Past Events

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...

Come for the drink specials, Wong Kar-wai-esque neon lighting, and writer Henry Chang reading from his new book Death Money. Stay for the karaoke. Part of Chang's Detective Jack Yu series, Death Money takes us from the benevolent associations of Chinatown to the take-out restaurants, strip clubs, and underground gambling establishments of the Bronx, to...

In case you missed it, we're now accepting applications for two different fellowships at AAWW associated with our online magazines, Open City and The Margins.

Sometimes the only way into the heart of a city, with its layers of history and teeming populace, is through the overlooked detail, the back-alley tale, the surreal. In A Matter of Rats, Amitava Kumar offers a sensitive portrait of his hometown Patna, using city's rat infestation as a entry...

Two writers explore metropolises they have known for years, finding them changed, expanding, dangerous, lively. Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: The Eruption of Delhi takes a personal, journalistic account of the deep contradictions in the expanding city, from its new billionaires to the slums surrounding them. In Every Day is for the Thief, Teju Cole’s...

As part of the 2014 PEN World Voices Festival and NYU Literary Mews, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU presents a reading of avant-garde Asian/Pacific American writing that is on the edge. Challenging distinctions between genre and form, these texts push the boundaries of literature, poetry, and history to defy categorization....

Meet a grandma named Bruce, an occasional Godzilla, and Whitney Houston's bodyguard/lover.  Tom Cho's Look Who’s Morphing was published to acclaim in Australia and shortlisted for multiple literary awards—including the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book—and has been studied at universities in Canada, Australia, UK, Switzerland and Japan. It is finally...

On the occasion of Ai Weiwei's retrospective opening at the Brooklyn Museum, Sergio De La Pava, Jennifer Egan, Ha Jin, Alison Klayman, Chang-Rae Lee, and Victoria Redel will read writing and testimonials from Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaobo, Liu Xia, and  Ilham Tohti in support of freedom expression in China. Follow and tweet your support...

Suffering doesn't make us noble, but it forces itself into our lives anyway. Akhil Sharma reads from his new book Family Life, some thirteen years in the making. Sharma uses precise prose to create moments of intense pain, duty, and revelation as a young boy and his family learn to live through a wrenching...

This year's cross-cultural reading features writers who have been funded through Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops Program, representing the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Brooklyn Community Pride Center, Robleswrites, and Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon. Writers will be introduced by Nadia Ahmad, JP Howard, Peggy Robles-Alvarado, and more! For...

The writers of Bamboo Ridge Press draw on Native Hawaiian, Japanese, and Standard English to craft a hybrid poetry that reflects the history and culture of their islands. Join us for a rare chance to hear six of these poets read in New York. Four will read from their collective...

they want me to settle down when I have not yet lived – Frances Chung The struggle was everywhere during the 1970s Asian American Movement. In between rallies, volunteer health services, and radical study groups, many activists sat down to write poetry. On the final night of the exhibition Serve...

The new front in the War on Terror is the “homegrown enemy.” Undercover officers and informants have spied on 30 mosques in New York alone, and counter-terrorism agents have a file on every Moroccan taxi driver in the city. Based on several years of research and reportage from Texas and New York to Yorkshire, The Muslims are Coming! by...

The Annual Asian American Literary Awards honor Asian American writers for excellence in three categories: (1) fiction,(2) poetry, and (3) nonfiction. Literary awards recipients are determined by a national panel of judges who are selected on the basis of expertise in a literary genre and/or experience in academic environments relevant...

Are you a freelance/self-employed writer, journalist, photographer, artist, or producer without health insurance? Do you have questions about how the NY Health Insurance Exchange works and how to sign up before the March 31st deadline? Come to a free informational session hosted by the Asian American Writers' Workshop, South Asian...

Chang-rae Lee's new novel On Such A Full Sea is what you might call a post-post-apocalyptic novel. The world has already ended, the environment already ravaged beyond belief. And that’s when things get interesting. The novel follows Fan, a diminutive fishtank diver and descendant from the settlers from New China,...

Blood is thicker than water, but this has never stopped intra-family drama. Join us for an evening of conversation with Catherine Chung (Forgotten Country), Mai Der Vang (How do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology), and Dina Nayeri (A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea) about history, separations and schisms,...

We suspect that you, like us, have a rich inner life, and never get tired of traipsing its landscape. Join us on the 30th if you carry a portrait of Emily Dickinson in your heart, and have a soft spot for introverts and writers who are obsessed with the power...

This event is sold out! To hear about future programs first, sign up for our mailing list. How do you make sense of something that's always shifting? Identity and self-definition are perpetually in flux -- writer/reader, past/future, fiction/reality, linear/cyclical, maker/made are treated as dichotomies, but these writers illustrate that each is...

Days are short; nights are long and cold. We're entering prime cozying-up season. (In other words: there's a good reason so many babies are born in September.) Please join us for an evening of readings and talk about what really drives humankind and its literary documentarians: love, sex, and all...

An evening of film, art, literature, and music, Second Settlements features artists whose work arises out of a necessity to resettle spaces, both real and imagined. Second Settlements is an exploration of places and experiences long lived out by the artists, that still weigh heavily in their creative work. In the work of each of...

Please join us for a community gathering, literary reading, and book sale in the spirit of Bayanihan, in support of typhoon survivors. Featuring readings and discussion with Jessica Hagedorn, Ninotchka Rosca, Sheila Coronel, Sarah Gambito, Joseph Legaspi, R.A. Villanueva, Gina Apostol and others. Hosted by Bino A. Realuyo and Nita Noveno. Books...