Events

• March 26, 6:30 PM

  MAGNOLIA SEASON: Building your creative toolkit

  Six Sessions, 2.5 hours (6:30PM-9PM) Tuesdays, March 26th - April 30th Fees & Payment Options: $325 General/$295 Member (JOIN THE FANCLUB!) Registration Deadline: March 19th *This is a small class. Please apply through the link below if you are interested. Please complete this application. We will notify you if you are accepted into the class. Why you should take this class: Do you know what you want to say, but you’re not sure how to say it? Have you ever read a beautiful piece of writing and thought, I want to know how that works! Every craft has a sort of toolkit—painters have colors and texture and stroke; a woodworker her chisel, saw, drill and lathe. In this class, we’ll work on building out your creative toolkit—exploring different forms and writing strategies to help bring our ideas to the page in the ways that best express what we want to say. With an emphasis on form and writing exercises to kickstart your creative process, this is a class equally suited to poets, prose writers, and anyone interested in experimental, hybrid forms. Course description: We’ll begin by bringing in our favorite pieces of writing and taking them apart to see how they work. From there, we’ll delve into a variety of tools that we can use to generate new and exciting pieces of writing—poetry, prose, or anything in between—and workshop them together in class. We’ll talk about micro-details like rhyme, meter, and rhetorical device, but we’ll also talk about large-scale formal problems like structure, voice, and the uses of the fragment and the list. Through weekly prompts intended to kickstart the writing process, we’ll generate work that can be polished throughout the course or used as a jumping-off point for longer pieces. Students will come away with at least one polished piece, five completed writing exercises, workshop experience, and a set of creative writing tools for both poetry and prose. You’ll leave with: -One workshopped prose piece or long poem, plus several other written exercises -Written feedback from Larissa on several pieces of your work -A community that is invested in your work and development as a writer Larissa Pham is a writer & artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review Daily, Bookforum, Guernica, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Verso, Adult Mag, New York Magazine, ELLE, The Rumpus, The Hairpin, Gawker, Garage, Broadly, Packet Bi-Weekly, and elsewhere. In 2017 Larissa attended Jack Jones’s Literary Retreat as the inaugural recipient of the Yae Di Up Fellowship. She is the author of Fantasian, a New Lovers novella from Badlands Unlimited (2016). She is currently working on poem club, a project that activates poetry through a combination of code, aesthetics, and audio components. “Skilled, darting prose...If genre writing dishes up escapism and pleasure, then Pham accomplishes this.” —BOMB Magazine “Fires, sex, desire, murder, and the loss and creation of ‘the self’ are the building blocks of this breezy, dark novella.” —Baltimore City Paper “Tender and explicit, her e-letters shared snapshots like the grey bubbles of iPhone ellipses growing across a screen mid-sext, or her braindust after a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA.” —Dazed..
  
• April 18, 6:30 PM

  An Evening with Han Kang

  Join us for a rare American visit by Han Kang, one of the most prominent novelists in contemporary world literature. Han’s first book, The Vegetarian (Hogarth 2016)--a phantasmagoric fable about a wife whose carnivorous renunciation disrupts her marriage in ways whose consequences are ultimately grotesque--won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, her newest book, The White Book (Hogarth 2019), a woman at a writer’s residency in snow-covered Warsaw meditates on the color white as a way of processing traumas that have haunted her family. Moderated by former AAWW Fellow E. Tammy Kim, a contributor to The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine. Co-sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI). Please note the 6:30pm start time! RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Essentially a letter from Han to her sister, Han Kang’s The White Book offers a lyrical and disquieting exploration of grief that functions as “a secular prayer book” (The Guardian) and contains “some of Han’s best writing to date” (NPR). As Katie Kitamura wrote in the New York Times Book Review: “Formally daring, emotionally devastating and deeply political...In this subtle and searching novel, Kang, through Smith, proposes a model of genuine empathy, one that insists on the power of shared experience but it not predicated on the erasure of difference.” A participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Han has won the Man Booker International Prize, the Yi Sang Literary Award, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Manhae Prize for Literature. A professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, Han Kang is translated by Deborah Smith. Moderated by former AAWW Fellow E. Tammy Kim, who has written about the Koreas for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. E. Tammy Kim is a freelance reporter and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times whose work has also appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. She reviewed Han Kang's Human Acts for The Nation in 2017, and previously worked as a social-justice lawyer. Read her writings as an AAWW Open City Fellow here. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/ 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• April 22, 7:00 PM

  Guernica Magazine's "Climate Fiction": A Special Issue

  Co-sponsored by the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Climate Working Group and Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and Asian American Writer’s Workshop. “These stories exemplify the genre of ‘climate fiction,’ or ‘cli-fi,’ by exploring what the world might become if climate change continues unabated. Its roots are in science fiction, but here, it’s tinged, beautifully so, with realism and the supernatural. At its best, cli-fi conjures, spell-like, meditative spaces in which we ponder our deepest fears before emerging transfigured.” —Amy Brady, from the introduction to Guernica magazine’s “Climate Fiction: A Special Issue” On Earth Day, join us for readings, conversations, and a reception to celebrate the launch of Guernica magazine’s “Climate Fiction: A Special Issue.” Contributors and experts from across disciplines will discuss the importance of climate fiction for climate action. We will hear from writer Helen Phillips, novelist Pitchaya Sudbanthad, and photographer/filmmaker Nathan Kensinger, whose new works are featured in this issue. They will engage in conversations about their craft and climate advocacy with writers, scientists, anthropologists, and environmental justice scholars Ken Chen, Karen Holmberg, Eugenia Kisin, Jerome Whitington, and Guernica Deputy Publisher Amy Brady. Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Book Culture...