What does writing Asian and South/east Asian futures even mean? Join us as we uplift innovative writers Kirin M. Khan, Zeyn Joukhadar, Angela Peñaredondo, Lisa Factora-Borchers, and Kay Ulanday Barrett. Together they will share new work and discuss the current stakes and patterns in craft, audience, editing, and themes centering Asian, Pacific Islander, Desi writers in the U.S. 

Join us as we discuss how hybrid writing and existence can pivot norms of technique and culture. What ways does APIA writing contribute to re-imagining possibility and what do we hope for writers, workers, and community sustainability? Hosted by Asian American Writer’s Workshop and Moderated by Kay Ulanday Barrett.

REGISTER HERE!

Kirin M. Khan is a writer living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands who calls Albuquerque, New Mexico her hometown, and Peshawar, Pakistan her homeland. She is an alumna of VONA/Voices, Las Dos Brujas, and the Tin House Writers Workshop. She was a 2017 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, 2017 SF Writers Grotto Fellow, 2018 AWP Writer to Writer Mentee, and a 2018 Steinbeck Fellow, and she received a 2019 fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her essay “Tight” was nominated by Nat. Brut for a 2018 Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in The Margins, sPARKLE & bLINK, Your Impossible Voice, and 7×7.LA and elsewhere. In addition to writing, Kirin is an editor for the “Triple Threads” section of lit magazine Just Femme & Dandy, and serves as Treasurer on the VONA/Voices Board of Directors.

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Thirty Names of Night, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award, and The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a Goodreads Choice Awards and Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize finalist. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere and has been included in anthologies such as Kink, This Arab Is Queer, Letters to a Writer of Color, and others. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar guest edited Mizna’s 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue, serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective.

Angela Peñaredondo (she/they) is queer, nonbinary Filipinx writer and author of nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press, March 2023), All Things Lose Thousands of Times (winner of the 2016 Inlandia Institute’s Hillary Gravendyk Book Prize) and the chapbook Maroon (Jamii Publishing). An interdisciplinary writer, artist and educator, their work can be found in The Academy of American Poets, Pleiades, Apogee Journal, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. They are a recipient of fellowships from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, Macondo, TinHouse, the Community of Writers and others. They are an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, San Bernardino. 

Lisa Factora-Borchers is a Filipinx American writer, activist, and editor of the anthology, Dear Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence. Lisa has served as editorial director for Bitch Media, senior features editor for The Rumpus, contributing editor for Catapult, Editor for Guernica, and as a nonfiction editor with make/shift and Literary Mama magazines. Her work is widely published and has been anthologized in numerous collections. Lisa has a joint master’s degree in counseling psychology and pastoral ministry from Boston College and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 

Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a 2022 recipient of a Tin House Next Book residency, and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship Award at MacDowell. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, Literary Hub, them, The Advocate, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, The Lily, The Maine Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. For more information go online at kaybarrett.net or on social media at @brownroundboi.