Events

• 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• May 2, 7:00 PM

  A Map of Secrets and Second Chances

  “To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it,” Alexander Chee writes in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his moving collection of essays that explores coming of age as a New Yorker, a gay man, a Korean American, and an artist constantly tasked to explain the value of art. A search for a missing person in Aminatta Forna’s latest novel Happiness brings to life London’s nightcrawlers, urban foxes, street performers, and immigrants who work as security guards and hotel doorman. Join us for a conversation with these master fiction writers about how character and self evolve through encounters in the city and the multiple, overlapping somewheres that we inhabit. Moderated by novelist Anelise Chen. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Alexander Chee’s highly-anticipated first book of essays, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel (Mariner, 2018) collects all his past selves and past New Yorks, winding through grief, activism, drag performance, and odd jobs that led him to become a novelist. Ocean Vuong calls the collection, “a map of secrets and second chances.” He is the best-selling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. A chance encounter between a Ghanaian psychiatrist and an American studying urban foxes in London sets off Happiness (Atlantic Monthly, 2018), Aminatta Forna’s novel that captures the city’s worlds within worlds. Salman Rushdie writes, “Aminatta Forna expertly weaves her characters' stories, past and present, in and out of the larger story of London, which becomes as rich a character as the human beings and, indeed, the foxes.” She is the author of the novels Ancestor Stones, The Memory of Love, and The Hired Man, as well as the memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water. Her essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and Vogue. She is currently the Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University. Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press, 2017), an experimental novel that blends elements of sportswriting, memoir, and self help. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR, BOMB, New Republic, VICE, Village Voice and many other publications. A former Open City Fellow of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, she now teaches writing at Columbia University. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• May 3, 7:00 PM

  Robot Coda

  Join us for a reading with three writers who explore the relationship between race and technology. Margaret Rhee reads from LOVE, ROBOT, a collection of love poetry examining the bonds between humans and robots. Poet and community organizer Ching-In Chen reads from recombinant, an assemblage of poetry and data that investigates female and genderqueer lineages, and Seo-Young Chu reads from her theoretical work on science fiction and how it offers high-intensity realism. Don’t miss this event that uses a variety of forms to explore humans’ relationship with robots, technology, and ourselves. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Margaret Rhee’s LOVE, ROBOT (The Operating System, 2017) is a set of speculative accounts of robot-human love, drawing from a variety of writing forms, such as algorithms, chat scripts, and sonnets. Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, "In a paradoxical and wonderful way, Margaret Rhee's robot love affairs make us rethink what it might mean to be human." Currently, she is completing her first monograph, How We Became Human: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body, and a full-length collection of essays on radicalization. Rhee is currently a Visiting Scholar at the NYU A/P/A Institute, as well as a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Media Study, and produces media art in addition to writing. Her poem, “Theft of Color” was published in The Margins. Ching-In Chen’s recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017) examines erasure, female and genderqueer lineages, and reconstruction of history. “How might a poem diagram destruction? What survives records or doesn't, leaves traces, ledgers or ghosts' marginalia? It is a bleak and beautiful summoning, one that discovers/inscribes a world anew in testifying to the destruction of this one.” (Trish Salah) Born of Chinese immigrants, Chen is a Kundiman, Lambda, Callaloo and Watering Hole Fellow and a member of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundations writing communities. A community organizer, they have worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston, as well as helped organize the third national Asian Pacific American Spoken Word and Poetry Summit in Boston. Chen is also the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press, 2009). In Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Representation of Theory (Harvard University Press, 2017) Seo-Young Chu blurs the line between the imaginary of science fiction and reality. Chu draws from poems, novels, music, films, visual pieces, and more in an exploration of the globalized world, cyberspace, war trauma, the Korean concept of han, and the rights of robots. “It conveys in vivid ways the tensions and dilemmas bound up with inhabiting a high-tech society that is growing ever more science-fictional.” (Peter Y. Paik, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). Chu is the author of the essay, “A Refuge for Jae-In Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major” in ENTROPY and is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Chu also creates visual art using various media and is currently exploring themes of “the Korean DMZ, the strange duality of the Koreas, nostalgia, postmemory, han, injury, and how it feels to be Korean American.” This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Facebook page. Image by Seo-Young Chu: Do NOT Open This Map in Chronological Order, 2015. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..