Events

• January 23, 7:00 PM

  Invasive species Launch Party

  Is immigration your second language? Join us for a celebration of poet Marwa Helal’s debut collection Invasive species, a bold collection that pokes holes in the English of immigration officials, lols at the false expertise of Western commentators on the Middle East — and asks for nothing less than a re-examination of how we read. We’ll hear from Marwa as well as poets Sahar Romani and Belal Mobarak. Come to hear three brilliant poets. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC How do imposed frameworks of belonging echo through our narratives? How do we move beyond the limited possibilities presented to us when institutionally conventional language usage restricts and erases the myriad of our vernaculars? Marwa Helal’s Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) breaks open revelations that exist beyond rubrics, honoring histories fallen wayside in the face of violence and colonialism. Helal’s collection begins with “poem to be read from right to left,” a piece whose title specifies exact instructions for how to receive it. Safia Elhillo writes that the poem “takes a form created by the poet call the Arabic, which recreates for the non-Arabophone reader the experience of having to reroute the eye; the lovely, crooked syntax that comes from misreading; and the possibilities that precede fluency. For the Arabophone reader the experiences thrilling, familiar in both the old way— the first language— and the in the new way created by our intersections." With tenderness and steady burning determination, Helal calls us to join her in the future: “im lightyears away looking back at all of us, all of the things we wanted by couldnt have. youre stars now. im a planet. they call me mars. and there is life here.” Helal is the author of the chapbook I Am Made To Leave I Am Made To Return (No Dear/Small Anchor) & winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial Contest. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Watch her read “An Ode to DJ Khaled” from one of her first readings at the workshop on AAWW TV. Belal Mobarak was born in Alexandria, Egypt. Raised in Queens. He is a poet, artist, and the son of a great storyteller. Writing is how he learned to finish his stories and poetry is how he learned to tell them with the least amount of words possible. Belal recently traveled across the North Coast sharing his stories for The Moth Mainstage. A finalist in Brutal Nation’s 2017 Competition for Writers of Color. You can find his work published in Columbia Poetry Review, Newtown Literary, Blueshift Journal, Flock, Apogee, HEart, and others. Currently working towards his MFA in Creative Writing at Queens College and is an Academic Advisor for LaGuardia Community College. Sahar Romani is a poet and educator. She trained as a geographer and ethnographer at the University of Washington and Oxford before pursuing her MFA at New York University. A recipient of the 2017 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship, her poems appear in The Offing, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Margins, and elsewhere. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• January 31, 7:00 PM

  Insurrecto!

  Join us for a reading with Gina Apostol to celebrate her latest work of fiction, Insurrecto, a tour de force about about the Philippines’ past and present told through rivaling scripts from an American filmmaker and her Filipino translator. The book was one of the New York Times’ Editor’s Choices for 2018 and won comparisons to Nabokov and Borges for its kaleidoscopic structure. With her trademark wit, uncommon humor, layering of forgotten histories and dueling narratives, Apostol tells the story of the atrocities that faced Filipinos who rose up against their colonizers during the Philippine-American war at the turn of the 20th century. As Laurel Fauntauzzo writes, “It does strike me that the narrative is cackling and weeping at the same time, which would seem to me a particularly Philippine way of existing.” Apostol will be joined by Filipina-Australian writer Sabina Murray, the author of Valiant Gentlemen. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC In Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto (Soho Press, 2018) two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness” of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator—one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher. Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women—artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters—finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, the novel is startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful. Elaine Castillo writes, Insurrecto is “A searing and psychedelic road trip...a murder mystery, a war movie, and a movie exploration of all the ways grief lives on...A masterful puzzle.” Apostol is the PEN Open Book Award–winning author of Gun Dealers’ Daughter, as well as a two-time winner of the National Book Award in the Philippines for her novels Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. Her short stories have appeared in various anthologies and journals including The Gettysburg Review and the Penguin anthology of Asian American fiction, Charlie Chan is Dead, Volume 2. Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Philippines. She is the author of the novels Valiant Gentlemen, Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Slow Burn, and the short story collections Tales of the New World and The Caprices, which was the winner of the 2002 PEN/​Faulkner award. Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead II: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian Fiction. She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, which was an Independent Spirit Award Best First Screenplay nominee. She is a former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and Guggenheim Fellow. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Fred Brown Award from the University of Pittsburgh. Murray has served as the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy Andover and currently is a member of the Creative Writing Faculty at Umass Amherst. Image credit: Strohmeyer & Wyman. Interior Santa Ana Church - our field hospital during the fight, Philippines. Philippines, ca. 1899. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• February 15, 7:00 PM

  Sea of Mirrors

  Join us for an evening of Korean poetry in translation with Kim Hyesoon, a groundbreaking feminist poet and one of the most influential contemporary poets of South Korea. Her latest poetry collection, The Autobiography of Death, is a breathtaking collective elegy inspired by the Sewol Ferry Disaster of April 2014, and a narration performed as a sea of mirrors, summoning Korea's ghosts and roaming spirits. She’ll be in conversation with Korean-American poet Don Mee Choi, her English translator, and Jeffrey Yang, poet and Poetry Editor at New Directions. Together they’ll discuss translation, the "expelled tongues" of Korean women poets who invent new language outside of Korean literary conventions, and the book's relationship to Korean Shamanism. Don’t miss this rare chance to see one of Korea’s most important living poets and imaginative writers in conversation with her translator and editor. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Kim Hyesoon, born in 1955, is one of the most prominent and influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She was the first woman poet to receive the prestigious Kim Su-yong and Midang awards, and has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Swedish. Her powerful new book, Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018) consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” Autobiography of Death at once reenacts trauma and narrates death—how we die and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural “you” speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. Don Mee Choi writes, “I believe Autobiography of Death is one of Kim Hyesoon’s most important and compelling works to date.” Kim’s most recent books include I’m OK, I’m Pig! and Poor Love Machine. Check out two of her poems, translated by Don Mee Choi in The Margins. Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), a chapbook, Petite Manifesto (Vagabond Press, 2014), and a pamphlet of essays, Freely Frayed, ㅋ=q, Race=Nation (Wave Pamphlet #9, 2014). She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, and Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry, including Poor Love Machine (Action Books, 2016). Check out Emily Yoon’s interview with Don Mee Choi about the myth of fluency, hysterical translation, and what draws her to Kim’s poetry in The Margins. Jeffrey Yang is a poet, translator, and editor at New Directions, where he he edited The Autobiography of Death. He is he author of Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He is the translator of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies. Yang lives in Beacon, New York. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..