Events

• June 14, 6:00 PM

  Vernacular as Resistance

  Three Sessions, 3 hours each (6-9pm) Wednesdays June 14th, June 21st, June 28th Fees & Payment Options: $250 General / $220 AAWW Members (Become a Member!) Full payment due before first class. Maximum of fifteen students. *EARLY BIRD! Sign up before June 1st for $200 General / $180 AAWW Members* *STUDENT RATE for limited seats, contact Tracy Wong at twong@aaww.org for availability!* What is vernacular literature? What is its role in dismantling the oppressor’s language and assumptions? What happens to power when the oppressor co-opts the vernacular of the oppressed? And why would the oppressor want to co-opt the oppressed’s vernacular? Could it be becoz our power is embedded, encoded in our vernacular? We will explore these questions and read texts that challenge imposed ideas of hierarchy. Workshop discussion will center around Rotten English ed. Dohra Ahmed, Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen, Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, and more. Students will create original vernacular works as part of the workshop. REGISTER HERE Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. Her work appears in Apogee, Hyperallergic, the Offing, Poets & Writers, the Recluse, Winter Tangerine and elsewhere. She is the author of I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2017) and Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019). Helal is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University...
  
• June 19, 7:00 PM

  The Speculative Lyric: Alternate Universes and Imagined Freedoms

  Two Sessions, 2 hours each (7-9pm) Mondays June 19th & June 26th Fees & Payment Options: $100 General / $80 AAWW Members (Become a Member!) Full payment due before first class. Maximum of fifteen students. *STUDENT RATE for limited seats, contact Tracy Wong at twong@aaww.org for availability!* In the introduction to the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, Walidah Imarisha writes: “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.” In this workshop, we will use principles of sci-fi to explore ways to engage in the speculative mode in poetry. We will conduct experiments in imagining alternate universes, talk about utopias and dystopias, and discuss what distinct possibilities the lyric can offer us in the project of envisioning freedom. REGISTER HERE Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014), which the providence Phoenix called “a thin, muscular book crackling with energy.” She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams and has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her work has been featured by the Huffington Post and PBS NewsHour, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Poetry Review, the Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She is a Project VOICE teaching artist and a member of the Dark Noise Collective for multidisciplinary artists of color. She is currently an MFA Candidate in the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and her chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press) is forthcoming. One of the things I admire most about Franny Choi’s work is the questions she asks. With her book Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014), she asks questions about power, about the fluidity and intersectionality of identity, about the many shapes that grief takes when it comes to visit, and about how it feels to perceive and be perceived by the world, amongst others. [...] Funny, heartbreaking, and unpretentiously intelligent. -Ploughshares..
  
• June 29, 7:00 PM

  Celebrating Nick Joaquin

  Celebrate the new edition of works by Nick Joaquin, one of the most important writers of the Philippines who is only now being published in the United States for the first time by Penguin Classics. Born in 1917, Joaquin wrote a surreal, anguished sentence that cast an ironic eye at colonialism’s longue durée and Catholic rites, both of which he depicted through magical realism and baroque splendor. We’ll feature readings and discussion by Pen Open Book winner Gina Apostol (who wrote the introduction to the new Joaquin collection), legendary activist and author Ninotchka Rosca (a friend of Joaquin’s), and Five-Under-35 winner Alex Gilvarry, author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. Melissa R. Sipin will moderate the discussion. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Nick Joaquin, Jessica Hagedorn writes, “is akin to García Márquez in the extravagant, surreal imagery of his stories, the fatalistic humor, and the intricate weaving of history and memory. His magical Macondo was the very real Philippines, in all its beauty, splendor and ruin.” The new Penguin Classics edition of Joaquin’s work includes his best-known story, “The Woman Who Had Two Navels,” the stories “May Day Eve” and “The Summer Solstice,” and a canonic play, “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino.” Former AAWW board member Luis Francia class Joaquin an “intense chronicler of doubleness,” whose depiction of double consciousness took in “the patriarchal tone of Spanish and the feminist susurrations of Tagalog.” Gina Apostol wrote the introduction to the Joaquin collection. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel. Gina’s third novel, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, and Massachusetts Review. Check out an excerpt from Gun Dealers’ Daughter in AAWW’s The Margins. Ninotchka Rosca writes: “One cannot overstate what Nick Joaquin is to Philippine literature. Writing in English with the melody of Spanish and Tagalog, Joaquin was the first Filipino writer to focus on the impossible contradictions of a tribal civilization overlain by Spanish and American world views. And because that tribal civilization was woman-centered, Joaquin’s heroines are as complex, romantic and defiant as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina.” Rosca is a legendary organizer for women’s liberation and is engaged in the study and codification of the theory and practice of transnational and intersectional feminism. Her two novels, State of War and Twice Blessed, are considered classics of modern Philippine literature, with the second receiving the American Book Award for Excellence in Literature. Alex Gilvarry’s novel From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant won the Hornblower Award for First Fiction, was named a Best New Voice 2012 by Bookspan, and selected by the New York Times as an Editor’s Choice. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 nominee, Alex has received fellowships from the Harry Ransom Center and the Norman Mailer Center. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Nation, Boston Globe, NPR’s All Things Considered, and many other publications. His second novel, Eastman Was Here, is forthcoming from Viking in August 2017. He is a professor of creative writing at Monmouth University. Melissa R. Sipin was born and raised in Carson, CA. She won Glimmer Train's Fiction Open and the Washington Square Review's Flash Fiction Prize, and co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things (Carayan Press 2014). Her work is in Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Guernica Magazine, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Eleven Eleven Magazine, and PEN American Center, among others. She cofounded and is editor-in-chief of TAYO Literary Magazine, and her fiction has won scholarships and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Poets & Writers Inc., Vermont Studio Center, Kundiman, VONA/Voices Conference, Squaw Valley's Community of Writers, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She is hard at work on a novel. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..