Staff
JAFREEN UDDIN was appointed EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of the AAWW in January 2020. She is the first woman to lead the organization since its founding in 1991. With over a decade of experience working in the public sector, she specializes in communications, education, and fundraising. She most recently served as Deputy Director of Development for Special Events with PEN America, managing a high-level portfolio of events and cultivation activities. Prior to joining PEN America, she helped oversee Executive Education as an Assistant Director with NYU’s Stern School of Business, developing and coordinating both degree and non-degree programming for cohorts of senior-level executives. She began her career with a nearly-eight-year stint at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where she helped create the infrastructure for the public programming calendar of events, and spent nearly three years managing an online Book Salon for Aslan Media, spotlighting writers and artists from the greater Middle East/South Asia region. She regularly volunteers her time with a number of local South Asian and Muslim organizations in New York City, including serving as Chairperson of the Columbia Muslim Alumni Association from 2011-2015 and as a current Board Member for Laal-NYC. She received her B.A. in political economics from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her M.A. in global history from NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science.
PUBLIC EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS COORDINATOR TIFFANY TRAN LE runs and manages AAWW’s weekly events and workshops. They are also a poet with deep roots in Texas. In their time at AAWW, Tiffany has overseen over 200 events with authors and artists such as Monica Youn, Awkwaeke Emezi, Kay Ulanday Barrett, and dozens more. Tiffany serves on the Joint Union-Management Committee of the AAWW Union.
EDITORIAL COORDINATOR YASMIN ADELE MAJEED works on The Margins and the Margins Fellowship. She serves as the unit chair of AAWW’s union with UAW Local 2110. Her writing has been supported by Kundiman, Tin House, Kweli Journal, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JYOTHI NATARAJAN manages The Margins Fellowship program and oversees the editorial direction of AAWW’s online magazine The Margins with a team of editors. Jyothi is formerly an editor at The Caravan, a monthly longform journalism magazine based in New Delhi, and was an editor at The New Press. Their work has been published in the anthology Good Girls Marry Doctors (Aunt Lute, 2017). Jyothi is on the board of IndyKids, a social justice youth journalism initiative. They were awarded the 2017 Wai Look Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts, given by the Asian American Arts Alliance.
SENIOR EDITOR NOEL T. PANGILINAN edits Open City, a project of The Margins that captures deeply reported stories from Asian immigrant communities across NYC. He possesses more than 20 years of experience in editing, writing for, and managing print and online publications. He teaches Filipino and Philippine history at the College of Mount Saint Vincent (NY) and at Rutgers University (NJ). Noel also taught Filipino American literature at the City University of New York (CUNY)-Hunter College and journalism at Seton Hall University. He earned his Master of Science in Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
ASIA EDITOR KAITLIN REES runs the Transpacific Literary Project, which publishes literature in translation from writers in East and Southeast Asia. Rees co-founded AJAR, a Vietnam-based journal and press, with her collaborator Nhã Thuyên in 2014. AJAR has published four print journals, nine single author collections, three titles as a series of encounters, and one anthology—as well as organized the A Festival, the first of its kind in Vietnam without state or institutional support. A recipient of awards from PEN and Bread Loaf, Kaitlin has guest-edited issues of Words Without Borders and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.
GUEST CURATOR BUSHRA REHMAN is a poet, novelist and teaching artist. Her poetry collection Marianna’s Beauty Salon, has been described by Joseph O. Legaspi as “a love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home–and surviving.” Her novel Corona, a dark comedy about being South Asian American, was noted by Poets & Writers among the year’s Best Debut Fiction and her co-edited anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism was chosen as one of Ms. Magazine’s “100 Best Non-fiction Books of All Time.” Rehman’s first YA novel Corona: Stories of a Queens Girlhood is forthcoming from Tor/Macmillan. She is creator of the community-based writing workshop Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction.
A/V PRODUCER ROBERT OUYANG RUSLI is an artist based in Brooklyn and produces AAWW’s YouTube videos, live-streams, and forthcoming podcasts. He was a 2017-2018 Van Lier Fellow in Music Composition from the Asian American Arts Alliance, and has written music for feature films, exhibitions and installations featured in the Queens Museum, BAM Next Wave Festival, BAMCinématek, and international film festivals. He produces experimental rap music under the name OHYUNG and has been featured in PAPER magazine, Tiny Mix Tapes, and other publications. He serves on the AAWW Joint Union-Management Committee.
YOUTH AND COMMUNITY OUTREACH COORDINATOR ACE YANG holds community space and coordinates arts based programming for teens and elders in immigrant neighborhoods across NYC through CreateNow. They also work under the name Alice Sparkly Kat as an astrologer. This work has inhabited MoMA, Hauser and Wirth Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and ICP Museum. They have published Astrology and Storytelling (2018), Planetary Alignment for Mental BLISS (2018), Cancer: Zodiac Sign (Sterling Press, 2019), Money Magic (2019), and Magickism (North Atlantic Books, 2020).
Board of Directors
Manan Ahmed is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. Specializing in Islam in Medieval South Asia and intellectual history, he has been published in the New York Times, The Nation, and The Caravan. He is the author of Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Education (Just World Books, 2011)and his new book A Book of Conquest: Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2016) is forthcoming. He received his Ph.D at the University of Chicago, his B.A. in History at Miami University, and his B.SC. in Physics at the University of Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan.
Jin Auh attended her first Workshop event in 1994, which led to her internship at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She has been with The Wylie Agency, an international literary agency with offices in New York and London, since 1995. A full author list can be found on: www.wylieagency.com.
Mariko O. Gordon, CFA founded Daruma Capital Management LLC in 1995, an institutional money management firm specializing in U.S. small-cap stocks. She was presenter at the prestigious Ira Sohn Investment Conference, and was often featured in the financial press and in books on investing. She is a graduate of Princeton University where she earned her A.B. In Comparative Literature in 1983. She was born in New York City, and raised in the French Caribbean and Hawai’i. She is 100% Hapa (half Okinawan, half WASP) and is a long-time supporter of Asian American and Japanese American organizations.
Jennifer Hayashida is the former Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College. She is the recipient of awards from, among others, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. She is the translator of Fredrik Nyberg’s A Different Practice (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007), and Eva Sjödin’s Inner China (Litmus Press, 2005) with recent translations of Karl Larsson and Athena Farrokhzad forthcoming in 2014. Her collaborations in film/video have been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, including the Centre Pompidou, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the New Museum, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
Hua Hsu is a staff writer at the New Yorker and an associate professor of English at Vassar College. He is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press, 2019) and served on the editorial board for A New Literary History of America (HUP, 2010). Formerly a fellow at New America, he is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. He is originally from California.
Anne Ishii is currently the Executive Director of the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia. A writer, translator, strategist, and consultant, her work has been published in Publishers Weekly, Village Voice, Nylon, and more. She is the co-founder of Playbutton (Parte, LLC), an innovative tech firm that is recreating the way we consume music. She is also the former editor-in-chief and co-founder of the interest-based global travel guide book series Museyon Guides (Chiba Publications.) She served as director of Marketing and Publicity at Vertical, Inc., where she sold titles internationally with Random House, secured regular publicity in major US publications, and entered titles for and won most major literary awards for foreign fiction. She has translated over a dozen titles in French and Japanese. She is also a former director and managing partner at Imprint Lab, a venture fund and consultancy firm.
A native of Los Angeles, California, Kirby Kim attended Pomona College and got his JD at UC Hastings College of the Law. Kirby got his first job in publishing working for Charlotte Sheedy Literary, and is now a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit. Kirby represents both literary and commercial authors for children and adults. He also represents a range of nonfiction working with leaders and journalists in the areas of science, culture and current affairs. Kirby lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife and two kids.
Jennifer 8. Lee was a reporter at The New York Times for nine years, where she covered poverty, the environment, crime, politics, and technology. She harbors a deep obsession for Chinese food, the product of which is The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, 2008), which explores how Chinese food is all-American and was on the NY Times bestseller list. NPR has called her “conceptual scoop artist” and has appeared on the TED Talks, The Colbert Report, and the Today Show.
Tan Lin is the author of Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), Blipsoak 01 (Atelos, 2003), and Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (Wesleyan, 2009). His visual and video work has been exhibited at the Yale Art Museum, the Sophienholm (Copenhagen), and the Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York City). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at New Jersey City University.
Monica Youn is a poet and the inaugural Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at NYU School of Law, where she focuses on election law and First Amendment issues. Ms. Youn received her J.D. from Yale Law School, her M. Phil from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and her B.A. from Princeton University. She is the editor of Money, Politics, and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United, a book of essays by leading constitutional scholars and she has testified before Congress and published law review articles on election law issues. Her second collection Ignatz, a series of poems loosely based on the mouse character from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip of the 1920s-30s, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2010.
Founders
Curtis Chin
Christina Chiu
Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Bino A. Realuyo
Magazine Contributing Editors
Daniel A. Gross, Contributing Editor, A World Without Cages
Ayesha Raees, Assistant Poetry Editor, The Margins
Emily Jungmin Yoon, Poetry Editor, The Margins
