Past Events

Come hear two storytellers who are working at the edge of gender, sexuality, and the visual arts: graphic novelist MariNaomi, whose critically acclaimed new comic memoir explores her time working at hostess bars in Tokyo, and Japanese sculptor/manga artist Rokudenashiko, who was arrested last year in Japan for "distribution of...

Join us at AAWW for an evening of eco-feminist poetry that navigates time travel, queer resilience, migrant justice, love, trauma, fantasy, and indigenous survivance featuring Jess X. Chen, Demian DinéYazhi, Sonia Guiñansaca, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Ficara McDoom, Ceci Pineda. This is the homecoming show of SOLASTALGIA: a queer eco-feminist poetry tour featuring the transdisciplinary poetry of...

Karan Mahajan’s new novel The Association of Small Bombs explores the profound effects terrorism can have on a family and a community. One of the most celebrated novels of the year, the book has been praised by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the New York Times, which named...

Four sessions 6-8pm: Wed 5/11, Tues 5/24, Tues 5/31, Tues 6/7. No class 5/17. Fees & Payment Options: Full class tuition: $325 General / $300 Members Full payment due before first class. Deposit: $80 General / $75 Members Try out the first class and see what you think! Just pay...

If you’ve been following the Presidential election, you’ve heard Donald Trump call for a database tracking all Muslim Americans and Ted Cruz suggest banning Muslim refugees purely on their religion. While this nativism is not new, dating back to 9/11 and before, these examples show how crucial xenophobia remains for...

We’re treading the treacherous waters of the Age of Exploration and the history of New World slavery. Guiding your rudder will be two formally adventurous story collections: Dark Room Collective member John Keene’s Counternarratives (named Best of 2015 by Flavorwire, Lambda Literary, LitHub, Vanity Fair, and New York Magazine) and...

Join us for a special night about nationhood, exile, and Southeast Asian history featuring seminal Indonesian novelist Leila Chudori and honoring the late Benedict Anderson. The Jakarta-based Chudori will read from her novel Home, which spans the generation of left dissidents forced into exile by the 1965 killings and Suharto’s...

Join Kate Gavino with an awesome lineup of emerging writers talking about the challenges, thrills and tribulations of writing as a women of color online. Gavino’s Last Night Reading literary event illustrations have blown up to be a Tumblr sensation. She’ll be joined by Esther Wang, Adalena Kavanagh, Larissa Pham,...

Poet Fred Wah is a living legend in Canada, but he remains woefully under-read in this country. To remedy that, we’re celebrating Fred’s oeuvre--a jazzy, radical exploration of place and racial hybridity--and the publication of Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991 (Talonbooks 2016). We’ll have Fred himself, on a rare...

In a poem published in The Margins, J. Mae Barizo writes: “And if there was no country [...] there would be no memory, neither an others or one’s own.” Come hear three lyric poets whose new books grapple with the cost and value of remembering a place: Hala Alyan, Zeina...

*This event is not held at the Workshop in NY* What literary resources are available for Asian American writers? What does it mean to be an Asian writer in the 21st century? This first Asian American caucus is not a panel or a reading, but an open town-hall-style hang out...

*This event is not held at the Workshop in NY* “It isn’t hard to find writers of color,” Roxane Gay wrote in a 2012 blog post. “All you have to do is read.” In this panel, editors from five literary magazines dedicated to publishing writers often marginalized by the publishing...

So, we’re all familiar with the brand of 21st century India: the world’s largest democracy, a burgeoning BRIC economy, and, as one famous campaign slogan described it, India Shining. But what do these promises of possibility look like if you’re one of the subcontinents more marginal inhabitants--say, a poor laborer...

Do you have some good old fashioned Asian American family baggage? Then join us for a special event at Barnes and Noble and celebrate Jung Yun, who’ll discuss her debut novel Shelter with novelist and AAWW homie Alexander Chee. Jung’s novel has been named one of the most anticipated books...

One of Hindi literature’s most well-known authors (and favorite frenemy of Manto’s), Upendranath Ashk is most well-known for his autobiographical six-volume 1947 novel Girti Divarein or, as translator and artist Daisy Rockwell has named it in her new translation, Falling Walls (Penguin Modern Classics 2015). An accomplished critic and artist,...

Don your corset, lorgnette, and domino mask and come celebrate long-time AAWW homie Alexander Chee and his critically acclaimed second novel, Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2016). Fifteen years in the making and already hitting its fourth printing on its publication date, this operatic novel of performance and...

Experimental poets NourbeSe Philip and Phinder Dulai draw on legal decisions, ship records, and other archival materials to engage with the passage of bodies of color across the waters: the dead of the slave trade and South Asian migrants refused entry at port. Don’t miss this special New York appearance...

Copresented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and Asian American Writers' Workshop Rumi Neely. Susie Bubble. BryanBoy. Asian personal superbloggers dominate the Internet. In Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging (Duke University Press, 2015 ), Minh-Ha T. Pham examines the phenomenal...

Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction Six Mondays January 18, 2016 - February 22, 2016 7PM-9PM $375 General / $350 Members Writing from life can be a tricky business. There are people to protect, faulty memories of events, and the pitfalls of self-censorship. In this workshop, we...

How are artists and cultural workers shifting our national culture and perceptions towards immigrants and integration? As part of the 2015 National Immigrant Integration Conference, AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen joins Favianna Rodriguez (CultureStrike), Tia Oso (Black Alliance for Just Immigration; Black Lives Matter), Kat Lazo (Race Forward), and filmmaker...

In the stories of Mia Alvar and Vu Tran, you can run away from history but you can't escape it. Both authors have been acclaimed by NPR and the New York Times for their debut books that discuss the trauma of transnational migration of the 1960s and ‘70s and the...

Watch a talented cast of actors bring a novel to life! The Workshop is proud to host an exclusive back-to-back staged reading of Eric Gamalinda's The Descartes Highlands, performed by Alexis Camins and Jennifer Betit Yen, Executive Director of the Asian American Film Lab--as well as a new play in progress,...

Join us and our friends at Graywolf Press and Pen America Center to celebrate Liu Xia’s Empty Chairs: Selected Poems, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern. Born in Beijing in 1961, the Chinese painter, photographer, and poet Liu Xia has been under house arrest at her...

Join us to celebrate the release of Union, a new anthology assembled by international literary journal Drunken Boat. Commemorating 50 years of Singaporean independence (as well as the journal’s 15-year anniversary), Union draws out underlying connections between Singapore and the United States, both heterogenous, cosmopolitan democracies. Ravi Shankar, the founding...

Join us for a night of fraught love and exquisite literary fiction with Jennifer Tseng and Chaitali Sen. Both novelists imagine troubled romantic relationships in vivid settings and are published by Europa Editions, the publisher of Elena Ferrante and Muriel Barbery. Moderated by novelist Gina Apostol, whose novel Gun Dealers’ Daughter (W.W....

Come hear award-winning authors Raghu Karnad and Terese Svoboda discuss hidden family histories of the Asia theater of World War II. Moderated by N+1 editor Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. When Raghu Karnad found three sepia-toned photographs at his grandmother’s house, he learned the...

  The Asian American Writers' Workshop is now accepting applications for two separate opportunities for emerging Asian American writers: The Margins Fellowship and Open City Project Grants. Come learn more and meet our editors at an information session on Thursday, October 29. About the Fellowships and Grants: The Open City...

Poet and nonfiction writer Luis Francia muses on his most pressing preoccupations: colonial history, contemporary politics, and the arts. Moving between Salman Rushdie's first post-fatwa appearance in the United States to Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest in Burma and reaching back to José Rizal’s late-19th century visits...

Join us as four authors—Lee Herrick, Tracy O’Neill, Matthew Salesses, Sung J. Woo-  read from new books that grapple with the realities of adoption, broken families, and the journeys we take to find out where we belong. All of their protagonists are adoptees, as well as three of the authors. Moderated by...

Do your doctor’s visits remind you of the collected works of Franz Kafka? Did your blood pressure spike when you heard about the pharmaceutical CEO who raised the price of an AIDS pill from $13.50 to $750? Well, come hear memoirists Deanna Fei, Sandeep Jauhar, and Dora Wang discuss how...