Aaww Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

AAWW, Kundiman, & Kaya Press combine to bring acclaimed novelist Ed Lin together with pioneering YA author of FINDING MY VOICE and co-founder of AAWW Marie Myung-Ok Lee, in conversation to celebrate the release of Ed Lin’s YA debut, DAVID TUNG CAN’T HAVE A GIRLFRIEND UNTIL HE GETS INTO AN IVY LEAGUE COLLEGE (Kaya Press, October 2020). Moderated by Ruth Minah Buchwald, Ed Lin and Marie Lee’s dialogue will orbit themes, such as: Asian American study culture; the pitfalls of the “model minority” myth and how to challenge it; multiple standards and (mis)representations of Asian Americans in literature and the media; and coming-of-age in the Asian American diaspora while navigating relationships through race, class, young love, not to mention the confusing expectations of immigrant parental pressure.   https://sohopress.com/books/finding-my-voice/ Live Transcript: Neela Banerjee: Hi everyone! My name is Neelanjana Banerjee. I'm so excited to invite you all to our event tonight! This is also the launch event f

We're celebrating the launch of Kazim Ali’s newest poetry collection, The Voice of Sheila Chandra. Following a reading from Ali’s innovative and musical new collection, he will be joined in conversation by Sheila Chandra and Rajiv Mohabir to discuss sound, silence, and embodied art-making practice, as they reflect on Ali’s poetry, Chandra’s music, and Mohabir’s poetry and translation.  Support the writers!

We’re very excited to bring you an audio long read of “Shithole Country Clubs” an essay by Nina Sharma, recently published in The Margins. Named an Editor’s Pick at Longreads, “Shithole Country Clubs” is a hilarious and critical essay about Trump's New Jersey country club — the very golf club where he recently infected everyone with Covid-19 — and Indian weddings.  READ the original essay here in The Margins:  https://aaww.org/shithole-country-clubs/

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is thrilled to celebrate the launch of Akwaeke Emezi’s new book THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI and the recent release of Elizabeth Acevedo’s CLAP WHEN YOU LAND and WRITE YOURSELF A LANTERN: A JOURNAL INSPIRED BY THE POET X. The two authors read from their new works and have a moderated conversation with writer and Berkeley Center for New Media Events Coordinator Sophia Hussain.

Tina Chang and Mira Jacob join the Asian American Writers’ Workshop to celebrate the paperback releases of their books Hybrida and Good Talk. Following a reading from their work, they will speak to the intersections of their experiences and creative practices, discussing race, motherhood, and hybrid storytelling structures.

On this episode we are excited to repost a recent episode of Asian Americana, a podcast about Asian American culture and history hosted and produced by Quincy Surasmith.  Letters for Black Lives is an ongoing crowdsourced effort to create and translate multilingual and culturally-aware resources that open a space for families and communities to have honest discussion about racial justice, police violence, and anti-Blackness. Quincy took part in a series for publication on AAWW's online magazine The Margins that collected process notes from several translator-contributors to the Letters for Black Lives to make visible some of the complexity of this project. You can check out these translator notes now at aaww.org. In this episode of Asian Americana, Quincy follows a similar drive to explore the layers of linguistic and cultural nuance involved in this effort. Through interviews with some of the initial Letters for Black Lives organizers and translators, his conversations bring out the collective process and qu

AAWW hosted the launch for K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, Bestiary, with a reading and conversation with K-Ming and Franny Choi. Exploring the ways writing about girlhood can reinvent our definitions of community and lineage, and the ways we can grapple with and imagine beyond threats of violence that often shape daughterhood, this conversation delves into family and queer girlhood as a generative space of resistance and reinvention, monstrousness and memory.

Welcome to our Love Letter to Chinatown Episode! We’re happy to feature Mei Lum, Diane Wong, and Huiying B. Chan, the curators of Homeward Bound: Global Intimacies in Converging Chinatowns, hosted at the Pao Arts Center in Boston. The exhibit tells the stories of displacement, migration, resilience and grassroots organizing in Chinatowns around the world through photography, found objects, oral histories, and poetry.  Writer and organizer Huiying B. Chan travelled to Chinatowns in eight different countries, as well as their ancestors’ village, documenting global stories of migration and resilience across the diaspora. That same year, artist and scholar Diane Wong and Mei Lum, the fifth generation owner of Wing on Wo and the director of the Chinatown community arts org the WOW Project, went on a West Coast Solidarity tour to connect with tenants, organizers, workers, and artists in Chinatowns in San Francisco, LA, Vancouver, and Seattle.  We talk about how the formation of Chinatowns across the world, how the

Today is the legendary activist Yuri Kochiyama’s birthday! We’re celebrating by revisiting one of our favorite episodes of AAWW Radio, You Don’t Say No to Yuri Kochiyama.    In 2005, scholar and activist Diane C. Fujino released the biography Heartbeat of Struggle: the Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama. An in-depth examination of Kochiyama's life, the book follows her early years in a concentration camp in Arkansas during World War II, to her friendship with Malcolm X in New York City, and her years of radical political activism.    We hosted an event celebrating the release of this text in November 2005. Co-sponsored by the NYU A/P/A Institute, the event was curated by activist and musician Fred Ho. Fred Ho invited activists and political organizers Baba Herman Ferguson, Esperanza Martell, and Laura Whitehorn, all of whom had known and worked with Yuri over the years years, to discuss and celebrate her legacy. You’ll hear about how Yuri’s Harlem apartment was a social hub for activists in the 60s, the tir

One of our favorite episodes of AAWW Radio was from 2018 featuring Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in conversation with poet Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, author of SLINGSHOT. Leah reads from her work and together they discuss meaningful inclusion of disability justice, Intersectional disability, and the nuances and multitudes of the disability experiences. Watch the full event on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UpQVlT2wCQ

We’re bringing back one of our favorite events from 2018 called Breaking Caste, featuring Sujatha Gidla, Neel Mukherjee, and Gaiutra Bahadur. The episode features a wonderful conversation at the end about Dalit exclusion in the publishing industry, the connection between caste and women’s oppression, Dalit solidarity with Black Americans, and much more. Neel Mukherjee's novel A State of Freedom follows the lives of five characters born to different circumstances in India navigating deeply entrenched class and caste divisions. Dalit-author Sujatha Gidla wrote the debut memoir Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. Link to the video of this event on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIgKFl8Dpf8 This event was cosponsored by Equality Labs.

One of our favorite episodes is this reading and conversation from 2018 with brilliant experimental Asian American writers Anelise Chen, Patty Yumi Cottrell, and Eugene Lim. They read passages from their novels So Many Olympic Exertions, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, and Dear Cyborgs, all of which have unique perceptions on living and surviving in this difficult world. Following their readings they have an insightful and honest conversation with poet Lisa Chen about protest, immigrant narratives, and writing voice in fiction. Watch the reading on our YouTube channel

Now that we’ve published over 50 episodes of AAWW Radio, we’re selecting a few of our favorites to republish for our new listeners. One of our earliest episodes is Migrant Father Fragment from 2017 featuring authors lê thị diễm thúy, Q.M. Zhang, and moderated by Hua Hsu. It features wonderful readings of their books The Gangster We Are All Looking For and Accomplice to Memory and an incisive conversation about their writing process and putting memories to paper. Q.M. Zhang and lê thị diễm thúy, writers of fragmented, hybridic, family narratives explore themes of immigration, grief, and the father with The New Yorker’s Hua Hsu. A hybrid memoir/novel that’s part espionage, part historical documentary, Q.M. Zhang’s Accomplice to Memory tells the story of her father’s mysterious exodus from China during the country’s Civil War and WWII: all the silence and love that you’ve come to know from your Asian immigrant family, but with added subterfuge and geopolitics. Guggenheim Fellow lê thị diễm thúy, whose recent Asi

This episode is the second episode of our podcast series diving back into our 2016 Publishing Conference, which we held at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. The panel we’re sharing this week is titled “Breaking into Speculative Fiction”, featuring Jennifer Marie Brissett, author of the novel Elysium, and the upcoming 2020 novel Destroyer of Light, and Malka Older, author of the Centenal Cycle trilogy, which includes the novels Infomacracy, Null States, and State Tectonics. And last year Malka Older published the serial story Ninth Step Station. Their conversation on speculative fiction will be moderated by speculative fiction editor Tim O'Connell.  Remember this audio is from 2016, so some parts of the conversation are interesting to hear in retrospect, like when they talk about the “upcoming 2016 election” !  

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we’re time traveling through our archive, bringing you panel discussions from our 2016 Publishing Conference, which we held at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. The first panel we’re sharing this week is titled “What I Wish I Knew Before I Got My MFA”, featuring Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill and who received her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop-- Karim Dimechkie, author of Lifted by the Great Nothing and who received his MFA at the Michener Center, and Kaitlyn Greenidge, who received her MFA from Hunter College and is the author of the novel We Love You Charlie Freeman. Together they speak on their MFA experiences in a conversation moderated by Brooklyn Rail Editor Joseph Salvatore, who is the author of the short story collection To Assume a Pleasing Shape. Keep in mind this audio is from 2016, but we find the conversation is still very relevant, and hopefully people on their MFA journey can find this helpful!

Since our last episode from October on poetry and disappearance in occupied Kashmir, a lot has happened. We've gotten through a long leadership transition and turned our focus inward, to care for AAWW. And earlier this year, we joyfully welcomed our new executive director, Jafreen Uddin. Our staff is currently working from home. We know that it is the strength of our communities that keeps us resilient to help weather the COVID-19 pandemic and confront this difficult time. We also understand that the backbone of AAWW’s work is creating community through our in-person events. And so we're back on AAWW Radio, ready to beam you our audio events at this surreal moment. We know it’s not the same, but we’re hoping it’ll help you through this time of isolation. Starting next week, we'll kick things off by reaching back into our archive, bringing you panel discussions from our 2016 Publishing Conference. We’ll hear from Kaitlin Greenidge, Jenny Zhang, Alice Sola Kim and a bunch of other established writers as they di

How do you simultaneously disappear people and their hope? Can you keep that hope alive through writing? On this episode of AAWW Radio, we dive into the current blackout of Indian-occupied Kashmir, the history of enforced disappearances that haunts Kashmiris, and how political writing and poetry, like the work of poet Agha Shahid Ali, connects the Kashmiri diaspora to their home. We hear from several people at the forefront of Kashmiri diasporic literature and activism: Ather Zia, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at University of Northern Colorado Greeley and author of Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women's Activism in Kashmir, as well as Hafsa Kanjwal, Professor of South Asian History at Lafayette College and an organizer with Stand With Kashmir. We also hear beautiful readings of Agha Shahid Ali's poetry by his sister Sameetah Agha, Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute.   Learn more about Kashmir's history and why the ongoing struggle for self-det

Today marks the 18th anniversary of 9/11. We're bringing back our episode from April 9th, 2018 called Remixing Guantanamo Bay where former AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen interviews experimental poet Philip Metres. Philip Metres is the author of Sand Opera, the poetry collection that uses redacted texts from Department of Defense manuals for torture sites like Guantanamo Bay to create an aria for the victims of the War on Terror. Solmaz Sharif writes, “Philip Metres’s poetry collection Sand Opera is complex, an untamable polyvocal array of clipped narratives in post-9/11 (if we are to believe such historical markers) America.”  It’s a great conversation diving deep into Metres’ research of the confined and tortured people at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and the influence of these documents in response to violence as a poet.   Also: Sorry for the delay on regular episodes, we're working on a couple of other things at the moment (including an original podcast episode!) Hope you are all well and thank you for

Listen to writers Sahar Muradi, T Kira Madden, and Tina Chang  read works about mothers and motherhood. Sahar Muradi shares poems about mental health during pregnancy, T Kira Madden reads a scene from her memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, in which her mother tends to her daughter’s lice-infested head, and Tina Chang read from her latest collection Hybrida. AAWW Margins Fellows Pik-Shuen Fung and Jen Lue moderate a Q&A with the writers, who speak about their literary mothers, motherhood and multiplicity, and intergenerational healing. This reading is in collaboration with the W.O.W. Project at Wing on Wo, where Pik-Shuen and Jen curate and host their Womxn Writers Series. Learn more about Wing on Wo's W.O.W. Project here.

AAWW’s online magazine Open City documents metropolitan Asian America on the streets of New York City. Every year we grant two fellowships, the Neighborhoods fellowship and the Muslim Communities fellowship, to six writers to cover Asian American & Muslim American communities in New York City. We celebrated the end of our last cohort of Open City Fellows last month with a reading.  Writers Mohamad Saleh, Maryam Mir, Syma Mohammed, Hannah Bae, Astha Rajvanshi, and Nora Salem read from pieces that you can find on Open City: on racial tensions in Bay Ridge, a Syrian baker in Brooklyn passionate for baking Baklava; a personal essay on childhood trauma and foster care as an Asian American, and much more. Afterwards, former Open City fellow Humera Afridi held a Q&A with the fellows on translation in reporting, how writing about immigrant communities has shaped their ideas of home, and how sharing your work in community with others improves your writing craft. Sweet Refuge Video: https://youtu.be/6YKiwx6U2HU