Events

• April 14, 4:00 PM

  No-Name Mind: Stories of Mental Health from Asian America, A Workshop

  Six sessions, April 14-May 19, 2018 Saturdays from 4:00-7:00pm Fees & Payment Options: Free Application Deadline: Thursday, March 15 2018 at midnight.  APPLY HERE Why You Should Take This Class: As psychic lives of Asian American women are yet to be rendered in their full complexities, "No Name Mind" offers a space to name our experiences with mental health and and map the vast contours of our minds. This creative writing workshop for Asian American women focused on mental health will explore what it means to convert private despair and silence into language and action. Lead by writer and performer Nina Sharma, the workshop’s interdisciplinary approach combines literary, socio-historical and psychological material that encourages participants to interpret and critique representation in media, art and culture and craft counter-narratives of their own. Course Description: Open to female-identifying and non-binary Asian Americans. All participants are expected to commit to a six-session program and complete all assignments. Applications (accepted via Google Form) are reviewed on a rolling basis with a final deadline of March 15, 2018. This program is FREE. Nina Sharma is a writer from Edison, New Jersey. Her work has been featured in Anomaly, Longreads, The Grief Diaries, Banango Street, The Margins, The Blueshift Journal, Teachers & Writers Magazine, The Asian American Literary Review, Drunken Boat, Certain Circuits Magazine, The Feminist Wire, Reverie: Midwest African American Literature, and Ginosko Literary Journal. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her essay,“Not Dead.” Her essay, “The Bride's Goodbye” was nominated for Best of the Net 2017 anthology. Her essay “The Way You Make Me Feel” won first place in the 2016 Blueshift Prizes for writers of color, judged by Jeffrey Renard Allen and appears in The Blueshift Journal's Brutal Nation feature. She also was recently awarded a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She is formerly the Director of Public Programs at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and with Quincy Scott Jones, she co-created the Nor’easter Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading series. She has an MA from Columbia University’s American Studies, Liberal Studies program and an MFA from Columbia’s School of the Arts writing program, where she concentrated in nonfiction. She was awarded a fellowship to teach in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program, where she was lecturer in Columbia's interdisciplinary pilot program, University Writing: Human Rights. She has also worked as a consultant at the Baruch College Writing Center. She gets silly on stage at The Magnet Theater. This program is funded by The Asian Women Giving Circle and sponsored by The Asian American Writers' Workshop.

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• April 21, 1:00 PM

  Leaps and Swerves: Creating Surprise with Poetry, a Workshop

  Two Sessions, 2 hours (1:00PM-3:00PM) Saturdays, April 21 & 28, 2018 Price: $150 General/$95 Member (JOIN THE FANCLUB!) Registration Deadline: April 14, 2018 REGISTER HERE Why You Should Take This Class: Join us for a poetry workshop that will explore unexpected moves in poems: disruptions to syntax, shifts in tone, and leaps that move associatively down the page. In this workshop, you can expect in-class and take-away writing prompts that invite a sense of wildness and surprise to our creative work. We’ll study poems by poets such as Carl Phillips, Brenda Shaughnessy, Natasha Tretheway, Rick Barot, Elizabeth Bishop, Lawson Fusao Inada, and others. Together, we’ll investigate how poets use various craft strategies to create an interplay between stabilizing and destabilizing forces in their work while engaging the reader in a journey of discovery. Class Description: We’ll study poems by poets such as Carl Phillips, Brenda Shaughnessy, Natasha Tretheway, Rick Barot, Elizabeth Bishop, Lawson Fusao Inada, and others. Together, we’ll investigate how poets use various craft strategies to create an interplay between stabilizing and destabilizing forces in their work while engaging the reader in a journey of discovery. Dilruba Ahmed’s book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, PEN America, and Poetry. New work is recent or forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Smartish Pace, and Ploughshares. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY *The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor. *We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free. If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• April 26, 7:00 PM

  Fractured Selves

  Join us for a reading with two of this spring’s most exciting literary fiction debuts that explore the metaphysics of identity, mental health, and migration. Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (Grove, 2018), named a Most Anticipated Book of 2018 in Esquire, the Huffington Post, and more, follows the story of a young Nigerian woman named Ada born “with one foot on the other side” who develops separate selves. Mira T. Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful (Pamela Dorman Books, 2018) alternates the between the perspectives of two Asian American sisters grappling with the the loss of a parent, illness, and the strains of intimacy. In conversation with TANAÏS, the author of Bright Lines. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and artist based in liminal spaces. Born and raised in Nigeria, they received an MPA from New York University. They were awarded a 2015 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship and won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa. Their work has been selected and edited by Chimamanda Adichie, and published in various literary magazines, including Granta. Freshwater is their debut. Mira T. Lee's work has been published in numerous quarterlies and reviews, including The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, and Triquarterly. She was awarded an Artist's Fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2012, and has twice received special mention for the Pushcart Prize. She is a graduate of Stanford University, and currently lives with her husband and two young sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everything Here Is Beautiful is her debut novel. TANAÏS is a portmanteau of Tanwi Nandini Islam; a renaming of self, free of patriarchy. She is the author of Bright Lines (Penguin 2015), a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is the founder of Hi Wildflower Botanica, a small-batch niche perfume, candle and skincare line. Her writing has appeared in Elle.com, Fashionista.com, Open City, Women 2.0, Billboard.com and Gawker. A graduate of Brooklyn College MFA and Vassar College, she lives in Brooklyn, NY. This event is co-sponsored by The Center for Fiction and will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page. NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY *The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor. *We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free. If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..