Edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar

Hosted by W.W. Norton & Company and the Rubin Museum of Art with The Asian American Writers’ Workshop

Multiple readings, book signing, DJ, bar, celebration.

Language for a New Century celebrates the artistic and cultural forces flourishing today in the East, bringing together an unprecedented selection of works by South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian poets as well as poets living in the Diaspora. Some, such as Bei Dao, Mahmoud Darwish, Michael Ondaatje, and Naomi Shihab Nye are acclaimed worldwide, but many more will be new to the reader. The collection includes over 400 unique voices – political and apolitical, monastic and erotic, established and emerging – that represent a wider artistic movement that challenges thousand-year-old traditions, broadening our notion of contemporary literature.

Language for a New Century has already attracted the attention of a numberof eminent writers and thinkers, including Howard Zinn, Yusef Komunyakaa and Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer, who writes, “This extraordinary, library-in-one volume: what a resource! The editors have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature.” Guggenheim Fellow and Los Angeles Times Book Award winning poet Carolyn ForchŽ has written”Language for a New Century [is] a field guide to the human condition in our time.”

Free and open to the public