Past Events

A book event with theater, film, and community forum presented by afro-latin@ forum, Asian American Writer's Workshop, and the Schombug Center for Research in Black Culture.

Pay tribute to H.T. Tsiang's experimental, proletarian novel on Depression-era New York.

Join us at the Aicon Gallery for an evening of literary erotica, sex trivia, and other surprises!

Writer/performer Anna Khaja sheds light on the historical and political forces surrounding Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007 while attempting to reunite a nation bitterly divided over the ideals of Islam and democracy. Through the monologues of eight characters that take place in the minutes before...

Literary administrators of color are still a rarity. Representatives will discuss diversifying the field on a collegial and programmatic level, as well as the retention and recruitment of minority administrators within the literary nonprofit industry, the academy, and beyond. The discussion will be followed by a brief Q&A with the audience.

Writing from life can be a tricky business. There are people to protect, faulty memories of events, and the pitfalls of self-censorship and self-aggrandizement. In this workshop, we will employ techniques of poetry and fiction to create works of Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction. Through original writing exercises, we will learn literary techniques including character, dialogue, setting and story arc. In our writing, we will draw upon both the truths and lies of our experience because our lives are too rich not to write about and our imaginations are too strong to ignore. All levels of writers are welcome.

Chef Eddie Huang of VICE food travelogue “Fresh Off the Boat” talks about his new memoir of the same name with Hot 97 deejay, Miss Info. Fresh Off the Boat is a true foodie’s journey, taking readers from theme-park America to Baohaus, the East Village Taiwanese street food joint Huang...

CANCELLED DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER

Join Drunken Boat, one of the world's oldest e-literary journals, and Open City as they celebrate its 16th issue with special folios on Art, Barry Hannah, Exploration, Fiction, Asian American Urbanisms, Sound Art/Dissonance, Speculative and Trance Poetics. Contributors will read pieces featured in the issue.

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...

Join longtime activists, advocates, writers, and photographers to discuss the effects of natural disasters and poverty on low-income communities of color in New York City. Panelists include: Jason Chan, Organizer, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities Bethany Li, Staff Attorney, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund Alisa Pizarro, Public Housing Resident...

Postponed-new date coming soon

Join us for a night of translation as we welcome award winning translators and writers: Fady Joudah, Sinan Antoon, Susan Bernofsky, Jeffrey Yang, and Ghassan Zaqtan. Renowned writers in their own right, they will read literature spanning China and Japan to new innovations in Palestinian poetry, including work by  Mahmoud...

Tarun Tejpal, founder of Tehelka—India’s leading political magazine, guides us through the corridors of power and into the belly of India’s forgotten underclass in his novel The Story of My Assassins. Recently released in the United States, The Story of My Assassins follows a journalist’s investigation into the plot of...

“Kitamura’s words are tough, and her characters are tied to the tails of wounded beasts: mother countries, the land itself, and hierarchies both out of steam and out of date...Kitamura makes the end of history— many histories—seem both casual and immediate,” says Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker. Set in...

American Book Award-winning author Jeff Biggers joins us on the East Coast to report on the situation on the ground of Arizona post- SB 1070. In his new book, State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream, Biggers diagnoses the root of the problem...

Much-anticipated for its “fierce, fresh language,” Jay Caspian Kang’s debut novel melds pop culture, sports fandom, and high literature into a trippy neo-noir novel. Join us on for a reading and discussion with Grantland editor Jay Caspian Kang and writer Hua Hsu. Meet Phil Kim- twentysomething MFA grad and online...

Long overdue is our salute to Sikh Americans’ contributions to stand-up comedy and spoken word. Jen Kwok and Ed Lin host a night of levity and healing on the inauspicious 9/11. Polish off your jokes and rhymes to join the open mic roll call and showcase your talents. Harnessing socially-conscious...

It's easy to bat around issues about character, plot, point of view, description, dialogue, setting, pacing, voice and theme (whew!) in terms of writing. But Ed Lin promises to spend as little time as possible talking about those concepts. Lin believes writing is akin to playing a musical instrument that...

Gina Apostol and Sabina Murray, two storytellers, whose works are steeped in history and its fractured retellings, will discuss latest projects, rewriting the past, and stumbling upon new worlds and the same old imperial ones. Join us for a dual reading, where Apostol and Murray will pick each other’s brain...

What do MIA, Adam Yauch, Jay Electronica, Christian Hosoi, Rondo, and the Kardashians all have in common? Grantland staff writer and Atlantic magazine regular Hua Hsu has written incisive criticism about all of them. Want to learn to write about your favorite (or most hated) cultural icons? This three-session course...

Ed Lin and Jen Kwok are back with an All-Stars Edition of Mouth to Mouth Open Mic! For one night only, we’re bringing you the best of the best—so spectacular that open mic slots are only available by lottery! Will you be the lucky winner of one of the five...

Spanning 1980s Midwest to imperial court China, our second installment of Bricolage—a salon-style multimedia show-n-tell—takes us into the brilliant minds of novelists on journeys of recovery. American Book Award-winner Don Lee’s The Collective is a gripping tale of friendship, loss, and the “melancholy burden of unfulfilled dreams” (Publishers’ Weekly). After...

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is launching three new magazines about race and immigration. We’re having a free party (with RSVP) at projective space in Chinatown to celebrate on June 28th with Ashok Kondabolu of Art Core Hip Hop Trio Das Racist, Julio Salgado, Tao Lin, Cognac Cocktails, Tiger Beer, and art swag tote bags by artist Tania Bruguera of Immigrant Movement International.

A lonely spinster marries a ghost. A live-at-home son writes dispatches from his basement. A laid-off techie tries his hand at doctoring day laborers without a license. These are the tales of antiheroes, itinerant workers and gender refugees in Tania James, Rajesh Parameswaran, and Xu Xi’s newest short story collections.

Have you tried to write a novel and found yourself paralyzed by the task? Are you unmotivated, or aimless in your literary pursuit? In this class, we’ll go over some of the basic steps, approaches, and methods for the beginning of novels and their drafting, how to organize your life differently, approaches to plotting and structure, how to work with an outline, and how to know when to drop your outline.

We want you to help celebrate our launch by posting photos of your immigrant parents and grandparents to Twitter--or anyone else in your family!--along with a short narrative tweet that will tell us what the person in the picture meant to you.

Why did Indian Americans, wearing turbans and carrying the Indian republic flag, march in New York’s St Patrick’s Day parade in 1920? What’s the connection between the Israel lobby in the US and the rise of the Hindu lobby? And how did multiculturalism facilitate the growth of rightist Hindu groups on US college campuses? Vijay Prashad’s takes on these questions in his latest book Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today.

Leave your dancing monkey at home and meet Spike Lee/Jonah Hill collaborator Trevor Zhou and Mr. Asian America, Jeff Yang of The Wall Street Journal. Trevor is the face of Verizon FiOS and starring in Spike Lee's The Girl is in Trouble and the upcoming 20th Century Fox feature The...

Take a load off and join special guests Nora Chau and Cihan Kaan at our next rib-tickling Mouth to Mouth event. Nora Chau- Ma-Yi Writer's Lab member and ABC/Disney New Talent Screenwriting grant recipient- will mystify you with her unique brand of vaudevillian storytelling 'til your jaw drops and your eyes bulge. Award-winning video artist and...