Past Events

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...

This event is open to the public; $5 donation is suggested. Nobel Prize-nominated poet Bei Daoreads with Jennifer Chang, whose debut collection, The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008), explores a nocturnal world of childhood and myth. Often seen as the preeminent Chinese poet of his generation,Bei Dao was born in Beijing in...

Novelist Alexander Chee guest edits a special issue of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politicsfeaturing New Korean American Fiction and asks what it means to be Korean American. Come hear Alexander Chee, Catherine Chung, Elaine H. Kim, and Jin Yong Sohn read from stories published in the June 2008 issue of Guernica. This event is open...

"No story matters till it is finished and the only stories that need telling are the ones whose endings do not fulfill us," writes Fae Myenne Ng in Steer Toward Rock (Hyperion 2008). Steer is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Ng's first novel Bone (Hyperion 1993), a classic of Asian American literature and not since Bone, has a work so...

This event is open to the public; $5 donation is suggested. In his second novel, The Age of Shiva (W.W. Norton, 2008), Manil Suri chronicles the life of Meera Sawhney, an exquisitely fleshed out woman who comes of age during India's partition. A lush, witty, expansive novel, Shiva spans from Indian politics and mythology to Meera's...

Parents and teachers, having trouble finding Young Adult novels that speak to you and your kids? Fusion Stories is a new website that aims to tell Asian American stories for this generation of young readers. These aren't traditional tales set in Asia or stories of hard-scrabbling immigrants. Instead, Fusion Stories offers fun,...

Drop by this Thursday for three of your favorite things: beer, treats and The Asian American Writers' Workshop. You're invited to our Open House -- a great chance to snack, mingle, and learn more about the Workshop. Meet the Workshop's new Executive Director, Ken Chen, as well as some of...

Join us for an evening of short fiction by The Asian American Writers' Workshop's young adult writers. This past spring, as part of a workshop called UnFairy Tales: The Myths in Myths, students questioned traditional myths and wrote their own. In this final performance, they'll read their own UnFairy Tales,...

Jennifer Sookfong Lee's The End of East(Thomas Dunne Books, 2008) explores isolation, immigration, and romance in Vancouver's Chinatown through the eyes of a Chinese Canadian woman in her early twenties. Set on the outskirts of Ipoh in Malaysia, Preeta Samarasan's The Evening Is The Whole Day, reveals the secrets that lead to...

Poems of loss and love... In The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007), Indran Amirthanayagam memorializes the Asian Tsunami in 2004. "I hid your life vest in the death trap on purpose, my love" begins the speaker in "Three Sorries" one of the many spunky and perverse poems in Brenda...

PEN America Center and The Asian American Writers' Workshop co-host a Saturday morning brunch for young writers. Teen writers are cordially invited to break bread with, chat with, and present their writing to novelist Kashmira Sheth (The Keeping Corner) and Simon & Schuster editor Sulay Hernandez (Final Theory). Former microbiologist Kashmira Sheth writes...

The Workshop is getting a makeover -- with the help of Goil Amornvivat of TLC's "Trading Spaces," Parsons The New School for Design, and Design Within Reach Annex. Buy furniture at the DWR Annex in New Jersey from May 3 through 11 and a percentage of sales will go to...

Two writers read from their upcoming works. R. Zamora Linmark is the author of the acclaimed Rolling The R's (Kaya/Muae, 1997), and Prime Time Apparitions (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) as well as Leche (2008) and Evolution of A Sigh which is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press in April 2008. Nina Revoyr is the author of Necessary Hunger (St. Martin's Griffin, 1998) and Southland (Akashic Books, 2003),...

Edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar Hosted by W.W. Norton & Company and the Rubin Museum of Art with The Asian American Writers' Workshop Multiple readings, book signing, DJ, bar, celebration. Language for a New Century celebrates the artistic and cultural forces flourishing today in the East, bringing...

A night of Southeast Asian American memoir. Six years ago at the age of twenty-one, Jaed Muncharoen Coffin, a half-Thai American man, left New England to visit his mother's native village of Panomsarakram-thus fulfilling a familial obligation. A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (Da Capo, 2008), part armchair travel, part coming-of-age story, is...

In conversation, chaired by Harold Augenbraum. Three Asian American women writers address questions of literary form and taboo, body and community, voice and text, dream and reality, and what it is to write across multiple borders. Born in 1951 in Allahabad, India, Meena Alexander began writing poetry at ten years old. While...