Texts and Authors for Teaching Asian American Literature

Essays Reportage Marginalia Interviews Poetry Fiction Videos Everything

Recommendations from five NYC educators

By Kyung Cho, Victoria Meng, Sophie Oberfield, Annie Thoms, Shreya Vora

Marginalia, books | Asian American literature, Books, Living in Echo, New York City, Teaching, education
October 25, 2021

Editor’s Note: To mark the 20th anniversary of September 11, we invited five NYC educators to discuss teaching Asian American literature and using it to help students understand 9/11 and its ripple effects. During and after the conversation, “Teaching Asian American Literature After 9/11,” they each recommended several Asian American texts and authors. Some of these texts help them and students connect to conversations about a post-9/11 world, some encourage students to critically engage with how Asian Americans write and are written. Others are texts that educators use to shape their own approach to teaching and reading Asian American literature in the classroom. As teacher Shreya Vora says, each text “gives us imaginative space to talk, gives us this bounded common ground.”

Novels and Story Collections

Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies
Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, The Resisters
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth
Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker
Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs
Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie
Fatima Farheen Mirza, A Place for Us
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer, The Committed, The Refugees
Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine
Patricia Park, Re Jane
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

Plays

Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
Jiehae Park, Peerless
Stuyvesant students, edited by Annie Thoms, with their eyes

Essay Collections and Memoirs

Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Mira Jacob, Good Talk
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World
Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

Scholarly Works

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings
Edward Said, Orientalism
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?

Poetry Collections

Kimiko Hahn, Mosquito & Ant (and many other books)
Jason Koo, More Than Mere Light (and other books)
Ishle Yi Park, The Temperature of This Water
Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Individual Poems, Stories, and Essays

Hayan Charara, “Terrorism” (Poetry magazine)
Jason Koo “No Rest” (Yes Poetry)
Eugene Lim, “The Nameable”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, pieces in Time and the New York Times
Nina Sharma, “Shithole Country Clubs” (The Margins)

Anthologies and Journals

Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction. Edited by Jessica Hagedorn.
Go Home! an anthology of Asian diasporic writers edited by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. (Especially the pieces “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying” by Alice Sola Kim, “The Stained Veil” by Gaiutra Bahadur, “Meet a Muslim” by Fariha Róisín, and “Esmeralda” by Mia Alvar.)
Poetry magazine (July/August 2017), “The Asian American Poets Issue.” Edited by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, Tarfia Faizullah, and Timothy Yu.
Poetry magazine (July/August 2019), featuring global Anglophone Indian Poems. Edited by Kazim Ali and Rajiv Mohabir.

Kyung Cho teaches at Bard High School Early College. He received his BA from Vassar College and his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Victoria Meng has taught English at Hunter College High School since 2013; her courses have included seventh-grade seminar, eighth-grade English, tenth-grade English, Asian American Literature, Introduction to Film and Media Studies, and Advanced Essay Writing. She also advises Tapestry, a student-run speculative fiction magazine, and Feminist Future, an activist club, and currently co-chairs the HCHS Staff and Faculty Diversity Committee. Before entering secondary education, Meng was a teaching fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a lecturer at Arizona State University, Tempe.

Sophie Oberfield has been teaching at Stuyvesant High School since 2008, working with all grades. Currently, she teaches ninth-grade English and a one-semester Asian American Literature selective for juniors and seniors. Previously, she taught at the High School for Environmental Studies (Manhattan) and the Solomon Schechter Middle School (Long Island). She has an MA in Theater History in Criticism from Hunter College-CUNY. She is also a graduate of the BMI Musical Theater Writing Workshop and a student at the Center for Group Studies, training in psychodynamic group therapy leading, the same skills that are relevant to classroom teaching.

Annie Thoms has been an English teacher at Stuyvesant High School since 2000, with a few breaks to care for her three children and to work as a teacher consultant with the NYC Writing Project. At Stuyvesant, her courses have included ninth-grade composition, American Short Stories, Writers’ Workshop, Women’s Voices, Writing in the World, and her current selective, Writing to Make Change. She is the editor of the play with their eyes: September 11th—the view from a high school at ground zero.

Shreya Vora is entering her tenth year teaching middle and high school English. Since September 2020, she has been teaching at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City; prior to that, she taught at Hunter College High School (New York, NY), Bayonne High School (Bayonne, NJ), and North Star Academy (Newark, NJ). Before becoming a teacher, Shreya worked in management consulting and nonprofit strategy.