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 25, 7:00 PM

  Is America in the Heart? New Filipinx Literature

  Come for a special event about Filipinx-American history, migration, queerness, and the elusive goal of cracking the American Dream for working-class immigrants. Elaine Castillo’s debut America is Not the Heart is a vibrant and starkly hilarious novel told through the perspective of different members of the De Vera family, who flee Marcos-era Philippines in stages for the immigrant suburbs of the Bay Area, and the title a riff on of Carlos Bulosan’s social classic about the life of a migrant Filipino farm worker. Elaine will be joined by writer, journalist and poet Luis H. Francia, who will read from his introduction to the Philippine’s version of Bulosan’s text, and recent poems about police violence and Duterte. They will be joined by Kundiman co-founder Joseph O. Legaspi, the author of Threshold, a collection of poetry, and moderator Gina Apostol, the author of Gun Dealer’s Daughter. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Elaine Castillo’s first novel is America is Not the Heart (Viking, 2018), which follows Hero de Vera, a young Filipina woman arriving in California to live with her uncle. In her new life among her relatives, she realizes the contrast between the American Dream and the reality of the 21st century, as she falls in love and undergoes a series of trying dramatic turns. Jade Chang writes of America is Not the Heart: “The creative accomplishments of this story are incredible: this unexpected family, this history, this embrace of the sacred and the profane, this easy humor, this deeply felt human-ness, this messy, perfect love story.” Castillo was born, raised, and lives in the Bay Area. Winner of the Palanca Poetry Prize, Luis H. Francia has had five poetry books published, including Tattered Boat (2014), The Beauty of Ghosts (2010), and Museum of Absences (2005). In 2002, he won both New York’s PEN Open Book and the Asian American Writers literary awards for Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago. In 2016, RE: Reviews, Recollections, Reflections (2015), was awarded Manila’s National Book Award for Best Essays in English. Included in the Library of America’s Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing, Francia has edited or co-edited three anthologies, including Flippin’: Filipinos on America. A member of the New York Writers Workshop, he has taught at the City University of Hong Kong, the St. Marks Poetry Project, Ateneo de Manila University, the College of St Benilde, Yale, and the Iowa Writers Summer Workshop. He is on faculty at New York University and at Hunter College. He writes an online column, “The Artist Abroad,” for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. You can read his poem in tribute to Eric Garner in The Margins. Joseph O. Legaspi’s latest book of poetry is Threshold, a collection which explores fluidity, boundaries, and the sense of being in-between. The language of his poetry creates a full, incredible world inhabited by the reclaimed body of the poet himself. Rigoberto González writes: “These exquisite poems invite us to cross into the ‘periphery / of sanctuary and danger,’ farther into the rooms of family and culture, in order to find nourishment in breath, beauty, desire, and love.” Legaspi was born and in the Philippines, and he and his family immigrated to California when he was 12 years old. He is the co-founder of Kundiman, an organization that serves Asian American writers. Gina Apostol’s third book, Gun Dealer’s Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Protagonist Soledad Simon reflects on her youth as a wealthy student at university in Manila who falls in love with a rebellious communist. She becomes the architect of a controversy that quickly grows beyond her control. Ashanti L. White says “Rich with emotion, reflection, and fervor, the story takes on an added element of revealing the struggles of Filipinos and women. While the narrative is strong, Apostol’s writing style―simple, poetic, and captivating at every point of Soledad’s journey―is the real draw.” Apostol was born in Manila and grew up in the Philippines. She earned her MFA in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. An excerpt from Gun Dealers’ Daughter was published in The Margins. This event is co-sponsored by Kundiman and PAL / Pilipinx American Library, a moveable non-lending library that celebrates Filipinx narratives. This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page. Image credit: Venancio Igarta, Freedom!, from the United Nations Series, 1945, gouache and pencil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..