By throwing myself headlong into the awkward and frustrating experience of writing sex, I am ceding control of my narrative.

When the dead depart, it’s the living who are left behind, fractured beyond recognition

Today we are celebrating the nine emerging writers who will receive fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in 2021.

These four writers will spend the year crafting reversible poems of migration; bridging immigration, love and violence in fiction; chronicling a survivor’s journey through fragmentation; and telling a family history of sovereignty and colonialism.

These four writers will spend the next year queering nature writing, reflecting on the struggle between intellectual- and animal-self, experimenting with the boundaries of lyric to find a home in the body, and telling a family’s story of a century of urban upheaval in Brooklyn

These four writers will spend the next year writing fiction about Iraq beyond war, creative nonfiction on diasporic women’s silences around trauma, memoir about legacies of abuse and the Cultural Revolution, and poetry of displacement and loss.