Events

• September 24, 7:00 PM

  Two Truths & a Lie: a Workshop

  Six Sessions, 2 hours each (7-9pm) Mondays, September 24th, October 8th, 15th, 22th, 29th, November 5th Fees & Payment Options: $425 General / $400 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!) Full payment due before first class. *Please note: this class skips Monday, October 1st. **There is an application process for this workshop. Please fill out this application. We will be in contact regarding your submission. Why You Should Take This Class: “Writing from life can be a tricky business. There are people to protect, faulty memories of events, and the pitfalls of self-censorship. In this workshop, we will employ techniques of poetry and fiction to create works of Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction.” (www.twotruthsclass.com) Course Description: “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 too strong to ignore. Every writer will have the opportunity to workshop one original piece. All levels of writers are welcome. This workshop is open to people of color and allies.” (www.twotruthsclass.com) Bushra Rehman is a poet, novelist and cultural activist. Her poetry collection Marianna’s Beauty Salon, has been called “a love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home--and surviving.” Her novel Corona, a dark comedy about being South Asian American, was noted by Poets & Writers among the year’s Best Debut Fiction and her co-edited anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism was chosen as one of Ms. Magazine's "100 Best Non-fiction Books of All Time." Rehman’s first YA novel Corona: Stories of a Queens Girlhood is forthcoming from Tor/Macmillan. She is creator of the community-based writing workshop Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction...
  
• September 25, 7:00 PM

  A Cruelty Special to Our Species: A Launch Party for Emily Yoon

  Join us for a transcendent night celebrating Emily Yoon’s debut collection of poetry, A Cruelty to Our Species, a collection of testimony to Korean “comfort women” who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II, and a bright elegy to departed ancestors, languages, and girlhood. As Poetry Editor for The Margins, Emily has cultivated a special home for Asian American poetry in all of its richness. Come celebrate her poetic force along with readings from poet and drag performer Wo Chan, poet Kristin Chang, and writer, video artist, and scholar of light Sueyeun Juliette Lee, who is visiting us from Denver! RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Emily Jungmin Yoon collects testimony and confronts history in her debut collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018). The poems in this book are records of earthly and human violence—the sexual slavery of Korean comfort women, lives lost during natural disasters, and the everyday, accumulating ways that women hurt and are made to silently accept that pain. These are poems deeply invested in the minutiae of language, how one word leads to the next, connecting sound, rhythm, and meaning between languages, poets, and women. Emily is also the author of Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press. She was born in Busan, Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and MFA in Creative Writing at New York University. She has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, AWP’s WC&C Scholarship Competition, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems and translations have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, POETRY, The New York Times Magazine, and Korean Literature Now. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, and is a PhD student studying Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Check out two poems from A Cruelty Special to Our Species in The Margins. Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer living in Brooklyn. Wo is the author of the chapbook ORDER THE WORLD, MOM (Belladonna*), and has received honors from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, Lambda Literary, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. As a standing member of the Brooklyn based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney, Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. Wo was born in Macau, China, and currently lives in New York where they are an MFA Candidate in Poetry at NYU. You can find them on Instagram at @theillustriouspearl. Kristin Chang is the author of the poetry chapbook Past Lives, Future Bodies, which will be published in the fall of 2018 by Black Lawrence Press. Kristin’s work has been published in Teen Vogue, Muzzle Magazine, The Margins, the Shade Journal, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net and Best New Poets. She works for Winter Tangerine and can be found online at kristinchang.com and on Twitter @KXinming. She is passionate about martial arts films and matriarchy. Check out “Sitting the Month,” her collection of birth stories in The Margins. Sueyeun Juliette Lee is a writer, video artist, and cultural worker who writes about light, displacement, imaginations of the future, and movement. She is the author of That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut Press, 2008), Underground National (Factory School Press, 2010), Solar Maximum (Futurepoem, 2015), and No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise (Kore Press, 2017), a meditation on light, human displacement, and longing. Lee has held fellowships with the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Kunstnarhuset Messen, Hafnarborg, and the UCross Foundation. In 2006, she founded Corollary Press, which publishes chapbooks of multi-ethnic writing. Her work has appeared in the Constant Critic, Jacket2, EOAGH, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver, Colorado, where she serves as Programs Director at Chinook Fund, a community foundation that funds grassroots, social justice work across Colorado. This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page. NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY *The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor. *We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free. If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• October 1, 7:00 PM

  Mouth Waters Earth

  Focusing attention into the palette, AAWW hosts an evening for language, food, art, & place to come together on a shared table. Situating her writing from the perspective of food, author Chienfang Chang will share pieces of her recent work at the Vermont Studio Center as well as engage in a guided tasting & reading of aiyu, a plant indigenous to the mountains of Taiwan, with chef Pyna Yang. We will lead guests through the process of preparing aiyu following local tradition and discussions will follow the roots of how food opens a space for both cultural exchange and social justice. Seats limited to 50 people, so everyone cay try aiyu!  RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Chiengfang Chang is a Taiwanese author of two collections of short stories One Traveller, Sixteen Tables and A Foreign Journey Through Dining Tables, with a third collection forthcoming in 2018. Chang's writing forefronts food and the space of the table as a core of greater human understanding and sympathy. As a food voyager, she writes about how eating cultures are interwoven with life stories. Pyna Yang is a chef, writer, and traveller from Taiwan. In her restaurant that doubles as an art space, Pyna works closely with indigenous artists while focusing on seasonal ingredients from the mountains and streams as well as traditional cooking methods. Through her curation, Pyna hopes to touch the spirit of an artwork with a culinary experience that weaves together histories of human and food. Co-sponsored by Taipei Cultural Center in New York. This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page. Seating for this event is limited to 50. RSVP through Eventbrite required. NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY *The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor. *We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free. If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..