Events

• November 1, 7:00 PM

  Authoring Advocacy: Bearing Witness in an Era of Mass Incarceration

  What is the responsibility of writers to confront our era of mass incarceration, and how do we bear witness without assuming voyeuristic or exploitative perspectives? Join us for a reading featuring 2018 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellows Justin Rovillos Monson and Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Asian American Writers Workshop's The Witness Program writers Roshon Abraham, Christine Olivares, & Sarah Wang. A closing conversation will explore the ethics, challenges and necessity of writing about mass incarceration from a variety of perspectives and lived experiences. RSVP HERE! $5 Suggested Donation. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. All donations go to AAWW public programs. The Asian American Workshop is a national nonprofit dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told. PEN America’s Writing for Justice Fellowship commissions writers—emerging or established—to create written works of lasting merit that illuminate critical issues related to mass incarceration and catalyze public debate. The Fellowship aims to harness the power of writers and writing in bearing witness to the societal consequences of mass incarceration by capturing and sharing the stories of incarcerated individuals, their families, communities, and the wider impact of the criminal justice system. This event will also serve as a warm welcome to the new 2019-2020 Writing For Justice Fellow cohort! The Witness Program is a new program of the Asian American Writers Workshop that empowers writers of color to witness and write about mass incarceration. It began in the spring of 2019 and supports four creative writers, as part of our ongoing initiative A World Without Cages. Each participant visits several sites of American incarceration and detention, meets with individuals who are directly affected, and takes part in a pen-pal correspondence with an incarcerated writer. Their creative work will appear on The Margins, our online magazine of culture and ideas. Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of the newly published collection of poems Felon. He has been a Guggenheim, NEA, and PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow. Justin Rovillos Monson, a first generation Filipino-American artist, was the winner of the inaugural 2017 Kundiman/Asian American Literary Review/Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center Mentorship in poetry. A love poet, he seeks in his writing to catalog the body incarcerated, to misbehave, and, most of all, to conjure a poetics of reaching. He was born and raised outside of Detroit, Michigan, in Oakland County, and is currently serving a sentence in the Michigan Department of Corrections, from which he hopes to be released in 2027. He is a 2018 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellow. Sarah Wang is a writer in New York. She has written for BOMB, n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, Catapult, Conjunctions, Stonecutter Journal, semiotext(e)’s Animal Shelter, The Shanghai Literary Review, Performa Magazine, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, and The Last Newspaper at the New Museum, among other publications. She is the winner of a Nelson Algren runner-up prize for fiction and is currently a fellow at the Center for Fiction and the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Witness Program, which bridges conversations about mass incarceration and migrant detention. See more of her writing at wangsarah.com. Christina Olivares is the author of the full-length No Map of the Earth Includes Stars (2015), winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize, and of the chaplet Interrupt (2015), published by Belladonna* Collaborative. Her second full-length book, HIJX, is forthcoming from YesYes Books. Latinx and queer from the Bronx in New York City, Olivares earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in Poetry and a BA from Amherst College in Interdisciplinary Studies (Education). She is the recipient of a 2018 BRIO Award in Nonfiction, a 2015-2016 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, and two Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grants (2014 and 2010). She was recently a visiting faculty member in the Rutgers-Newark poetry MFA program and works as a high school educator. Roshan Abraham is a journalist, essayist and poet whose writing has appeared in VICE, The Verge, Pacific Standard, The Village Voice and more. Roshan reports on city policy, including criminal justice, immigration and housing. He was a 2018 Open City Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop and is a graduate of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Connie Leung has been incarcerated since the age of 17 at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, and is serving a sentence of 30 years to life. She attends Marymount Manhattan College through the Bedford Hills College Program. Ricardo Ferrell, 61, born and raised in Detroit, MI, is a writer published in 3 newsletters: The Communicator, The Michigan Lifers Report, and the University of Michigan’s PCAP News. Ricardo writes essays for DreamBigLiveBig.Net, op-eds for The Gangster Report Magazine, and he's a staff writer for Voice of Detroit. Ricardo is writing several books You can reach him via email: go to www.jpay.com to set up an account (free) must include Ricardo Ferrell #140701, or write him at: Ricardo Ferrell #140701, 2727 E. Beecher St., Adrian, MI 49221. 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...
  
• November 4, 7:00 PM

  Our Families, Our Secrets: New Literature by Korean American Writers

  Every family has secrets—secrets they keep from each other, as well as the ones they keep together. The bonds and scars of family are universal, but they manifest in different ways in every country, as well as in every community and every household. A reading & discussion, authors Steph Cha, Catherine Chung, and Angie Kim will explore issues of immigration, history, legacy, and identity in new novels about American families and the secrets they keep. Miracle Creek (FSG, 2019) is Angie Kim’s powerhouse debut: a literary courtroom thriller about an immigrant family and a young single mother accused of killing her autistic son. Kim takes a classic form-- courtroom drama-- and draws on her own experience as an immigrant & lawyer to examine how far we’ll go to protect our families & our deepest secrets. Alexander Chee says of the novel, “A bright seam of crisis, mystery, and love emerges in these pages. Angie Kim has written a bold debut novel about science and immigration and the hopes and fears each engenders.” Catherine Chung’s exhilarating sophomore effort, The Tenth Muse (Ecco, 2019), has been praised from writers like Roxane Gay, Elif Batuman, J. Courtney Sullivan, Téa Obreht, Rebecca Makkai, and Helen Oyeyemi, and has received rave reviews from The Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, and Kirkus Reviews, among others. A saga about a trailblazing mathematician and her extraordinary family story, Catherine Chung – who has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago and spent time at Einstein’s famed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton – brings to life the language and passion of mathematics and shines a light on the fascinating but too often overlooked real life historical contributions of women in science. Your House Will Pay (Ecco, 2019) is Steph Cha’s latest novel, tackling head-on the major themes of racial tension, police violence, social movements, and cultural identity, from the perspective of a Los Angelean. Your House Will Pay (Ecco, 2019) marks a bold new direction for Steph Cha, further establishing her as one of the strongest voices in the next generation of both crime and literary writers – compelled by the notion that crime is a fundamental part of life and exploring what that means for the individual as well as society at large. RSVP HERE! $5 Suggested Donation. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. All donations go to AAWW public programs. The Asian American Workshop is a national nonprofit dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told. Catherine Chung was a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Granta New Voice, and a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from The University of Chicago and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before receiving her MFA from Cornell University. She has published work in The New York Times and Granta and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City. For more information, please visit: www.catherinechung.com Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s an editor and critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. A native of the San Fernando Valley, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two basset hounds. Angie Kim is the author of the national bestseller Miracle Creek, named a "Best Book of the Year" by Time and Amazon, a Washington Post Bestseller and Summer Read pick, and a Top 10 Apple Books Debut of the Year. Kim is one of Variety Magazine’s “10 Storytellers to Watch,” and has written for Vogue, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Glamour, Salon, and Slate. She moved from Seoul, Korea, to Baltimore as a preteen, and attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. A former trial lawyer, she now lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and three sons, and is at work on her next novel. Learn more at www.angiekimbooks.com. 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...
  
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