Past Events

Is immigration your second language? Join us for a celebration of poet Marwa Helal’s debut collection Invasive species, a bold collection that pokes holes in the English of immigration officials, lols at the false expertise of Western commentators on the Middle East — and asks for nothing less than a...

There are enough people in American prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers to populate a country. And like a country, American incarceration has its own language. There's the technocratic and euphemistic language of the state—offender, felon, illegal immigrant, detainee, parolee. There's also the language that the incarcerated use to describe...

Every year in the wintertime, Critical Resistance New York City sends a note of solidarity, hope, and encouragement to all of the 1,500+ subscribers of The Abolitionist newspaper that are currently locked up in jails, detention centers, and prisons on the east coast. This year, we invite you to join...

Join us for an event to honor the work and legacy of the queer Korean American novelist Samuel Park, whose novel The Caregiver was released posthumously this past fall. A panel of queer and Asian American writers featuring by Alexander Chee, T. Kira Madden, Mitchell Kuga, Eugene Lim and Daniel...

Call Her Ganda follows the tragic murder of Jennifer Laude, a Filipina transgender woman by a U.S. marine, the community organizing and effort that brought her murderer to justice - and the role that the long US-Philippine relationship played in this. Amidst a media storm and police inquiry, as Jennifer’s...

Nov 15th is The Day of the Imprisoned Writer, and Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam remains incarcerated. Join author Salil Tripathi and journalist Jennifer Chowdhury in conversation with The Polis Project as they shed light on the political, and historical events that have led to the current crisis in Bangladesh and...

Six Sessions, 2.5 hours (6:30PM-9PM) Mondays, November 12 - December 17 Fees & Payment Options: $325 General/$295 Member (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!) *This is a small class. Please apply through the link below if you are interested. Please complete this application. We will notify you if you are accepted into the...

Join us for a reading with three Korean diasporic writers whose work spans memoir, poetry, and fiction to look at the legacy of the Korean War and the life of Korean adoptees in the United States. Eugenia Kim will read The Kinship of Secrets, a riveting story two sisters, one...

Come hear two storytellers who became friends while working in animation and are releasing absurdist graphic novels based off popular web comics: internet sensation Aminder Dhaliwal, whose debut graphic novel Woman World started off an an infectiously funny instagram comic about a group of women who gab and hang out...

UPDATE: Please note the new location. This program will now take place at the NYU King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center located at 53 Washington Square South. While conducting research for her book Coolie Woman, Gaiutra Bahadur (Visiting Scholar, A/P/A Institute at NYU) came across Lal Bihari Sharma’s Holi...

Join us for a reading with two South Asian diasporic writers who both have published ambitious and energizing new works of political fiction. Novelist and journalist Preti Taneja will read from her debut novel, We That Are Young, a modern-day rendition of King Lear in which a family dynasty implodes...

How do we document our first-generation elders’ histories, and the stories of the vanishing communities they grew up in? Join us for a special event with Chinese-American writers who use an innovative mix of memoir, oral history, and intergenerational storytelling to do just that. We’ll hear a special presentation from...

Join us for a book launch and conversation for Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and disability justice poetics conversation with Leah and Cyree Jarelle Johnson. What the hell is disability justice? How do collective care, disability justice and sick and disabled Black and brown femmes save the...

Join us for a special reading with the Open City fellows. We’ll hear from Neighborhood Fellows Roshan Abraham, Pearl Bhatnagar, and Huiying Bernice Chan, who have been documenting the pulse of metropolitan Asian America as it's being lived on the streets of New York right now, and our Muslim Communities...

What does it mean to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them? Join us for an event with Nicole Chung as she discusses her debut memoir All You Can Ever Know, a poignant and graceful exploration of transracial adoption, family, and identity. In...

Join us for a night of reading and film with visiting Indonesian writer Ahmad Fuadi, whose bestselling novel Negeri 5 Menara (The Land of Five Towers), an uplifting story of a young Muslim boy’s journey to Islamic boarding school, became the source of inspiration for one of Indonesia’s top box...

Join us for a reading that pushes the boundary of home and desire through meditations on kin, violence, and rupture. The poet Divya Victor will read from Kith, her visual and instructional book of stolen and insurgent history that asks us to re-order the question of belonging in the Indian...

Six Weeks (Five Sessions plus Final Reading), 2 hours each (7PM-9PM) Tuesdays, October 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30. Final Reading on Tuesday November 6 Fee & Payment Options: $272 GENERAL // $240 MEMBER (Join the Fan Club!) **Full payment due before first class. We have a limited number of...

Focusing attention into the palette, AAWW hosts an evening for language, food, art, & place to come together on a shared table. Situating her writing from the perspective of food, author Chienfang Chang will share pieces of her recent work at the Vermont Studio Center as well as engage in...

Join us for a transcendent night celebrating Emily Yoon’s debut collection of poetry, A Cruelty to Our Species, a collection of testimony to Korean “comfort women” who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II, and a bright elegy to departed ancestors, languages, and girlhood. As...

Six Sessions, 2 hours each (7-9pm) Mondays, September 24th, October 8th, 15th, 22th, 29th, November 5th Fees & Payment Options: $425 General / $400 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!) Full payment due before first class. *Please note: this class skips Monday, October 1st. **There is an application process for...

Join us for an event about globalizing East Asia, love, family, and what happens when we leave one home for another. We’ll hear from Crystal Hana Kim, whose debut novel If You Leave Me tells the story of a refugee of the Korean War and her forsaken love. Lucy Tan...

Do you feel like your life resembles an office farce? While Millennials have been blamed for the downfall of homeownership, the diamond industry, and even napkins -- Ling Ma’s debut novel Severance shows what life might look like when you don’t notice the apocalypse because you’re so entrenched in the...

LITERAOKE finally comes to NYC, after unforgettable shows across the country! Come see performers sing their hearts out to their favorite karaoke bangers and then then read from their work. Featuring: Ed Lin, Sokunthary Svay, Sam Chanse, Swati Khurana, Joshunda Sanders, Moncho, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Charles Rice Gonzalez, Quincy Scott...

Join us for a bilingual reading with the novelist Hwang Jungeun, poet Song Kyung-dong, and poet Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. This event is moderated by journalist E. Tammy Kim and co-sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI). RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Hwang...

What national fictions are immigrants in America pressured to preserve, and how does the task of self consciously constructing an immigrant “self” tear at the boundaries of nations and the the novel itself? Blending fiction, nonfiction, diary notations, news clippings and photos, Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana chronicles the story of...

Six sessions, September 8-October 6, 2018 Saturdays from 3:00-6:00pm Fees & Payment Options: Free Why You Should Take This Class: As psychic lives of Asian American women are yet to be rendered in their full complexities, "No Name Mind" offers a space to name our experiences with mental health and...

Come with book donations for incarcerated readers, leave with homemade bubble tea. We’re hosting a book drive in partnership with NYC Books Through Bars to mark the launch of A World Without Cages—AAWW’s new series of stories and workshops that bring together voices from jail, prison, and immigrant detention. Over...

Join us for a reading with Brown Girls web series co-creator Fatimah Asghar, who will read from her debut collection of poetry, If They Come For Us and the artist Vivek Shraya, whose forthcoming book I’m Afraid of Men explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and...

Has your superstitious grandma ever told you myths that you haven’t been able to forget? Join us for this event about Asian grandmas with critically acclaimed cartoonist and Last Night’s Reading creator Kate Gavino, whose new graphic novel Sanpaku explores the Japanese myth through the eyes of Marcine, an impressionable...