Events

• June 20, 7:00 PM

  From Plate to Page: Writing Asian American Food

  Join us for an event that uses food as a starting point to explore the world of the restaurant, Asian American immigrant life, and how histories of migration and colonialism shape our plates. We’ll hear from Lillian Li, whose debut novel Number One Chinese Restaurant delves into the world of family drama behind the Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland; New York Times Hungry City columnist Ligaya Mishan, whose essential piece on the rise of Asian American food in the restaurant industry investigates its newfound critical embrace, and its effect on Asian American chefs; and Toronto-based Naben Ruthnum, whose funny and sharp memoir-essay Curry analyses the canon of “currybooks,” unraveling the nostalgic sentimentality around one of the most iconic staples of Asian food and its connection to the Indian diasporic experience. Moderated by chef and Tiffin editor Rohan Kamicheril. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Lillian Li’s debut novel Number One Chinese Restaurant (Henry Holt, 2018) chronicles mass growing pains among the staff of a thriving, local Chinese restaurant, with familial tensions comically dark cultural criticism, and an underlying, more profound sense of grief. Li received her BA from Princeton and her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Short Fiction. Her widely acclaimed short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Granta, Bon Appetit, Jezebel, and Glimmer Train, where she won Glimmer Train’s 2015 New Writer Award. Born in the D.C. metro area, she now resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ligaya Mishan is a columnist for New York Times’ “Hungry City”, which explores the great unsung restaurants of New York with a smart curiosity and vitality. Her writing career has taken her from a Cornell MFA in poetry to reviewing books for the New Yorker to her current position, where she utilizes her background in many genres to weave together narrative of the lives of immigrants and entrepreneurs and their menus. She now lives in New York. Naben Ruthnum’s Curry (Coach House Books, 2017) cultivates dashing cultural critique, sharp literary analysis, and a hint of diasporic memoir into a well-seasoned exploration of the implications of curry. He has been awarded the 2013 Journey Prize for his short fiction and has previously written for the National Post books column. His stories and essays have appeared in Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and the Walrus. His crime fiction has been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Joyland, and his pseudonym Nathan Ripley's chilling crime thriller Find You In The Dark debuted in April of 2018. Check out his interview Curry and playing with the tropes of South Asian literature in The Margins. Rohan Kamicheril is a writer, editor, and chef. Founder and editor of online food journal Tiffin, Rohan showcases his literary proficiency through a series of interviews, recipes, and stories of international travel. His food-oriented, journalistic writing has appeared in Gastronomica, The Margins, Hemispheres, Asymptote, and elsewhere. He was the editor of Words Without Borders’ literary anthology The Wall in My Head, which commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain through a collection of written and visual work. He currently lives in New York City. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• June 26, 7:00 PM

  A Reading

  Join us for a reading about outsiders in fiction with Let’s No One Get Hurt author Jon Pineda, The Affliction author C. Dale Young, and Though I Get Home author YZ Chin. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC YZ Chin's debut fiction novel Though I Get Home (Feminist Press, 2018) received widespread critical acclaim for the collection's focus on the many facets of Malaysia, dissonance between self-ascribed and plastered identity, and finding one's voice. Though I Get Home is the premier winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, which celebrates women and nonbinary writers of color. Her poetry chapbooks deter and In Passing contain similar themes of immigration and national identity. She now lives in New York with her husband and cat; an engineer by day and writer by night. Check out her interview in The Margins. Let's No One Get Hurt (FSG, 2018) by Jon Pineda is a testament to his linguistic prowess as an author and his ability to make characters, like the eternally adrift Pearl, "so real, so vulnerable, and so earnest that she walked off the page and straight into my heart," as said by fellow author Lauren Groff. His other titles have received similar praise. His memoir Sleep in Me was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and Library Journal "Best Books of 2010" pick and his 2013 novel Apology was the winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. Pineda is also the author of the poetry collections Little Anodynes, which won the 2016 Library of Virginia Literary Award, The Translator's Diary, winner of the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Poetry & Prose, and Birthmark, as selected by Ralph Burns as winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Open Competition. Pineda also spends his time as a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte and teaches at the College of William & Mary. C. Dale Young’s fiction debut The Affliction (Four Way Books, 2018) animates and intertwines a series of characters in various cities in order to explore themes of disappearance and loss. Young's four poetry anthologies and other works, the latest entitled The Halo, have been published in many anthologies and magazines including The Best American Poetry, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, American Poetry Review. Young is a full-time medical practitioner and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Recipient of the 2017/2018 Hanes Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is based in San Francisco. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
• July 2, 6:30 PM

  Getting to Work: an Open Genre Workshop

  One session, 2 hours (6:30PM-9PM) Monday, July 2nd, 2018 Fees & Payment Options: General $75/Member $65 Why You Should Take This Class: In this 1-session “sprint” rendition of Balasubramanian’s previous 5-session workshop, participants will develop an honest, sustainable work plan for the next stage of their respective projects. Class Description: No matter what form your work takes—fiction, journalism, poetry, or something not written at all—learning "how to work" is a daunting but necessary process. Using improv, design, and writing exercises, we’ll collectively bridge that gap between the aspirational (dreams, wishes) and the practical (goals, time) so you can get to work. All manner of writers and creators welcome. REGISTER HERE. Janani Balasubramanian is a writer and gamemaker whose work has been presented at more than 160 stages across North America and Europe, including The Public Theater, MOMA, Abrons Arts Center, Andy Warhol Museum, Red Bull Arts, Ace Hotel, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, Balasubramanian premiered Heisenberg (a live audio game on uncertainty and chaos) at the New York High Line. Balasubramanian is currently a 2018-2020 Van Lier fellow at the Public Theater, and is working on Stargeit, a Cold War era novel about an extraordinary friendship. ..