yau, who has performed at the NYC Underground Comedy Festival and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, and playwright, poet, and 2g's artistic director Carla Ching, who will be performing brand spanking new work.. MORE
Are you a high school or college student who wants to be a writer? Or just someone who’s ever wanted to grab the mic? Come join two incredible artists as they show you the ropes of performance and spoken word poetry. YaliniDream artfully weaves her spoken word with music and dance, while Kilusan Bautista mixes hip hop and theater using his poetry and martial arts skills. They will be your.. MORE
Are you in dire need of a bon voyage? Come hear three acclaimed writers read works set in the places usually at the periphery of the map. Alice Albinia re-imagines the Mahabharata in urban Delhi in her debut novel of manners, Leela’s Book. A character-packed page-turner, Leela’s Book is a fable about family and storytelling and a "rollercoaster romp through the centuries, accompanied by a disgruntled Ganesh” (Kishwar Desai, India.. MORE
"It’s a little terrifying to be so influential. By which I mean, it’s really moving to have these wonderful writers come and share my work with all of you.”
The post In the Company of Salman Rushdie appeared first on Asian American Writers' Workshop.
Lesser known facts about the celebrated author—from his days sweating ad copy to his latest gig as a television screenwriter
The post Six Things to Know About Salman Rushdie appeared first on Asian American Writers' Workshop.
Ashok Kondabolu of Das Racist catches up with documentary photographer Annie Ling at her Brooklyn apartment.
The post Ashok and Annie Hit the Backyard appeared first on Asian American Writers' Workshop.
“81 Bowery is their home and their only choice for a place to live.”
Maroosha Muzaffar talks to a taxi-dancer, who works at one of the many taxi-bars in Jackson Heights, Queens, where lonely immigrant men pay for a dance and a shot at love.
There are 42,000 cab drivers in New York City--and 82% of them are immigrants. Many from them from white collars jobs back in their home country.
