Events

• November 14, 7:00 PM

  Mouth to Mouth: Open Mic

  Mic Check! Are you a writer? Come share your work at the next edition of our open mic, Mouth to Mouth. Hosted & curated by AAWW fam Kay Ulanday Barrett and Jimena Lucero, this edition of Mouth to Mouth features Trace DePass and more. Mouth to Mouth seeks to provide a safe community space for QTPOC and rising migrant artists. RSVP HERE! $5 Suggested Donation. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. All donations go to AAWW public programs. The Asian American Workshop is a national nonprofit dedicated to the creation, development, publication, & dissemination of Asian diasporic literature & storytelling. KAY ULANDAY BARRETT is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. K. has featured at The Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Princeton University, Tucson Poetry Festival, NY Poetry Festival, The Dodge Poetry Foundation, The Hemispheric Institute, & Brooklyn Museum. They are a 2x Pushcart Prize nominee and received fellowships/residencies from Lambda Literary Review, VONA/Voices, The Home School, and Macondo. They are Guest Editor for Nat.Brut & Guest Faculty for The Poetry Foundation. Their contributions include: Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, Asian American Literary Review, PBS News Hour, F(r)iction, VIDA Review, NYLON, The Huffington Post, Them., Bitch Magazine, Apogee, & more. Their first book, When The Chant Comes was published by Topside Press in 2016. Their second collection More Than Organs, will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press, Spring 2020. See their work at Kaybarrett.net or on social media, @brownroundboi . JIMENA LUCERO is a poet, artist, and actor from Queens. She is a Pink Door fellow and you can find her writing in EOAGH, Colorbloq.org, and more. Jimena has performed her work at the Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, and Flux Factory. She is currently working on her first poetry manuscript. TRACE DEPASS is the author of Self-portrait as the space between us (PANK Books, 2018) and editor of Scholastic’s Best Teen Writing of 2017. He served as the 2016 Teen Poet Laureate for the Borough of Queens. His work has been featured on television and radio—BET Next Level, Billboard, Blavity, and NPR’s The Takeaway—and in print—Anomalous Press, Entropy Magazine, Split This Rock!, The Other Side of Violet, Best Teen Writing of 2015, and the Voices of the East Coast youth poetry anthology. DePass is a 2018 Poets House Fellow.

  NICO AMADOR is the author of Flower Wars (Newfound Press, 2017), selected as the winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize. He lives in rural Vermont.

  This event will be live-streamed 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...
  
• November 21, 6:00 PM

  WORKSHOP: Sketch Jam!

  Thursday, Nov 21 1 Session 3 Hours (6PM-9PM) Sliding Scale $75-$150. REGISTER HERE! Got an itch for sketch comedy writing but don’t know where to start? Join us for the inaugural Overstep Comedy Sketch Jam! Overstep is an all Asian sketch comedy collective dedicated to increasing diversity & kicking ass. Try out sketch comedy writing under Overstep’s guidance! This 3 hour workshop will include a tutorial on how to write sketches, dedicated class time to write an original sketch, & a chance for everyone to perform their newly written sketches! Screenwriting software is highly recommended & a laptop is required. Students will be sent recommendations for free & accessible screenwriting software to download prior to Sketch Jam. Overstep Comedy, NYC's hottest Asian-American sketch phenomenon, is here to increase diversity and kick ass. Come for an hour of scripted comedy skits and shenanigans. Overstep's squad of writer-actor-comedians sees laughter as not merely an escape, but as an entry point into difficult conversations, into something otherwise overlooked or considered unspeakable. They also make a lot of food references because they are hungry--for both food and social change! For more information, visit their website at weareoverstep.com or follow Overstep on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, & Youtube. Jatin Chhugani is a writer, director and video editor who is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. He has written and produced four live sketches for Overstep and edited three Overstep sketch videos. He has also written and directed 3 short films, one of them which won 1st runner up at the 2017 Asian Film Lab 72-Hour Shootout Festival. Jatin is not an actor but when Overstep needs someone to play someone dull, boring or depressing in a sketch, it usually ends up being him. Andy Shartzer is an actor, writer, and rapper from Williamsburg, VA. He has studied improv at UCB and has also studied with Freestyle Love Supreme, North Coast, and ComedySportz. Andy performs regularly with PIT house team Stolen Valor and indie hip-hop improv team Boots N Cats. He has written several sketches with Overstep Comedy, including the parody music video “Small Charcoal Grill.” While never explicitly asked to, Andy always brings Japanese snacks and sweets to Overstep meetings and rehearsals. Because he cares. Helen Shih is a writer who studied screenwriting and fell into sketch comedy. In addition to regularly writing and performing sketches with Overstep Comedy, she’s a 2019 semifinalist of the MACRO Episodic Lab powered by the Black List for an original 30-minute TV comedy pilot. She moonlights in the art department on short films and has written and produced digital shorts for Overstep. Helen hails from metro-Detroit, Michigan and is of Taiwanese/Chinese descent. Otter Lee is a classically trained actor, playwright, comedian and voiceover artist. He studied playwriting, history and acting at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he trained in scene study, rehearsal technique, movement, and musical theatre with Fiasco Theater. Otter has also performed improv, sketch, and stand-up at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Since 2016, he has helped organize the annual Diverse As ****Festival, which aims to give a platform to underrepresented voices. In 2017 and 2018, he acted in Theater2020's productions of Shakespeare plays MacBeth and As You Like It. In addition to booking gigs throughout NYC, Otter performs and writes for Overstep, an Asian-American sketch team he helped found in February 2019. ..
  
• November 22, 6:30 PM

  Channeling Fire, Playing with Magic: A Workshop

  1 Session, 3 Hours (6:30PM-9:30PM) November 22, 2019 REGISTER HERE. Do you find Tarot cards fascinating, but don’t quite understand them? Do you have a creative project and want to feel more momentum and purpose? Do you want to use the archetypes and symbolism of the Tarot in your work? Come to the Autumnal Equinox Tarot and Storytelling and learn (or have a refresher on) how the cards work, learn to do an intuitive reading about your creative process, and come away with some fresh pages of new writing. This hands-on class will cover the basics of the card meanings (from a decolonized, anti-racist, and non-binary perspective) and lead participants through writing exercises that channel their inner High Priestess for the purpose of generating new work. Be prepared to grab your journal and favorite pen, bring your deck or use the ones we provide and dig deep! Learn interpretation and spread designing by doing the real thing. Channel the energy of the workshop into your own creative and spiritual practice. Handouts and Tarot decks will be provided for each student. Swati Khurana started her career as a multidisciplinary visual artist, exhibiting her embroidery, drawing and installation work at the Queens Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and DUMBO Arts Festival before earning her MFA in fiction at Hunter College. She has received writing fellowships and awards from the Center for Fiction, Kundiman, the Jerome Foundation, Vermont Studio Center and New York Foundation for the Arts. Her fiction and essays have been featured in Guernica, The Offing, and The New York Times, and recently as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2019. She is a founding member of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC), a public speaker on feminist art/social media/activism, and her Tarot practice has been featured in Teen Vogue. Chaya Babu is a Brooklyn-based writer, journalist, artist, and educator. Her work focuses on desire, power and oppression, cities, exile, systemic and intergenerational trauma, and more. She completed her MFA in Writing & Activism at Pratt last May, and she has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, BuzzFeed, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Her essays, commentary, and reporting have appeared in The Margins, The Porter Gulch Review, VICE, Open City, BuzzFeed, CNN.com, The Felt, Go Home! (anthology), and others, with her visual art having been shown at Project for Empty Space in Newark. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, about the impossibility of return after diaspora and the epistemic violence of colonialism. Chaya uses tarot to inform her craft, her healing practice, and guidance for others seeking to connect to their intuition. Check out this interview with the instructors!: https://bloom-site.com/2019/01/16/tarot-astrology-storytelling-a-conversation-with-chaya-babu-swati-khurana/..