Past Events

Rana Dasgupta & Naeem Mohaiemen
Commonwealth Prize-winning author Rana Dasgupta will be in conversation with writer and artist Naeem Mohaiemen, reading from and discussing his novel, Solo. Come hear why Salman Rushdie has called Solo a "novel of exceptional, astonishing strangeness," and argues the novel "confirms Rana Dasgupta as the most unexpected and original Indian...
January 29, 2011
6:30 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Jennifer 8. Lee, Ed Lin, Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, & Eddie Huang
Does your mom leave desperate voicemails asking you to "please pick up phone? hello? are you there?" or take twenty-four more napkins than she needs at Taco Bell? Your mom may be a fob. What began in 2008 as a blog featuring endearing and nosy texts and emails from Teresa Wu and...
January 4, 2011
7:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Taiyo Na & Koba Sounds
Our last open mic of 2010 features two New York-based musicians and poets Taiyo Na and Koba Sounds. Come hear them and spit a rhyme yourself! Or a poem, or a story, or some comedy— we've got room for it all if you can fit it in 5 minutes! Honored...
December 10, 2010
9:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Michael Syjuco
Michael Syjuco's Ilustrado won the Man Asian Prize before it was even published, and has been called a "literary landmark for the Philippines and beyond" by Booklist. Mixing fiction with nonfiction,Ilustrado is a family saga of four generations tracing 150 years of Philippine history forged under the Spanish, Americans, and Filipinos themselves. Woven...
December 2, 2010
6:30 PM
The Asia Society
750 Park Avenue (70th Street)
New York New York
Juliet S. Kono, Fred Chao, Negin Farsad and others!
If you open your mouth and the AAWW is around, will you make a sound? Will these sounds make sense? Will they make a story? You've got questions, we've got answers at our open to the public open mic series. This week we welcome poet and first time novelist, Juliet...
November 19, 2010
8:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Barbara Jane Reyes, Craig Santos Perez, & Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Craig Santos Perez probe the identities of the outcast, the displaced in poems that experiment with everything from internet news sources to the Book of Genesis and Tagalog tradition. In Diwata, Reyes inherits the responsibility of remembering from her grandfather, a survivor of World War...
November 15, 2010
7:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Yunte Huang & Charles Bernstein
Charlie Chan, a fictional Chinese detective played by white men on the silver screen, captivated American audiences for decades with one-liners like "tongue often hang man quicker than rope" and is today seen as a yellowface relic. In Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with...
October 28, 2010
7:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Gish Jen & Billy Tsien
Gish Jen's latest novel, World and Town,explores new starts and shifting American towns in what Publisher's Weekly heralds as an "expansive story of identity and acceptance." Hattie Kong loses her husband and best friend in the same year—"like having twins. She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both...
October 7, 2010
7:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Mae Ngai & Aziz Rana
Join Mae Ngai and Aziz Rana as they discuss family lives and legal battles that offer insight into the Chinese-American experience. Called an "absorbing story" by The New York Times, The Lucky Ones, the latest book by historian and Guggenheim fellow Mae Ngai, is a compelling account of three generations of the...
October 7, 2010
12:30 PM
Asia Society
725 Park Ave (70th Street)
New York New York
Linh Dinh & Cihan Kaan
Linh Dinh and Cihan Kaan create landscapes where Coney Island meets Mars, post-war Saigon backdrops lovelorn characters, and rich boys pay to be Muslim for a day. In Love Like Hate, Linh Dinh, who writer Ed Park calls "one of the secret masters of short fiction," uses his deadpan humor to explore...
October 6, 2010
7:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li has recently been named a MacArthur genius and featured as one of the Top 20 Writers under 40 by The New Yorker. Her latest collection of short stories, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, has been heralded as "brilliant" by Publishers Weekly and "further proof that [she] deserves to be considered among the best living fiction writers" by Kirkus...
October 5, 2010
7:00 PM
Asian American Writer’s Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Tyehimba Jess, Patricia Smith, Ken Chen, & Eric Gamalinda
Join hosts and curators Tina Chang and Tracy K. Smith for the fifth annual collaboration between Cave Canem and the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Featuring readings by Ken Chen, Eric Gamalinda, Tyehimba Jess and Patricia Smith. Detroit native Tyehimba Jess's leadbelly was a 2004 National Poetry Series selection. Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named...
October 1, 2010
7:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Natalie Kim & Samantha Chanse
Already sick of schoolwork? Ditch your #2 pencil, pick up you guitar and join New York natives actress Natalie Kim and writer and performer Samantha Chanse on Friday night: bring your best work (or your worst)—either way, drinks on us. Actress and New York native Natalie Kim recently completed a successful run...
September 24, 2010
9:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Fatima Bhutto
Q&A with Steve Coll, New America Foundation Fatima Bhutto's third book, Songs of Blood and Sword, details her complicated childhood in Pakistan, wrestling with national history—from Partition to the post 9/11 "War on Terror"—and its relationship to her father's assassination and her family's political dynasty. Join Steve Coll, President of New America...
September 24, 2010
6:30 PM
Asia Society
725 Park Ave (70th Street)
New York New York
Oliver de la Paz, Tishani Doshi, & Marie Mockett
Why do we want to escape the places we were raised? How much do its bleachers and stadiums, its nosy neighbors and long-distance phone calls shape our coming-of-age? Poet Tishani Doshi reads from her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers. Called "captivating, delightful" by Salman Rushdie,The Pleasure Seekers follows the cross-cultural love affair...
September 17, 2010
7:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Nair, Marilyn Nelson, Paolo Javier
Frank O'Hara famously said most poets were worse than the movies, but then he'd never heard of Movietelling. It's a multimedia literary performance genre that's as new as Youtube and video art and as old as 1920s Japan, where storytellers would "talk" over silent films in lieuof intertitles. Meera Nair...
September 12, 2010
1:00 PM
Brooklyn Borough Hall, Conference Room
209 Joralemon Street
New York New York
Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang's new novel, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, follows the trials of a class of emerging writers, their love/intimidation relationship with their brilliant poet professor, and the different ways they sacrifice their lives for writing. As Booklist praises, "it is [Chang's] indelible portrait of the loneliness of artistic endeavor that will...
September 10, 2010
7:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street, 6th Floor
New York New York
Cindy Cheung
A story of family secrets and discovery, of confession and revelation, Monique Truong's second novel Bitter in the Mouth follows Linda Hammerick, who has a secret sense—she can "taste" words. She falls for names and what they evoke: Canned peaches. Dill. Orange sherbet. Parsnip (to her great regret). In this celebration, actress...
September 7, 2010
7:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W27th Street
New York New York
Amitava Kumar
The dress code is casual, and the alert level definitely high for this celebration of the release of Amitava Kumar's latest books, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb (non-fiction) and Nobody Does the Right Thing (fiction). Part reportage and part protest, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His...
Brownstar and Jaed Coffin
Alabama’s got us so upset, Tennessee’s made us lose our rest, and now everybody knows about Arizona! Spoken word duo Brownstar and memoirist Jaed Coffin, led by hosts Ed Lin and Jen Kwok, will perform in response to SB 1070 and The Workshop’s WORDSTRIKE: Writers’ Boycott of Arizona. Bring your stories of...
August 20, 2010
9:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
New York NY 10001
The Brownstar Revolution
Commencing at 11 pm on Saturday, August 14 (Pakistan's Independence Day) and continuing into the early morning hours of August 15 (India's Independence Day), UNIFICATION 2010 celebrates 63 years of independence and the voices of talented, socially conscious South Asian/American artists. With performances by DJ Rekha, The Kominas, Hari Kondabolu,...
August 14, 2010
11:00 PM
Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette Street
New York NY
Fay Chiang and Peter Kwong
Galleries, luxury condos, displacement, rezoning, affordable housing, neighborhood preservation. These are a few keywords in the active and ongoing conversation about gentrification, development, and urban change more broadly. But what is the role of writing in the face of this kind of urban change? Two activists, scholar Peter Kwong of Hunter College/CUNY...
July 27, 2010
12:00 AM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
New York NY 10001
Sung J. Woo and Ali Wong
Exhausted from having to walk around under the summer sun? Escape the heat with our sixth Open Mic of the year. This week we feature author Sung J. Woo whose short story "Limits" was an Editor's Choice winner in Carve Magazine's2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and academic-turned-comedian Ali Wong whose...
July 23, 2010
9:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
New York NY 10001
David L. Eng, Jared Rehberg, Wendy Lee, Marie Lee, Misoon Yang, and Eleana Kim
In the United States alone, more than 139,000 children have been adopted internationally in the last ten years--many of whom were born in China and Korea. Transnational adoption is rewriting how we understand Asian American identity--by implicating parents of non-Asian American descent who are eager to connect their children with...
June 28, 2010
7:00 PM
Nodutdol
53-22 Roosevelt Ave, Second Floor
Woodside NY
Sinan Antoon, Fayre Makeig, and Lucas Klein
Although less than 0.7% of all literary books published in the United States as works in translation, translation acts as a central way we experience other cultures: including Asian.Sinan Antoon, Fayre Makeig and Lucas Klein come together to read their translations of Asian heavyweights like Mahmoud Darwish and H.E. Sayeh and discuss the...
June 26, 2010
12:00 PM
Woodside Library
54-22 Skillman Avenue
Queens New York
Nelson George and Jessica Hagedorn
The Montauk Club is pleased to announce an evening celebrating literature as part of our new reading series, No Book Jackets Required. Featuring authors Nelson George and Jessica Hagedorn and curated by James Hannaham, the event is produced in partnership with Ringshout and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. The reading...
June 23, 2010
8:00 PM
Montauk Club
25 Eighth Avenue
Brooklyn NY
Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Gina Apostol, and Purvi Shah
How does movement—social, political or physical—affect our personal identities and those placed upon us? Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Gina Apostol, and Purvi Shah each address the shifting nature of identity and its relationship with movement in different ways. Sueyeun Juliette Lee's most recent collection of poetry focuses on Korea and explores...
June 22, 2010
7:00 PM
Nodutdol
53-22 Roosevelt Ave, Second Floor
Woodside NY
Corky Lee, Tomie Arai, Jack Tchen, and Karen Tei Yamashita
Come hear one of the foremost Asian American novelists of her generation and the artist-activists who defined what it means for all of us to be Asian American. This special symposium features key activists Corky Lee, Tomie Arai, and Jack Tchen alongside Karen Tei Yamashita, whose new novel, I-Hotel, is destined...
June 19, 2010
2:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
New York NY 10001
Vidur Kapur and Lisa Chen
Got a summer fling you want to tell the world about? Come by for our fifth Mouth to Mouth Open Mic of the year, featuring stand up comedian Vidur Kapur and poet Lisa Chen. Lisa's book of poetry, Mouth, uses everything from poems carved in the loneliness of Angel Island barracks...
June 18, 2010
9:00 PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
New York City
Queens Council on the Arts, Adhikaar, and NYSCA
In Letters to our Mothers, five writers celebrate the multi-faceted voices of South Asian women in Queens and what it means to be heard across distance. This rare joint production curated by Adhikaar’s Executive Director Luna Ranjit, in collaboration with Queens Council on the Arts and The Asian American Writers’...
June 12, 2010
6:00 PM
Jackson Diner
3747 74th Street
Flushing NY 11372-6337
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