The Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Margins Fellowship was first established in 2014, as part of AAWW’s 25 year tradition of incubating emerging writers of color. A hub for the next generation of Asian American literature, the Margins Fellowship materially improves the lives of emerging writers of color through an innovative mix of re-granting, publication, and career development. Four writers are annually supported through the year-long fellowship which provides them with financial support, publication opportunities, work space, mentorship, and a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Come celebrate the 2019 Margins cohort with our fellows—Amanda Ajamfar, Sabrina Imbler, Yuxi Lin and Abigail Savitch-Lew—and their mentors, novelist Zaina Arafat, the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn Tina Chang, National Book Award finalist Lisa Ko, and New York Times bestselling science writer Ed Yong. We’ll have cake, drinks, and will be selling copies of a limited-edition chapbook featuring selections of each fellow’s writing and the art of Kaitlin Chan.

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 creation, development, publication, & dissemination of Asian American literature.

The Fellows!

Amanda Ajamfar is an Iranian-American short story writer currently living in Brooklyn. Born in the US, she spent her childhood moving between various US states and countries in the Persian Gulf. She holds degrees in Film, Religious Studies, and Creative Writing. Her work tends to feature hybridity, mongrelized forms of myths pulled from a transnational inventory, and issues of moral complicity as a modern/American person. You can find her stories in The Colorado Review and at PaperDarts.

Yuxi Lin is a Chinese American poet and writer, born in Fujian and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Ever since immigrating to the United States at the age of twelve, she has been fascinated by language as a vehicle for longing. After graduating from Davidson College as a Belk Scholar with a BA in English and Economics, Yuxi worked as a management consultant and a teacher before deciding to pursue her MFA in Creative Writing at NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. Yuxi’s writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Epiphany, Electric Literature, Cosmonauts Avenue, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was selected as a winner of the Breakout 8 Writers Prize. You can follow her on Instagram @yuximerollin.

Abigail Savitch-Lew is a writer and journalist born and raised in Brooklyn, of Chinese and Jewish descent. In her fiction, she seeks to unearth the ravages of racialized capitalism, particularly through investigations of land use policy and displacement. No Ghosts in Brownsville, her novel-in-progress, contemplates generation gaps within immigrant families, anti-Blackness in Chinese communities, and the relationship of biracial identity to the myth of a post-racial America. Since graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in Literary Arts, Savitch-Lew has written longform articles for publications including YES! Magazine, Colorlines, Jacobin, The Nation, and Dissent magazine. She is a former staff reporter for City Limits and a three-time winner of an Ippies award from CUNY’s Center for Community and Ethnic Media.

Sabrina Imbler is a half-Chinese writer and dyke based in Brooklyn. She is a staff writer for Atlas Obscura and the recipient of fellowships from Jack Jones Literary Arts, the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, and Paragraph NY. Sabrina wrote the monthly “My Life in Sea Creatures” column at Catapult and is working on a book of essays on the subject.

The Mentors!

Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian American writer. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, VICE, and NPR. She holds an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts. She grew up between the United States and the Middle East and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Tina Chang, Brooklyn Poet Laureate, is the author of Half-Lit Houses (2004), Of Gods & Strangers (2011), and most recently Hybrida (2019) which was named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by NPR, Lit Hub, The Millions, Oprah magazine, Publisher’s Weekly and was named a New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy collection. She is also the co-editor of the W.W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2008). Chang teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Ed Yong is a science journalist who reports for The Atlantic, and is based in Washington DC. His work has featured in National Geographic, the New Yorker, New Scientist, Scientific American, and many more. He has won a variety of awards, including the National Academies Keck Science Communication Award. I CONTAIN MULTITUDES, his first book, was a New York Times bestseller, and a clue on Jeopardy! He has a Chatham Island black robin named after him.

Lisa Ko is the author of The Leavers, which was a 2017 National Book Award for Fiction finalist, won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2017 Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. The Leavers was named a best book of the year by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, The Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, and others. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016 and The New York Times and received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony.

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.