Past Events

We invite you to an afternoon of readings in celebration of Philippine culture and two literary heroes who brought the Philippine experience to the public. Harold Augenbraum, Luis Francia, and Dorian Merina read and discuss the writings of José Rizal and José Garcia Villa. Noli Me Tangere, the powerful and...

Come hear the diverse voices in the only English language anthology by Pakistani women published in the United States: Humera Afridi and Fawzia Afzal-Khan. Co-sponsored by Asia Society

Crossing borders and genres. Nonfiction writers Hajratwala and Rachlin read from Leaving India andPersian Girls. Poets Chen and Lieberman read from their collections The Heart's Traffic and Breaking The Map.

Come hear winner, Shivani Manghnani and finalists Bushra Rehman, Kevin Tang, Ky-Phong Tran and Joy Wood read the pieces submitted for our 2008 short story contest. For more information on the contest, including a full list of the finalists, please click here. $5 suggested donation; open to the public    

For several weeks now, under the guidance of artist Chitra Ganesh, nine fantastic young women from around New York City have been understanding, dissecting, and drawing comics. They've explored gender/ethnic stereotypes contained in mainstream cartoons, in the process experimenting with aesthetic choices and storytelling in comics, and have rendered their own...

Karan Mahajan reads from Family Planning: A Novel (P.S.), Rakesh Satyal from Blue Boy, Sung J. Woo from Everything Asian: A Novel, and Paul Yoon from Once the Shore. $5 suggested donation; open to the public    

Parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles bring your young ones to a day of fun at the Workshop. Look forward to story time, a craftmaking workshop, a writing game and ice cream for all this Saturday. Our guests include authors Christina Seid and Pooja Makhijani, as well as craft editor Laura Young, writer Suelain Moy and Susan Soriano from Kaboose.com....

The Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the largest collection of Asian American playwrights ever assembled, presents an exciting night of live theater. $5 suggested donation; open to the public

A reading concert with Circumference, the journal of poetry in translation. Hayashida reads from her translation of Swedish poet Fredrik Nyberg's dark and intimate A Different Practice. Yang reads from his translation of classical Chinese poet Su Shi's East Slope and his own debut An Aquarium. $5 suggested donation; open to the public

Ali's The Far Mosque, an elegant yet plainspoken debut, draws on mystical lyrical traditions. Kim's Dura, a classic of experimental poetics, charts a public history of and her personal relationship with immigration and cultural severing. A panel discussion on Dura featuring Cathy Park Hong, Tan Lin and Warren Liu follows the reading....

In Chang's Year of the Dog, Detective Jack Yu is transferred to another precinct but can't seem to get away from his Chinatown past. Don't I Know You? is Shepard's suspenseful story of a boy who finds his mother murdered in late '70s New York. A rock band plays after the reading! $5...

Finding time for your writing life can be a tricky business when juggling kids, a job, and sleep. Come hear a few writers talk about how they keep their writing life vibrant despite other obligations. $5 suggested donation; open to the public

A celebration of the ground-breaking Norton anthology,Language For A New Century: Contemporary from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond including a panel discussion with Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Tina Chang, Kimiko Hahn, Nathalie Handel, Khaled Mattawa, and Ravi Shankar and readings by Monica Ferrell, Eric Gamalinda, Cathy Park Hong, and Barbara Tran.

Do you refer to the day Scrabulous was taken off Facebook as 'The Day the Wordplay Died'? Thinking of tattooing that last triple word score on your arm? Come to our inaugural Scrabble party and get your group wordplay on again! Play hard, drink some Singha Beer, and make new...

Ferrell's wickedly funny, The Answer is Always Yes, follows one NYUers quest for coolness and rise into the NYC club scene. A hilarious take on office life with Pynchonesque touches, Park's Personal Days makes one feel less alone during those tiny apocalypses caused by email typos. $5 suggested donation; open to the public...

In The Taste of Sweet: Our Complicated Love Affair with Our Favorite Treats, Chen makes you think twice about those carrots in your lunch bag as she ponders America's sweet-tooth anxiety. Abandoned at three in a Korean marketplace, Kim Sunee tells her story about personal geography and the food that helped...

Had your fill of reading the usual classics for your AP exam literature and college English classes? Come to our open mic series for a little change of scenery. Curated by Nuyorican semifinalist Elijah Kuan Wong, Witchdoctors offers you a safe space and nurturing environment. Come bring your own work...

In Stop Me If You Have Heard This One Before, Yoo humorously captures that special mania that only your high-school crushes can induce. Yoo's debut Good Enoughchronicles the journey of Patti, an over achieving Ivy-bound teen itching to rebel. After the reading, this young adult duo will discuss creativity among siblings and...

Panel: MFA Programs Today Deborah Landau (Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at NYU) and Ben Marcus (Associate Professor and Chair of the MFA program in creative writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts) Thinking of applying to an MFA program but don't know where to begin? Come...

Writer, visual artist, and Argentine tango dance/teacher, Mong-Lan brings her love of the dance into her latest collection, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art, where she mixes calligraphic art with graceful and quick-witted poetry. After the reading, Mong-Lan will give a tango performance and teach you some tango basics! $5 suggested donation;...

Kageyama-Ramakrishnan draws on her tender memories of her grandparents as she addresses Japanese American internment in Shadow Mountain. In Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, Sedarat confronts past and current injustices in Iran with hope for its future. $5 suggested donation; open to the public

Come celebrate Many Mountains Moving: A Literary Journal of Diverse Contemporary Voices, with some of its editors and contributors. MMM was founded by Naomi Horii in 1994 and quickly achieved national recognition. The editors took chances on works that were exciting, brilliant, eccentric, courageous and heartfelt, by unknown and famous writers...

In her poetry collection, Matadora, Gambito challenges traditional Filipina gender norms in moves as witty and fierce as her title suggests. Legaspi's poetry collection Imago, which has been compared to Pablo Neruda, poignantly renders rites of passage into manhood. In his novel, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire, Mura leads us through the...

Come to the inaugural event of our Practicing Writer series, a monthly series dedicated to the career and craft development of writers. Thinking of applying to an MFA program but don't know where to begin? Come hear the heads of two prominent NYC-area MFA programs, Kimiko Hahn, Distinguished Professor at Queens...

Paring childhood stories with her nature photography, Earth Passages: Journeys Through Childhood is Lora Jo Foo'sbeautifully collaged memoir of escaping hard living in San Francisco Chinatown and finding sanctuary in woods.Wendy Lee deftly renders the delicate and precarious contours of the international adoption experience in her debutHappy Family. From the age of 11, Lora Jo...

A celebration of Drunken Boat's special tenth anniversary issue, a multimedia event featuring poet Meena Alexander, sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, fiction writerGeronimo Madrid, sound sculptor Sawako, installation artist Robin Starbuck, poet Jerry Williams and musicianJonathan Zalben. Meena Alexander's poetry includes Illiterate Heart, winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk (2004), andQuickly Changing River (2008) all published by...

An evening of poetry in conjunction with the Bryant Park Summer 2008 Word for Word Series featuring Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, John Yau and Shanxing Wang. Spoken word artist Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai has been featured in over 275 performances at venues including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the House of Blues, the Apollo theater, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center,...

Memoir night. In Marrying Anita: Quest for Love in New India (Bloomsbury, 2008), Anita Jain, a thirty-something New Yorker frustrated with Western dating norms, travels to Delhi with the goal of finding a husband using a somewhat more traditional method only to stumble upon a New IndiaÑa vibrant cosmopolitan place where instead...

Eight writers write about songs that strike a chord with them. The result is an evening of stories, a mixtape of fiction, poetry and non fiction. Expect tales of angst, wonderment and love. And sex. And death. And everything in between. Lisa Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She earned a...

Madcap stories of mayhem! A sculptor turned Brussels sprouts farmer, an indicted movie producer, and an alcoholic kung-fu diva are just a few of the characters in Don Lee'sWrack and Ruin (W.W. Norton, 2008), a suspenseful and satirical comedy of errors that culminates in literature's first-ever windsurfing chase scene. A tragicomic...