Events

• March 21, 7:00 PM

  Visual Breaks

  How can poets of color use visual art, photos, and sound to explore absences in language? Come through for a reading featuring three multidisciplinary poets whose work embodies multiple genres of art, translation, and sound. Come see award-winning poet Diana Khoi Nguyen, whose debut collection Ghost Of was a finalist for the National Book Award. She’ll be joined by painter-poet Aldrin Valdez, author of the newly released ESL or You Weren’t Here, a collection about a queer Pinoy who immigrates to New York in the 1990s in order to be reunited with their parents. Apogee Editor and poet Joey de Jesus will share poems of spell-casting against imperialism that can be heard through feedback, loop pedals, and visual projection. Don’t miss this incredible night visually and sonically challenging poetry! RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018), was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest. Terrance Hayes writes, “There is nothing that is not music” for this poet. Poetry is found in the gaps, silences and ruptures of history. Sometimes it is as if these poems address the reflection of a ghost in a mirror.” In addition to winning the 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Contest and being a finalist for both the National Book Award and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver. Check out two poems from Ghost Of in The Margins. Aldrin Valdez is a Pinoy writer and visual artist. They grew up in Manila and Long Island and currently live in Brooklyn. Aldrin has been awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/Mentorship and Poets House. Their poetry & visual art appear in The Felt, Femmescapes, Nat Brut, Poor Claudia, and The Recluse. Aldrin has also presented work at Dixon Place, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Poetry Project. Collaborating with writer & organizer Ted Kerr, Aldrin co-organized Foundational Sharing (2011-2015), a salon series of readings, performances, & visual art. Most recently, they've co-curated two seasons of the Segue Reading Series with fellow poet Joël Díaz. Check out their poems and paintings inspired by family photos in The Margins. Joey De Jesus is a poet and perennial adjunct. Joey edits poetry for Apogee Journal, received the 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry and lives in Queens, New York. Poems have appeared in several venues in print and online and have been performed and/or installed in Artists Space, The New Museum, and elsewhere. Joey teaches at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Image credit: Detail of Aldrin Valdez's "Inside Space (Nanay)" 2012 mixed-media on paper 11 x 15 in. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• March 23, 5:30 PM

  Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network: A Discussion Among Writers

  Co-presented by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. In the Summer of 2018, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network invited writers from the US, Canada, Australia, France, and Indonesia to California to participate in a writing residency, foster the Vietnamese literary community, and stage a series of conversations. This spring, in New York, those conversations continue in front of a live audience. Featuring Amy Quan Barry, Matty Huynh, Violet Kupersmith, Thanhha Lai, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Vu Tran, Monique Truong, and Abbigail N. Rosewood. Moderated by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, Mimi Khúc, and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud. RESERVE A SEAT $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Viet Thanh Nguyen is University Professor, Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. His novel The Sympathizer (2015) is a New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (along with many others awards). His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002). His current book is the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees (2017). He is also the editor of the collection The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. He is also the co-director of DVAN and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. Monique Truong lives in New York. Her first novel, The Book of Salt (2003), was a national bestseller and the recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, Bard Fiction Prize, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award, Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award, and an Asian American Literary Award. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (2010), received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and was named in 2010 as a 25 Best Fiction Books by Barnes & Noble, a 10 Best Fiction Books by Hudson Booksellers, and the adult fiction Honor Book by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association. Matt Huynh is a visual artist and storyteller based in New York City. His bold brush and ink paintings are informed by Eastern sumi-e ink traditions and Western comic books. His animation, paintings and comics interrogate war, diaspora, refugees, asylum seekers and migrant communities. Huynh's work has been exhibited by the MoMA, The Smithsonian, The Sydney Opera House and New York Historical Society. Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Press, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018). His first collection of poetry was a finalist for both a Minnesota Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. In 2018, Hieu was awarded the Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. His work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis and attends the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Vu Tran was born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma. His first novel, Dragonfish, was a NY Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and an NEA Fellowship, and his short fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, and other publications. He is currently a criticism columnist for the Virginia Quarterly Review and an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago. Abbigail N. Rosewood was born in Vietnam, where she lived until the age of twelve. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. An excerpt from her first novel won first place in the Writers Workshop of Asheville Literary Fiction Contest. She lives in New York. If I Had Two Lives is her first novel. Amy Quan Barry was born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore. Quan Barry directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born as well as four poetry books. Barry received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in such journals as Ms. and The New Yorker. Barry received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry; in 2016, she served on the final jury in selecting the winners of the NEA in Literature. Isabelle Thuy Pelaud teaches in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (2011) and co-editor of award winning Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders (2014). She is the co-director of DVAN. Violet Kupersmith is the author of The Frangipani Hotel (Spiegel & Grau 2014), a collection of supernatural short stories about the legacy of the Vietnam War, and a forthcoming novel about ghosts and American expats in modern-day Saigon. She was the 2015-2016 David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, and her writing has appeared in No Tokens Journal, The Massachusetts Review, Word Vietnam, and The New York Times Book Review Thanhhà Lại was born in Vietnam and lives in New York.  She is the author of Inside Out & Back Again  and Listen, Slowly.  Her third novel, Butterfly Yellow, will be published this fall. Lawrence-minh Búi Davis, PhD is Curator of Asian Pacific American Studies at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. He is also founding Director of the Washington, DC-based arts nonprofit The Asian American Literary Review. Mimi Khùc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is also the Managing Editor of The Asian American Literary Review (AALR) and guest editor of Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• 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..