Events

• November 12, 6:30 PM

  Slow Magic: Writing the Lyric Sentence

  Six Sessions, 2.5 hours (6:30PM-9PM) Mondays, November 12 - December 17 Fees & Payment Options: $325 General/$295 Member (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!) *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. Registration Deadline: November 5. Why you should take this class: It’s easy to believe that there’s a kind of magic to writing—an inexplicable something that makes a word, a sentence, or an essay beautiful. Where does that magic come from, and how can it be replicated? In Slow Magic, we’ll slow down and listen to the meter. We’ll break down sentences and poems and strip them down, word by word, to see how they are formed, then use the tools we’ve learned to write new ones. This course will use poetry and poetic form as an entry point to writing more deliberate, beautiful, and effective prose. If you’ve ever wanted to write poems but never thought of yourself as a poet, or if you’ve ever wanted to have the opportunity to deeply engage with your writing on a sentence level, this is the course for you. Course description: Starting with the very basics, we’ll read some of our favorite poems, sentences, and song lyrics for scansion and meter. From there, the course will turn to different poetic forms—sonnet, sestina, ghazal, and more—to explore how form can affect content, and to nurture writing with an ear toward lyricality and rhythm. Drawing from contemporary poets such as Kaveh Akbar, Max Ritvo, Ada Limon, Jos Charles, and Anne Carson, and historical poets ranging from Shakespeare to Sappho, we will examine lyricism, maximalism, concision and revision with an eye toward learning how to convey exactly what we mean. The course will culminate in a polished prose piece (or long poem!) demonstrating the principles covered. Participants will be expected to work on one long piece throughout the duration of the class, as well as to write new work each week and participate in workshop discussion each week. 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 ..
  
• November 27, 6:30 PM

  AAWW FAM: "Call Her Ganda" Film Screening and Talk

  Call Her Ganda follows the tragic murder of Jennifer Laude, a Filipina transgender woman by a U.S. marine, the community organizing and effort that brought her murderer to justice - and the role that the long US-Philippine relationship played in this. Amidst a media storm and police inquiry, as Jennifer’s family copes with their loss, three women intimately invested in the case, pursue justice—taking on hardened histories of U.S. imperial rule that have allowed previous American perpetrators to evade consequence: An activist attorney, Virgie Suarez, who labors to reveal the truth of Jennifer’s death from inside the courtroom—in the face of strategic silences and sly legal maneuvers from Pemberton’s defense team. A transgender investigative journalist, Meredith Talusan, who determines to bring international attention to the case, writing sharp, in-the-fray essays for VICE, The Guardian and Buzzfeed. And Jennifer’s normally reserved mother, Julita, who finds herself at the affective center of a political uprising, inciting fellow protesters with a tenacious voice she never knew existed. While seeking justice for Jennifer's tragic murder, the film looks at a tortuous US-Philippines relationship, which has much in common with other countries that have been forced to host US bases and military personnel - South Korea and Okinawa among them - where the rules allow the US military to commit crimes and injure communities - without any recourse for the communities they impact. RSVP HERE Join Nodutdol, Bayan USA, Gabriela-USA, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Third World Newsreel, the Asian American Arts Alliance and the Documentary Forum at CCNY to watch this film and hear about the US military's role in Asia and what the peoples of those countries are doing about it - and hear from the film's director, PJ Raval, along with other speakers. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• November 29, 7:00 PM

  A Reading

  Ever wondered about the relationship between expeditions to scale Mount Everest and the waning of the British Raj? Join us for an event with Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker as she reads from her latest work of non-fiction, The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire, a saga tracing of the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order, with The Beautiful and the Damned author Siddhartha Deb. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen (Graywolf, 2018) presents an exhilarating drama of Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Deborah Baker attended the University of Virginia and Cambridge University, where she wrote her first biography Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly. She is author of In Extremis; The Life of Laura Riding, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994, and A Blue Hand: The Beats in India. In 2008–2009 she was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library, where she researched and wrote The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Non-Fiction. She currently divides her time between Brooklyn and Goa. Siddhartha Deb is the author of The Beautiful and the Damned, winner of the PEN Open award and a finalist for the Orwell Prize. A columnist for The Baffler and The New York Times Book Review and contributing editor to The New Republic, his writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, and n+1. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..