*RSVP IS REQUIRED TO ATTEND THIS EVENT – RSVP HERE. MASKS WILL BE REQUIRED FOR ALL ATTENDEES. COVID VACCINATION AND TESTING SURVEYS WILL BE SENT TO REGISTRANTS AHEAD OF THE EVENT.*

This October, join AAWW for a celebration of Rajiv Mohabir’s WHALE ARIA and Shilpi Suneja’s HOUSE OF CARAVANS. The first book event at the AAWW space in over three years, this will be a conversation on the post-colonial themes of these works, and a dive into what their stories can teach us about migration and geopolitics. After a period of transformation and renewal, we are excited to invite you to our newly revitalized space, a home for writers, artists, and creators to come together to celebrate the richness of Asian, Asian American, and diasporic storytelling.

“Rajiv Mohabir is one of the most brilliant poets writing today. In Whale Aria, he plunges us into the crosscurrents of ecological, documentary, queer, postcolonial, and diasporic poetics. Throughout, Mohabir translates the structure of whale songs into multilingual lyricism and  irregular forms. These vocalizations (and invocations) sing across the depth of every page and ping against the shores of our attunement. If you listen deeply to these aquatic songs, you will hear, as whales do, how the ghostly echoes of our more-than-human kin ‘pierce the dark / fathoms’ and reveal ‘the miracle: // what was once lost / now leaps before you.'” —Craig Santos Perez

“Tolstoyan in its scope, House of Caravans is a marvel of a novel. It copes with some major issues of our time, such as the mingling of races, colonization, rebellion, historical violence, migrations, and also love and remembrance. Shilpi Suneja writes with patience, subtlety, and intelligence. She is a genuine artist.” —Ha Jin, author of Waiting

Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) is his fourth collection of poetry and currently he is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Shilpi Suneja is the author of House of Caravans. Born in India, her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Guernica, McSweeney’s, Cognoscenti, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. Her writing has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, and a Grub Street Novel Incubator Scholarship, and she was the Desai fellow at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She holds an MA in English from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University, where she was awarded the Saul Bellow Prize. She lives in Cambridge, MA.

RSVP HERE!

//ACCESSIBILITY//

ASL Interpretation is provided by our friends at Pro Bono ASL.

There is an elevator to the 6th floor.

AAWW is a fragrance-free space.

Please reach out to events@aaww.org for additional accessibility requests, including ADA accessible bathrooms, chairs with added back support, or beyond.