Past Events

December 4th, 2014 DATE CHANGE: December 5, 2014 LOCATION: Dumbo Sky 10 Jay Street, #903 Brooklyn, NY 11201 Some thirty years after her sudden death, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's work remains a force in the fields of visual arts, avant-garde poetry, and feminist theory. From her early scholarship on French...

The second event in The Asian American Writers' Workshop's Counterculturalists series highlights some of the rebels and bohemians of color who are often erased from histories of the left and the avant-garde. Watch a clip from American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, the new documentary film about 98-year-old Detroit-based...

“The world is wrong…. Who did what to whom on which day? ... Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth?” So writes Claudia Rankine in her new book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press 2014), just short-listed...

The poem can mobilize us in a social space, the poet Myung Mi Kim tells us. Taking that cue, how do we consciously use poetry to that end? How do we embed writing into the social justice process, and have it enter new spaces?Presenters will begin with a discussion of...

So you read Junot Díaz’s essay MFA vs. POC, but did you know that it was originally published in a special anthology of work by writers of color? Join us as we celebrate the legacy of Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA), a vital nonprofit for writers of color...

Come chomp on some Sri Lankan food as we ask, What happens in the aftermath of a three-decade long war? It’s a question at the center of Rohini Mohan’s new book, The Seasons of Trouble. The result of five years of reporting and research, her devastating and beautifully written account closes in...

You know the "model minority" story: Asian Americans as assimilated, professional, quiet. Ellen Wu's new book The Color of Success shows that this wasn't just a chance myth, but a concerted effort of liberal journalists, government officials, and scientists to create a narrative to combat and control the black liberation...

Hey Fam. You gotta drop whatever you're doing and come celebrate Jeff Chang's new book Who Who Be: The Colorization of America. The author of Can't Stop: Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Jeff now presents a recent cultural history of American race in Who We Be. We're...

The body carries memory, trauma, war, escape, repression. To excavate it is a political act. Lan Cao's new novel, The Lotus and the Storm, pulls the viewer back and forth between contemporary America and the war in Vietnam, following a family as they uncover truths about the atrocities there. Paul Tran...

Canadian-based artists Elisha Lim and Vivek Shraya celebrate the publication of their new books, 100 Crushes and She of the Mountains, with queer prayers, songs, films, and readings. We're co-hosting the event at Barnard College.

Hamlet, The Beatles, the LA Rebellion, the War in Iraq: Luis H. Francia's new book, Tattered Boat, moves across his many interests with a careful and confident eye. Poet, translator, and activist Jennifer Hayashida will parse the poems and politics.  Francia will also be joined on stage by two younger poets...

Among the many characters in The Scatter Here Is Too Great, Bilal Tanweer's new novel, is the city of Karachi itself: its diverse, thriving population. The episodic novel follows a series of characters and voices after a bomb goes off at Karachi Cantt station.  Sadia Shepard will show an excerpt of her gorgeous film cycle The Other...

Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction Six Mondays from October 6- November 10, 2014, 7PM-9PM at AAWW Fee: $275 General/$250 AAWW Members Deposit: $50 General Deposit/$40 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...

AAWW’s open mic series provides a safe space to forge new art and communities. We’ve seen unpublished writers and legendary authors, sparked book deals, and hosted comedy, spoken word, music, poetry, memoir, fiction, and more. Featured presenter Ayesha Akhtar will break down The Burqa Project, in which she asks men...

You love the sound of "Blurred Lines" but hate the words. You're troubled by The Help. Where do feminism and diversity fit into this crazy world of pop culture? Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist doesn't offer up definitive answers, it provokes us into conversation. Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh and the great blog Koreanish, joins her on...

Hari Kunzru has gone digital with his multimedia essay “Twice Upon a Time” for the Atavist. The Atavist is going print with their first paper book, Kamila Shamsie's A God in Every Stone. Kunzru's essay is a take on New York through music and memory, with the sounds of the blind musician Moondog....

Part religious meditation, part pop culture, R.A. Villanueva's Prairie Schooner Book Prize-winning debut Reliquaria uses the body as a starting point for everything else. AAWW is toasting the launch of his book with a stellar lineup of poets presenting their work with him. Award-winning performance poet Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai will emcee the...

Do we read white poets the same way we do poets of color? Dorothy J. Wang’s Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, And Subjectivity In Contemporary Asian American Poetry calls for a radical rethinking of how we read American poetry. Writers of color are seen as secondary to those who are...

Mouth to Mouth is AAWW’s open mic series. We provide a safe space to forge new art and communities. We’ve seen unpublished writers and legendary authors, sparked book deals, and hosted comedy, spoken word, music, poetry, memoir, fiction, and more. DarkMatter is a queer South Asian performance and literary arts duo made up of Alok...

At the start of Ed Lin's Ghost Month, a young man finds that his ex-girlfriend has been murdered. Turns out she was working as a "betel nut beauty": one of the scantily-clad women who stand by roadsides selling the snacks to truck drivers. AAWW is setting the scene for Lin's book at the start...

In 2005, over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations called on people around the world to join a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the state of Israel until it complies with international law and ends its occupation of Palestinian land.  While prominent musicians and filmmakers have publicly supported BDS,...

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai's Ai Weiwei: The Seed is a live music, video, dance and spoken word piece exploring the roots of Ai Weiwei's political consciousness and emergence as one of the world's foremost artists and thinkers. "Ai Weiwei: The Seed" tracks the artist's life from his childhood in exile with his political poet father Ai Qing to his formative decade in...

T.S. Eliot said that re-purposing myth was "a step toward making the modern world possible for art." He didn't know it could take forms as wondrous, colorful, and quirky as in the work of Porochista Khakpour and Hamid Rahmanian, who both updated tales from the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings. Khakpour's...

Mystery, immigrant narrative, family drama, coming of age story: Celeste Ng's debut novel Everything I Never Told You blends and transcends genre. The novel starts with the death of a young woman and turns into a family's process of discovery. AAWW celebrates the book's launch with Greenlight Books. Long-time AAWW friend Catherine Chung (author of Forgotten...

  Franny Choi's debut book just came out, and comedienne Jen Kwok and novelist Ed Lin are throwing down an open mic to celebrate. Called a "a beautiful, fearlessly loaded weapon” by Ed Bok Lee, Choi's Floating, Brilliant, Gone leads readers through the complex landscapes of absence, memory, and identity. Franny...

Singapore is known for order, safety, cleanliness. Singapore Noir, a new book edited by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, breaks us of that image. Join us for stories of geomancy, gambling, fisheries, and femmes fatales by Tan and contributors Damon Chua and Colin Goh. Moderated by Hirsh Sawhney (editor of Delhi Noir). Presented by the Asian American...

In recognition of World Refugee Day, this World Policy Salon brings together the film’s producers and immigration experts for a discussion of the ecosystem of global migration issues in the award-winning film Who is Dayani Cristal?  Deep in the sun-blistered Sonora Desert beneath a cicada tree, Arizona border police discover a...

You're a writer. We know it. You know it. We also know that sometimes the hardest part isn't getting your ideas down on paper, but getting your manuscript out of the slush pile. It's hard to know where to start, especially if you've got a full-time job or are raising...

When Kyung-sook Shin released Please Look After Mom in 2009, it was an international sensation, selling some two million copies. Her seventh novel, I’ll Be Right There, is a coming-of-age story set in South Korea’s turbulent 1980s. Her work explores the intersections of family duty, romance, and historical upheaval, marked by sparse prose and intense,...

2014 will go down as an historic year for poetry. We're feting Sally Wen Mao's debut Mad Honey Symposium. Dave Eggers likes its "gritty, world-wise sense of humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger.” Also just released: Cathy Linh Che's Split, a tender exploration of  war, diaspora, and violence, and Tarfia Faizullah's Seam, based on interviews with women...