Join us at Rector Park on May 4th at 6 PM ET where the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Battery Park City present In Celebration: Love Letters and 回 / Return and the first installment of our summer poetry series, Ballads at Battery Park City. Featuring incredible poets Emily Lee Luan, Yi Wei, and Abigail Mengesha, this reading will be followed by a conversation with the writers on their respective releases, Emily’s latest collection 回 / Return (April 2023) and Love Letters, a folio from The Margins edited by Yi and featuring Abigail.

RSVP HERE! 

From May through July 2023, the AAWW will presents an outdoor summer poetry reading and discussion series under the theme of “love”: declarations of love, rejections of love, self-love, romantic love, familial and platonic love, and the multitudes of the way love glimmers through our experiences.

Rector Park East
Rector Place & South End Ave
New York, NY 10280

Emily Lee Luan is the author of 回 / Return (April 2023), a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, Best New Poets 2019, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Newark.

Yi Wei is a first generation Chinese writer with a BA in Asian American Studies and English from Swarthmore College. She currently serves as the Assistant Flash Fiction Editor at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Yi has been awarded the Lois Morrell Poetry Prize and is the third place winner for the 2021 Sappho Prize for Women Poets. Her work can be found in Palette Poetry, Lantern Review, and Canthius. She’s currently a Writer in the Public Schools fellow at NYU’s MFA in poetry.

Writer and editor from Addis Ababa, Abigail Mengesha is a recipient of the George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry and Frontier Poetry’s Global Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Common, 20.35 Africa anthology, Mizna, and others.

This program is sponsored by Battery City Park.

//ACCESSIBILITY//
This event is outdoors at Rector Park East. Masks are highly encouraged. We protect each other.

For access to ASL interpretation at this event, please contact tle@aaww.org at least a week before the event.