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 ..
  
• December 13, 7:00 PM

  The Caregiver: Remembering Sam Park

  Join us for an event to honor the work and legacy of the queer Korean American novelist Samuel Park, whose novel The Caregiver was released posthumously this past fall. A panel of queer and Asian American writers featuring by Alexander Chee, T. Kira Madden, Mitchell Kuga, Eugene Lim and Daniel K. Isaac, will read from The Caregiver, and celebrate and discuss Sam’s final novel. RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Samuel Park was an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He graduated from Stanford University and the University of Southern California, where he earned his doctorate. He is the author of the novella Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the writer-director of a short film of the same name, which was an official selection of numerous domestic and international film festivals. He is also the author of the novels This Burns My Heart and The Caregiver. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times. Born in Brazil and raised in Los Angeles, he split his time between Chicago and Los Angeles. In April 2017, Samuel Park died of stomach cancer at the age of 41 shortly after finishing The Caregiver. Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, T Magazine, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, and Out, among others. He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Daniel K. Isaac is currently in production on Season 4 of Showtime’s hit series “Billions”, reprising his fan favorite role as trader “Ben Kim”. He can also be seen in the Off-Broadway transfer of the critically acclaimed Barrington production of The Chinese Lady. He recently completed production on the feature film The Drummer opposite Danny Glover. Mitchell Kuga is a Brooklyn-based writer from Hawaii. His work has appeared in Village Voice, GQ, and Hyperallergic. He's gay. T Kira Madden is an APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician. She is the founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, and facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature, she is the author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (Bloomsbury, 2019). She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Eugene Lim is the author of the novels Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press, 2008), The Strangers (Black Square Editions, 2013) and Dear Cyborgs (FSG, 2017). He works as a high school librarian, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, NY. 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. /\ /\ \/\/ \/\/..