Events

• September 19, 7:00 PM

  Motor Gangs and Misfits of Seoul

  Young-ha Kim, one of the most talented and prolific Korean writers of his generation, is making a rare appearance in New York to celebrate the launch of his latest novel, which explores social disintegration and the seedy underside of Seoul. Translated by Krys Lee, I Hear Your Voice, Kim’s fifth book, follows the ascent of disaffected young people living life on the run. He’ll appear with one of his translators, Jenny Wang Medina, who studies the reinvention of Korean culture in the twenty-first century. Young-ha Kim and Jenny Wang Medina will be in conversation with E. Tammy Kim, a former AAWW Open City Fellow and a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC One of the few writers to win all three major literary prizes in South Korea, Young-Ha Kim “leads the literary flank” of new South Korean fiction, according to the Los Angeles Review of Books; while his “youthful anomie, generational despair, and hip cultural awareness” may make him read like a Western novelist or Murakami, “Kim writes with a harder edge, under a darker cloud; these fragments of Western culture signal less international engagement than personal isolation.” Kim appeared at AAWW’s 2010 Page Turner Festival, where he read from his novel Your Republic is Calling You (Mariner 2010), a gripping political thriller that explores the double life of a North Korean spy and father in contemporary Seoul. His wrenching new novel, I Hear Your Voice (Mariner 2017), translated by Krys Lee, follows two teenage runaway orphans who join a motorcycle gang in Seoul. The National writes: “Kim excels with his tour of Seoul’s underbelly and his examination, or evisceration, of urban culture. His warts-and-all portrayal of young disaffected, disenfranchised or delinquent misfits recalls Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero.” Jenny Wang Medina is a translator and adjunct faculty member at Columbia and Rutgers. She is currently working on a book that focuses on the reconstruction of culture by the formerly dissident cultural sphere and the newly democratized government in millennial South Korea. She has translated works by Choi In-hoon, Beom-shin Park, and Kim Young-ha. E. Tammy Kim is a writer and a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff. She is the co-editor of Punk Ethnography, in which she writes about North Korean pop, and recently edited Gwangju Diary, an account of the South Korean uprising of May 1980. She previously worked as a social-justice lawyer, and was an AAWW Open City Fellow from 2012 to 2013. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• September 20, 6:00 PM

  Vernacular as Resistance

  Three Sessions, 2.5 hours each (6-8:30pm) Wednesdays September 20th, September 27th, and October 4th Fees & Payment Options: $250 General / $220 AAWW Members (Become a Member!) Full payment due before first class. Maximum of fifteen students. Priority will be given to previous students of Vernacular as Resistance. *STUDENT RATE for limited seats, contact Tiffany Le at tle@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 (W.W. Norton, 2017), Sand Opera by Philip Metres (Alice James Books, 2015), Look by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf, 2016), and more. New and continuing 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...
  
• September 22, 7:00 PM

  A Reading

  Come for a special night featuring author M. Evelina Galang, whose new nonfiction book Lola's House: Filipino Women Living with War (Curbstone, 2017) tells the story of sixteen surviving Filipino comfort women who survived violence inflicted by the Japanese army in World War II. Starting in the late nineties, Galang built relationships with women at Lolas' House, a community center for women's organizing in Manila, and records their testimony--at once intensely personal and globally political--in this searing book. Don't miss this rare appearance by Florida-based author Galang, one of the heads of VONA. RESERVE A SEAT /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..