Past Events

One Session, 90 minutes (3:00PM-4:30PM) Saturday, January 27th, 2018 Fees & Payment Options: $25 Full payment due before first class. REGISTER HERE Why You Should Take This Class: Everyone has a unique story waiting to be unearthed. Like diamonds under a bedrock, you need the right tools in order to...

A special discussion about music and the ghosts of America’s racial past featuring two highly acclaimed authors. A murder mystery, a ghost story, and two cultural tourists collide in Hari Kunzru’s spellbinding novel White Tears (Knopf, 2017), which connects contemporary cultural appropriation and white hawkers of black music with the...

4 Sessions, 2 Hours Mondays, January 22nd - February 12th Fees & Payment Options: $150-$250 Sliding Scale REGISTRATION DEADLINE: January 17th, 2018 **Note: tickets are listed on Eventbrite as "donation" in order to enable the sliding scale function. Please note that your registration is not confirmed unless you have paid...

Come join us for the launch of The Shanghai Literary Review’s second issue! TSLR is an English language literature and arts magazine based in Shanghai and New York, Featuring original artwork, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, book review, and translation from and about Asia. Nancy Huang, Jianan Qian, Joy Huang Stoffers, Jeremy...

Mic Check! Are you a writer? Come share your work at our next edition of our open mic, Mouth to Mouth. Hosted by AAWW Fam poets Sonia Guiñansaca and Kay Ulanday Barrett, this edition of Mouth to Mouth features Giselle Buchanan and Ysabel Y. Gonzalez. Mouth to Mouth seeks to...

How does history – particularly the history of war, colonialism, and marginalization – impact the work of Asian American poets across time and space? How does language act as a haunting space of intervention and activism? Poet and scholar Jane Wong raised these questions with her digital multimedia project, The...

Come celebrate the holidays with Riverhead Books, in support of the Asian American Writers' Workshop! $15 cash at the door, unlimited beer & wine from WINC, baked goods by Riverhead authors & raffle prizes!

Mic Check! Are you a writer? Come share your work at our next edition of our open mic, Mouth to Mouth. Hosted by AAWW Fam poets Sonia Guiñansaca and Kay Ulanday Barrett, this edition of Mouth to Mouth features Amir Rabiyah and xoài ph?m. Mouth to Mouth seeks to provide a...

Travel through time with Anaïs Duplan, Chen Chen, Rajiv Mohabir and Monica Sok as they explore both history and futurity in our seventh edition of Poetry Poetry! RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Anaïs Duplan is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn...

Note: This program is co-sponsored by AAWW, but the reading is taking place at BAM. Writing in Dari, Spanish, Nahuatl, Chinese, and English, the poets of Twisting Tongues see translation as a way to interrogate the relationship between English and histories of migration and diaspora. Come see poets Jen Hyde,...

Mic Check! Are you a writer? Come share your work at our next edition of our open mic, Mouth to Mouth. Hosted by AAWW Fam poets Sonia Guiñansaca and Kay Ulanday Barrett, this edition of Mouth to Mouth features Afua Ansong and Ricky Tucker. Mouth to Mouth seeks to provide...

Singapore recently celebrated it’s 50th birthday and its sparkling status as the “Switzerland of the East, but stories of rebellion and subversion remain just below the surface. In Jeremy Tiang’s thrilling debut novel, State of Emergency, an explosion in an office building in Singapore in 1965 unravels an epic story...

Five Sessions, 2.5 hours each (6-8:30pm) Tuesdays October 31st, November 7th, November 14th, November 21st, November 28th Fees & Payment Options: $350 General / $320 AAWW Members (Join the Fanclub!) Full payment due before first class. Maximum of twenty students. Why You Should Take This Class: This workshop lives in...

Learn about your rights while singing your heart out! Join us for a night of strengthening and celebrating our resistance as Attorney Jackie Mariano leads a Know Your Rights training on immigration and political demonstrations. Material Support, an agit-punk band which Mariano fronts, shares the stage with their lead singer...

If you’re in the Halloween spirit for some bewitching poetry, come celebrate the launch of Jess Rizkallah’s new book of poems, the magic my body becomes. She will be joined by poets Marwa Helal, Aria Aber, and Melissa Lozada-Oliva, all of whom write into different sorts of magics: the body,...

How is resistance possible when reality itself is obscured? In an era of "fake news" and more facts than anyone could hope to grasp, authoritarians rely on this uncertainty to consolidate their hold on power. Legendary journalist Raissa Robles joins us from the Philippines to share her new work, Marcos...

Many Asian Americans know innately that intergenerational trauma is real, but how do we “prove” it? Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal's new book, The Broken Country, tells the story of Vietnamese-American Kiet Thanh Ly, who stabbed two white men in 2012 in retribution for the Vietnam War, even though he...

Mic Check! Are you a writer? Come share your work at our next edition of our open mic, Mouth to Mouth. Hosted by AAWW Fam poets Sonia Guiñansaca and Kay Ulanday Barrett, this edition of Mouth to Mouth features Tanea Lunsford Lynx and Tonilyn A. Sideco. Mouth to Mouth seeks...

Come for a special night investigating how young Muslim Americans resist empire through hip hop and other musical subcultures. Su'ad Abdul Khabeer calls it “Muslim Cool”—her term for how young Muslims in the United States fight state power by engaging with Black identity, particularly through fashion and music. In a...

Come for a special night featuring author M. Evelina Galang, whose new nonfiction book Lola's House: Filipino Women Living with War (Curbstone, 2017) tells the story of sixteen surviving Filipino comfort women who survived violence inflicted by the Japanese army in World War II. Starting in the late nineties, Galang...

Three Sessions, 2.5 hours each (6-8:30pm) Wednesdays September 20th, September 27th, and October 4th Fees & Payment Options: $250 General / $220 AAWW Members (Become a Member!) Full payment due before first class. Maximum of fifteen students. Priority will be given to previous students of Vernacular as Resistance. *STUDENT RATE...

Young-ha Kim, one of the most talented and prolific Korean writers of his generation, is making a rare appearance in New York to celebrate the launch of his latest novel, which explores social disintegration and the seedy underside of Seoul. Translated by Krys Lee, I Hear Your Voice, Kim’s fifth book, follows...

One marriage is ending, and another is imminent. For the female protagonists of Danzy Senna’s New People and Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, marriage is a mark of achievement, a psychological bender, a private investigation, and a bracingly intimate way to hold a mirror to our turbulent emotional realities. New People—an...

If you’re Asian American or an immigrant, you’ve probably wondered: what does it mean to search for home? Well, you (and your post-colonial melancholia) are invited to this special event about Middle East politics, revolution, and the refugee experience, You may have read Iranian-American novelist Dina Nayeri’s viral story in...

Does literature stop at a country's borders, or is it possible to write transnationally? We invite you to the launch of the Transpacific Literary Project with the publication of our first themed portfolio, "Remittance." The Transpacific Literary Project is an exciting new initiative from the Asian American Writers' Workshop that...

The struggle to topple Confederate statues around the country is a challenge to rewrite the textbook version of American history we’re supposed to believe in. Poets Patrick Rosal, Bao Phi, and Sokunthary Svay confront nationalist mythology with lyrical odes to the America we struggle against, and the one being built...

Mic Check! Are you a writer? Come share your work at our next edition of our open mic, Mouth to Mouth. Hosted by AAWW Fam poets Sonia Guiñansaca and Kay Ulanday Barrett, this edition of Mouth to Mouth features Giselle Buchanan and Daniel K. Isaac. Mouth to Mouth seeks to...

The Asian American Writers' Workshop is now accepting applications for the Open City Project Grant Fellowship and the Open City Muslim Communities Fellowship. If you are a strong, voice-driven storyteller who cares about social justice movements and transporting readers to the creative subcultures of color in neighborhoods across Queens, Manhattan,...

How does private grief come to blend into today’s turbulent political landscape? For the South Asian families at the center of Kamila Shamsie and Hirsh Sawhney’s latest novels, the death of parents launches surviving family members into unexpected political terrain. In Shamsie’s Home Fire and Sawhney’s South Haven, grief blurs with anger, borders,...

Three Sessions, 3 hours each (6-9pm) Fridays, August 11th, August 18th, August 25th Fees & Payment Options: $150 General / $100 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!) Full payment due before first class. STUDENT RATE AVAILABLE FOR LIMITED SEATS Why you should take this class: You’ve got something special in...