Events

• August 13, 6:00 PM

  Literary Adaptations: A Screenwriting Workshop

  Four Sessions, 3 hours each (6-9pm) Mondays, August 13th, 20th, 27th and Tuesday, September 4th Fees & Payment Options: $250 General / $225 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!) Full payment due before first class. Maximum of ten students. **note: this workshop skips Labor Day Monday, September 3rd. The last session will take place on Tuesday, September 4th. Why You Should Take This Class: Writer & Director Darine Hotait bridges the gap between literature and cinema with her genuine fascination and devotion to both. This is an intensive 4 session workshop. Sessions are 3 hours long and are designed with an interactive collective approach that engages in group discussions. Class Description: Writers will be guided through the process of adapting a short story into a short film screenplay by using various hands-on exercises that focus on character development, sequencing of events, plot points, creating conflict and establishing the cinematic language of the story. Participants can either bring the short story that they prefer to adapt or can choose from the stories that we provide. Stories should be maximum 10 pages long and can be written by the writers or other well-known authors. REGISTER HERE Darine Hotait is an American Lebanese fiction writer and film director. She has written & directed a number of narrative short films that screened at numerous international film festivals, received multiple Best Fiction Film awards and were acquired and broadcasted on Sundance TV, AMC Networks, BBC & Shorts International. She is the recipient of the Literary Fellowship at New York Foundation for the Arts and the Arab Fund for Arts & Culture Cinema Grant. She was selected at Maison Des Scenaristes (pitching platform at the Cannes Film Festival), was among the top 5 finalists for the Hearst Screenwriting Competition, and was an EMMY Awards Blue Ribbon Finalist. In 2016, she was nominated for the prestigious Goethe Award. Her science fiction prose and stage plays have appeared in various publications as well as curated art exhibitions in Berlin, New York, Beirut and London. Darine has mentored workshops in screenwriting and film directing internationally at prestigious film festivals and organizations such as Asian American Writers' Workshop in New York, Arab World Institute in Paris, Arab American National Museum in Detroit, Med Film Festival in Rome, Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam, Mizna Literary Gathering in Minneapolis, Dubai international Writers’ Center in UAE and more. She served as a jury on several short film competitions at festivals like Cinewest in Sydney, Socially Relevant Film Festival in New York, Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam and Lebanese Film Festival. Darine holds a Master’s degree in screenwriting and film directing from the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She is the founder of Cinephilia Productions in New York - an incubator for the development of filmmakers from the MENA region.Darine is currently developing her debut feature film Like Salt that has recently been selected to participate in the Sundance Rawi Screenwriter’s Lab. She resides in New York City. ..
  
• August 22, 7:00 PM

  Lola: A Reading About Asian Grandmas

  Has your superstitious grandma ever told you myths that you haven’t been able to forget? Join us for this event about Asian grandmas with critically acclaimed cartoonist and Last Night’s Reading creator Kate Gavino, whose new graphic novel Sanpaku explores the Japanese myth through the eyes of Marcine, an impressionable Filipina preteen who lives for her grandmother’s eccentric stories. Kate will be joined by The Verge's Angela Chen, Little A editor Vivian Lee, GQ Senior Editor Kevin Nguyen, and Catapult's Matt Ortile, who will share pieces about their grandmothers. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC In Kate Gavino’s new graphic novel, an ominous condition known as sanpaku plagues the waking life of young Marcine. When Marcine learns about the theory, which says that seeing the white around the iris of your eyes is a bad omen, she begins to see it everywhere: in her ailing lola, her classmates, and even JFK. Sanpaku (BOOM! Studios, 2018) is a stark and explorative debut that examines what it means to challenge and cling to old beliefs in the process of forging one’s values and identity. Sierra Hahn writes, “Cartoonist Kate Gavino is primed to be one of her generation’s most refreshing and honest voices in comics.” Kate is a writer and illustrator and the creator of the website, Last Night's Reading, which was compiled into a published collection by Penguin Books in 2015. Her work has been featured in Buzzfeed, Lenny Letter, and Oprah.com. Angela Chen is a science journalist at The Verge, previously a reporter with The Wall Street Journal. Her reporting and essays have also been published in The Guardian, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Aeon Magazine, Pacific Standard, Hazlitt and more, and she writes a monthly narrative column for Catapult. Her first book, ACE, is forthcoming from Beacon Press. She is on Twitter: @chengela Vivian Lee is an editor at Little A, Amazon Publishing’s literary fiction and narrative nonfiction imprint, and is a 2018 PW Rising Star Honoree. Her writing can be found at The Los Angeles Times, Eater, The Rumpus, World Policy Journal, Epicurious, Entropy, TASTE, shondaland, and more. Kevin Nguyen is currently senior editor of GQ, where he writes about books, music, and popular media, and was editorial director at Oyster and Google Play Books. Matt Ortile is the managing editor of Catapult magazine. Previously, he was the founding editor of BuzzFeed Philippines. He's written for BuzzFeed, Into, Out, Details, Town & Country, and Side B Magazine. He graduated from Vassar College, which means he now lives in Brooklyn. He's also working on a book of nonfiction. He's been describing it as, “If Roland Barthes and Carrie Bradshaw had a baby, and the baby was Filipino and on Grindr.” 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..
  
• August 28, 7:00 PM

  A Reading

  Join us for a reading with Brown Girls web series co-creator Fatimah Asghar, who will read from her debut collection of poetry, If They Come For Us and the artist Vivek Shraya, whose forthcoming book I’m Afraid of Men explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl—and how we might reimagine gender for the twenty-first century. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, screenwriter, educator and performer. Her work has appeared in many journals, including POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets and many others. Her work has been featured on new outlets like PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011 she created a spoken word poetry group in Bosnia and Herzegovina called REFLEKS while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective, a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship recipient and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After came out on Yes Yes Books fall 2015. She is the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, poetry, fiction, visual art, and film. A Publishing Triangle Award winner, her books include even this page is white, The Boy & the Bindi, and She of the Mountains. Shraya is one half of the music duo Too Attached and founder of the publishing imprint VS. Books. She teaches creative writing at the University of Calgary. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..