Events

• October 17, 1:00 PM

  AAWW Lit Lunch: A conversation with Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde

  Join us for a special lunchtime chat from AAWW’s green couch with Stockholm-based writer Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde, whose US debut, What We Owe, is a gripping novella about a 50 year-old Iranian refugee whose terminal cancer diagnosis compels her brutal and bitter telling of her journey to Sweden after fleeing—or betraying—the revolution. Translated from the Dutch by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, What We Owe is “spare and devastating” (Kirkus). Tune in to our Facebook page at 1:00pm to watch Golnaz read from the book and discuss it with writer and journalist Roja Heydarpour. Grab your lunch, and pull up to our live chat! TUNE IN TO THE LIVESTREAM WEDNESDAY, OCT 17 | 1-1:20PM Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde was born in Iran in 1983 and fled with her parents to Sweden as a young child. What We Owe (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) is her first novel to be published in the US and will be published in 25 countries. Imbued with haunting prose and a deep sense of history, her slim, fierce novel is an unflinching look at how trauma and grief metabolize over time through the eyes of an immigrant woman striving to survive at all costs. Leni Zumas writes, "I read this ferocious novel in one sitting, enthralled by the rage of its narrator. Nahid confronts her own suffering with dark humor and noisy honesty, while taking aim at a patriarchal tradition that expects her to be silent.” Golnaz’s first book, She Is Not Me (Hon är inte jag) was published in Sweden in 2012. She is the founder and director of Inkludera Invest, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting marginalization in society by backing social entrepreneurs who have developed pragmatic solutions to social challenges. She lives in Stockholm with her husband and daughter. Check out an excerpt from the English translation of the book in Words Without Borders. Roja Heydarpour is a writer and editor. Born in Iran and raised in New York City, she has worked for the Daily Beast, the New York Times, Al-Monitor, Columbia Global Reports, and Devex, among others. She also teaches citizenship classes at the Bay Ridge and Kensington branches of the Brooklyn Public Library, teaching a mix of students ranging from Chinese to Azari to Tajik to Pakistani and Bangladeshi. You can read her most recent piece about how Muslim-Americans mourn after the first generations of families die at Open City. This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page at 1pm. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• October 18, 7:00 PM

  Care Work

  Join us for a book launch and conversation for Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and disability justice poetics conversation with Leah and Cyree Jarelle Johnson. What the hell is disability justice? How do collective care, disability justice and sick and disabled Black and brown femmes save the world and each other during this time of apocalypse—or do we? What are the histories and present day struggles and triumphs of disabled Black and brown queers in our movements and communities? Come discuss these and other provocative questions with writer, cultural worker and performer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and poet and essayist Cyree Jarelle Johnson, and celebrate the launch of this long-awaited, beautiful new book. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | NO ONE TURNED AWAY FOR LACK OF FUNDS In Care Work (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha outlines what it means to create spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative "collective access"—access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure —in our communities and political movements. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of colour are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, organizer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. They are the author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (short-listed for the Lambda and Publishing Triangle Awards, ALA Above the Rainbow List), Bodymap (short listed for the Publishing Triangle Award), Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner), and Consensual Genocide, and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. Their next two books, Tonguebreaker and Exploring Transformative Justice: A Reader (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon) are forthcoming in 2019. A lead artist with Sins Invalid, her writing has been widely published, with recent work in PBS Newshour, Poets.org's Poetry and the Body folio, The Deaf Poets Society, Bitch, Self, TruthOut and The Body is Not an Apology. She is a VONA Fellow and holds an MFA from Mills College. She is also a rust belt poet, a Sri Lankan with a white mom, a femme over 40, a grassroots intellectual, a survivor who is hard to kill. Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet and writer from Piscataway, NJ. SLINGSHOT, their first book of poetry, will be published by Nightboat Books in 2019. Find them on social media at @cyreejarelle or at cyreejarellejohnson.com   NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY *The space is wheelchair accessible. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor. *Bathroom access: Bathrooms are WC accessible and for all genders *Fragrance free: We ask that folks come fragrance free so that everyone can attend. Please leave off cologne, perfume and lots of essential oils. Thank you for being in solidarity with each other! *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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/  ..
  
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