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 24, 3:00 PM

  Desi Queer

  Rahul Mehta and SJ Sindu read from debut novels featuring complex queer desi characters struggling to reconcile their gender and sexuality with the families they came from. Introduced by AAWW Board Member Manan Ahmed of Chapati Mystery and Columbia University. Moderated by Sreshtha Sen, former director of the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival and editor of the Shoreline Review in New Delhi. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC In Rahul Mehta’s No Other World, twelve-year-old Kiran Shah finds himself longing for his classmate Kelly’s charismatic father Chris. Meanwhile, his own father finds himself haunted by the brother he’s left behind in India and his mother struggles over her arranged marriage and her attraction to another man. No Other World describes Kiran’s coming of age as an Indian American and a gay man in a homophobic society. George Saunders writes: “What a compelling, magical, big-hearted, lyrical book. Rahul Mehta is an expansive and mesmerizing talent—he sees things generously, from all angles, and makes the reader care, and feel, deeply.” Virginia-born Mehta’s debut short story collection, Quarantine (Harper Collins Publishers 2010), received a Lambda Literary Award and the AAWW Literary Award for Fiction. Brian Leung discusses the book in AAWW’s The Margins here. An Out magazine “Out 100” honoree, he lives in Philadelphia and teaches creative writing at the University of the Arts. In SJ Sindu’s debut novel Marriage of a Thousand Lies, Luck and her husband are both gay. They present their marriage to their conservative Sri Lankan-American family and date on the side. Lucky—an androgynously-dressed misfit artist whose real name is “Lakshmi”—finds herself returning to her childhood home and trying to save her first love Nisha from an arranged marriage. Nayomi Munaweera writes, “SJ Sindu has written an important novel about Sri Lankan immigrant culture. Here, the intersections of migration, sexuality and culture are explored in loving and heartbreaking detail. A book that reveals the secrets of a community caught between East and West.” Sri Lanka-born Sindu’s I Once Met You But You Were Dead (Split Lip Press 2016) won the 2016 Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest. A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, she has written for Brevity, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Normal School, and Fifth Wednesday Journal. She teaches creative writing at Ringling College of Art and Design. Manan Ahmed researches the relationship between text, space and narrative. He specializes in the intellectual history of Islam in South and Southeast Asia; frontier-spaces and the city in medieval South Asia; colonial and post-colonial North India and Pakistan. His monograph, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2016) presents a vision of being Muslim in South Asia over this longue durée, while resisting the narratives of ‘foreign-ness’ and ‘otherness’ that assemble around the Indian Muslim subject. His current research is a comparative, global project that focuses on seventeenth century histories of conquest and their relationship to the emergence of “World History” (Weltgeschichte) in the nineteenth century. He is also finishing a book on space and memory of early modern Lahore. Sreshtha Sen is a writer from New Delhi, India, and one of the founding editors of The Shoreline Review, an online journal of South Asian poetry. She studied English from Delhi University and is currently completing her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, New York. You can check out two of her poems published on The Margins here. This event is cosponsored by Lambda Literary and the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association of New York City. Art by Salman Toor, Humiliated Ancestor #3, oil on panel. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..