Events

• July 28, 11:00 AM

  Asian American Literature Festival: There Will Be Dragons

  Nearly 90% of the books reviewed by the New York Times are written by white writers. In a scintillating performance debut, the AAWW Margins Fellows will play with language to drag the literary institution and each other. They may come in drag. Dragons will be provided on request. RSVP HERE Note: This event will not be at the AAWW Event Space in New York City. The Asian American Writers' Workshop is the preeminent national arts nonprofit dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told. Our fellowships materially improve the lives of emerging writers of color through an innovative mix of re-granting, publication, and career development. Since 2010, we have contracted to pay $141,500 to 34 emerging Asian American writers. The Margins Fellowship incubates emerging Asian American creative writers, while the Open City Fellowship fosters Asian American nonfiction writers telling stories about inequality in low-income Asian immigrant neighborhoods in New York City. Taken together, these fellowships articulate our wide vision of Asian American writing as combining both excellent literary fiction and poetry and the stories directly from our community. You can read more about our fellows here. Jyothi Natarajan is managing editor at the Asian American Writers' Workshop where she edits The Margins, an arts and ideas magazine featuring the work of Asian American writers, artists, and thinkers. She was previously an editor at the Caravan magazine, and prior to that worked in book publishing at The New Press. Mariam Bazeed began her life a statistic of economic expatriation in the Persian Gulf. A writer of prose, poetry, and thinly-disguised memoir, Mariam is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Hunter College, where she is at work on her first novel-ish. She has been the recipient of the Hedgebrook Women's Writing Residency, the Marble House Writing Residency, the Helix Performance Network's NEEDING IT fellowship at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has been a featured poet at the Bowery Poetry Club. Mariam's first play, PEACE CAMP ORG, debuted in a workshop performance at La Mama Theater in New York City. She was recently accepted into the 2017 class of the Hemispheric Institute's EmergeNYC fellowship for performance and politics. In her writing Mariam is concerned with themes of migration, death, death, also death, sickness, death, and the estrangements particular to love and family. Mariam is currently at work on a novel informed by her biography as a life-long expat. She is also at work on a collection of short stories set in Egypt during and immediately following the Arab Spring. Rami Karim is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Their work engages dreams, dissociation, and migration and has appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee, The Brooklyn Review, The Invisible Bear, and Peregrine. They are a member of Kaf, an art/publishing collective, and an MFA candidate in creative writing at Brooklyn College, where they received the Himan Brown, Carole Lainoff and Rose Goldstein awards in poetry. This year they will be writing stories, poems, and essays on diasporic life, beginning with a prose lyric set between 1970s Lebanon and present-day America. Kyle Lucia Wu is a Chinese-American writer living in Brooklyn. She is the co-publisher of the literary journal Joyland and the social media editor at Electric Literature. She has an MFA in fiction from The New School and a BA in psychology from New York University. She has studied at the eight-week fiction workshop at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was a Byrdcliffe Colony Artist-in-Residence in May 2015, and is a PEN prison writing mentor. Kyle is interested in hybrid forms of identity, and the invisibility and confusion that accompanies it. She explores how to occupy an identity that hasn't been defined, and how society seeks to categorize individuals who don't fall cleanly into pre-established roles. The ways in which we constitute our identities across race, gender, and class are themes that drive her work. She is working on a novel about a mixed-race young woman who works for a wealthy white family, and how it refracts her own fractured background growing up between two families, between two races, and always as an outsider. Yanyi is a writer and critic based in Brooklyn. He currently serves as a senior editor at Nat. Brut, contributing editor at Foundry, and curatorial assistant at The Poetry Project. A recipient of a 2015 Poets House fellowship, his poems and criticism have appeared in Model View Culture, The Shade Journal, and cellpoems, among others. Yanyi's manuscript deals with self-documentation, intergenerational trauma, and how memory lodges itself in the body. His ongoing work explores statelessness—of gender, of nationality, of family—and how lyric, myth, and memoir may work together in its translation. He is accountable to joy, history, and community. In his fellowship year, Yanyi will play with and around language in archive, law, and pop culture. He believes that poetry should de-codify structures of power, and that no text can be safe from answering to emotional and historical experience...
  
• July 28, 7:00 PM

  Love is a Ghost

  Come hear poet Hossannah Asuncion and nonfiction writer Laurel Fantauzzo write about the ghosts of love—the emotional distance it can create when the desired intimacy fails, and the ways love haunts the people who witnessed it, even when it's passed. With her debut poetry collection, Hossannah Asuncion’s Object Permanence uncovers a geography of longing and unfulfilled relationships—a startling contrast to contemporary narratives of an seamlessly interconnected, digitally mediated urban dating web space. Spanning address from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, each of Asuncion’s poems mark both the site of intimacy and its absence, building towards a slower, musing tour of relationships in which instant gratification is an elusive goal and outcome. Combining memoir and reportage, Laurel Fantauzzo’s The First Impulse is an account of the writer’s return to her mother’s homeland, the Philippines, and an obsession she discovers upon her arrival there: the tragic death of two lovers in Manila. Fantauzzo arrives on the island the year after the unresolved murders of Filipino-Canadian film critic Alexis Tioseco and his girlfriend, Slovenian film critic and magazine editor Nika Bohinc—a cosmopolitan couple committed to each other and putting down roots in Manila. Both Asuncion and Fantauzzo’s writing traces the places that haunt us, and the promise and memory of love. Come through or if you can’t make it, watch our livestream on Facebook. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC The child of a Filipina mother and an Italian American father, Laural Fantauzzo is the author of the nonfiction book The First Impulse (Anvil Publishing 2016). Luis Francia writes that the book “will cause you to ponder and appreciate the interrogatory restlessness and intelligence of those whose belonging is simultaneously claimed and disavowed by multiple worlds.” The recipient of grants and residencies from Erasmus, Fulbright, and Hedgebrook, she teaches at Yale-NUS College and lives between Singapore and Quezon City, Philippines. Read her piece on the front page of the International edition of the New York Times on the rise of Duterte. Hossannah Asuncion grew up near the 105 and 710 freeway in Los Angeles and currently lives near an A/C stop in Brooklyn. A Kundiman fellow who has been published by The Poetry Society of America, The Collagist, and Tuesday; An Art Project, Anti-, she is the author of the poetry collection Object Permanence (Magic Helicopter Press 2016). Chiwon Choi writes, “The poems in Object Permanence took me back to places I thought I didn’t want to return. Streets and nights and bars and beds. To lovers and death and longing. To loneliness and moments where I thought I was losing grasp of life. But somewhere, sometime, in between the first and the final brutally gorgeous piece, I learned to cherish my pain again.” Read her GIF interview with R.A. Villanueva in AAWW’s The Margins. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/ ..
  
• August 8, 6:00 PM

  Screenwriting Workshop

  Four Sessions, 3 hours each (6-9pm) Tuesdays, August 8, August 15, August 22, and August 29 Fees & Payment Options: $220 General / $200 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!) Full payment due before first class. Maximum of ten students. Why you should take this class: Writer & Director Darine Hotait bridges the gap between literature and cinema due to her genuine fascination and devotion to both. A mentor in numerous screenwriting workshops at film festivals and institutions such as the Med Film Festival in Rome, Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam, Mizna Literary Gathering in Minneapolis, among others —Darine invites you to learn how to take the elements that construct a screenplay into development: act structure, character development, and scene breakdown. Class Description: Develop your screenwriting skills with award-winning writer and director Darine Hotait, whose films screened at top international film festivals, received multiple Best Fiction awards and were acquired by Sundance TV, AMC Networks & BBC Channel. Her feature screenplays were selected at Cannes Film Festival's International Scriptwriters' Pavilion and were among the top 5 finalists at Hearst Screenwriting Competition. She's the recipient of the AFAC cinema grant and a current literary fellow at New York Foundation for the Arts. Over the period of 4 weeks, writers will be guided through the process of developing a feature film screenplay using various hands-on exercises. Participants are expected to have a one-page storyline that they wish to develop into a feature film screenplay during the workshop. REGISTER HERE Questions? Contact Tracy Wong at twong@aaww.org Darine Hotait is the writer and director of various short films Beirut Hide and Seek (2011), and I Say Dust(2015), which screened at over 70 international film festivals and received multiple Best Short Fiction awards. Her films received prestigious distribution and were acquired by reputable platforms such as AMC Network, Sundance Channel, BBC Channel, Shorts International & The Journal of Short Films. Her debut science fiction feature film project Symphony of a Flood was selected at the International Screenwriters' Pavilion at Cannes Film Festival 2016 and was a finalist at the prestigious Hearst Screenwriting Competition at San Francisco Film Society. Her plays and short stories have been published in numerous publications in print and online. Darine has mentored over 50 screenwriting workshops around the world at various institutions and international film festivals. Since 2010, Darine serves as the founder and creative director of Cinephilia Productions in New York City, an incubator for the development of writers and filmmakers from the MENA region. Praise for I Say Dust (2015) “The film’s power and beauty comes in its subtlety. The story’s intensity and potency lies in Darine’s ability to sing cinematic brilliance in the interstices between scenes and to reveal more about the characters in their silence. The plot is unsaturated and always in dialogue with the audience: what is strategically unpictured by Darine is viscerally felt by the viewer.” — Leena Habiballah, Qahwa Project, US “The characters are complex, the writing – interspersed with poetry – is so touching, and the shots so poignant it just seems like a damn shame it’s a short rather than a feature length film.” — Wided Khadraoui, Kalimat Magazine “There is romance, sweet and ephemeral - an encounter more potent, perhaps, for the sense of coming home. A thoughtful film which packs a lot of ideas into a tight space, I Say Dust speaks well to the talents of those involved. It’s no surprise that it has multiple awards to its name.” — Jennie Kermode, Eye For Film (Edinburgh) ..