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 23, 7:00 PM

  Visions and Fever Dreams: New Iranian Lit

  Come for a special reading on folklore, the Iranian revolution, and people whose dreams were lost to history. “One of Iran's greatest novelists” (Guardian), Shahriar Mandanipour reads from Moon Brow, the story of a playboy-turned-soldier shell shocked from the Iran-Iraq War who sees visions of angels from the past. Jasmin Darznik reads from Song of a Captive Bird, her debut novel about the life of legendary rebel feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad; the novel translates many of her poems into English for the first time. Also featuring Mandanipour’s translator Sara Khalili, and moderated by Porochista Khakpour. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Jasmin Darznik is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. Her novel Song of a Captive Bird is a fictional account of Iran’s trailblazing woman poet, Forugh Farrokhzad, and will be published by Random House in February 2018. Jasmin was born in Tehran, Iran and came to America when she was five years old. She holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College and a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. Now a professor of English and creative writing at California College of the Arts, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. Shahriar Mandanipour is one of Iran’s most accomplished writers, the author of nine volumes of fiction, one nonfiction book, and more than 100 critical essays. Born in 1957 in Shiraz, Iran, he studied political science at Tehran University and bore witness to the 1979 revolution. After the onset of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, he joined the military and volunteered for duty at the front, where he served for more than eighteen months. His first collection of stories was published in 1989; his works were banned between 1992 and 1997. In 2006, he moved to the United States and has held fellowships at Brown, Harvard, and Boston College. Mandanipour’s first novel to appear in English, Censoring an Iranian Love Story (Knopf, 2009), has been widely acclaimed. He currently teaches creative writing at Tufts University. Sara Khalili is an editor and translator of contemporary Iranian literature. Her translations include Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour, The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons by Goli Taraghi, The Book of Fate by Parinoush Saniee, and Rituals of Restlessness by Yaghoub Yadali. She has also translated several volumes of poetry by Forough Farrokhzad, Simin Behbahani, Siavash Kasraii, and Fereydoon Moshiri. Her short story translations have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, EPOCH, GRANTA, Words Without Borders, The Literary Review, PEN America, Witness, and Consequence. Porochista Khakpour’s debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007) was a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” Chicago Tribune “Fall’s Best,” and 2007 California Book Award winner. Her second novel, The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014), won a place on a number of “best of” lists, being a Kirkus Best Book of 2014, a Buzzfeed Best Fiction Book of 2014, and an NPR Best Book of 2014. Check out an interview with her in AAWW’s The Margins. This event 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..