Aaww Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

On this episode of AAWW Radio we hear from New York Times Hungry City columnist Ligaya Mishan, Number One Chinese Restaurant author Lilian Li, and Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race author Naben Ruthnum. They read from their work and have a conversation with writer and chef Rohan Kamicheril about "authentic" food, the power dynamics of cultural appropriation, and the role of food as a cultural gateway. Shout out to MSG.

In this episode of AAWW Radio, authors Yiyun Li and Porochista Khakpour discuss how depression and chronic illness have transformed their existence not only as writers, but as people. Author Elif Batuman guides us in a conversation exploring the relationship between trauma and physical illness, the authors’ influences, and for who they tell their stories.   Link to the video of this event on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/Epj7kP7gWKA 

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we host a reading on India and caste with writers Neel Mukherjee and Sujatha Gidla. Neel Mukherjee's latest novel, A State of Freedom, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2014, 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 critically-acclaimed debut memoir Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. The two authors read from their work, and afterwards have a conversation with Gaiutra Bahadur, the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. Together they discuss Dalit exclusion in the publishing industry, the connection between caste and women’s oppression, Dalit solidarity with Black Americans, their love of Samuel Beckett, and much more. 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.

AAWW’s online magazine Open City documents the pulse of metropolitan Asian America as it's being lived on the streets of New York City right now. For this episode of AAWW Radio, we listen to AAWW Muslim Community Fellows Roja Heydarpour, Raad Rahman, Sumaya Awad and Humera Afridi read their stories published in Open City about their own experiences as Muslim American women, and the unique experiences Muslim Americans face in the current xenophobic political climate. Sarah Khan's documentary: http://opencitymag.aaww.org/collateral-damage/ Apply for Open City Fellowships: https://aaww.submittable.com/submit

On this episode of AAWW Radio, we’re featuring three Arab American writers exploring the boundaries between personal and political: novelist/poet Hala Alyan and poets Hayan Charara and Marwa Helal. From the Six-Day War and the invasion of Iraq to explosive poetic experimentations, these writers explore what it means to have a private self, a family space, and a home in the conditions of war, displacement, and migration. They read from their work and have a conversation with with novelist and former AAWW Open City Fellow Tanaïs. This event was co-sponsored with Radius of Arab American Writers, Turning Point for Women and Families, and Alwan for the Arts.

Elaine Castillo's debut novel America is Not the Heart is a vibrant and starkly hilarious novel about the De Vera family who flees Marcos-era Philippines in stages for the immigrant suburbs of the Bay Area. Elaine Castillo joins poets Luis H. Francia and Joseph O. Legaspi for a special reading about Filipinx-American history, migration, queerness, and the elusive goal of cracking the American Dream for working-class immigrants. After reading they join author Gina Apostol, author of the Gun Dealer's Daughter, for a conversation about Carlos Bulosan, Filipinx as a synthetic identity, and writing for Asian Americans vs the white establishment.

Do you ever feel like your life is in a constant state of crisis? Do you feel like, nevertheless, you persist? On this episode of AAWW Radio, we're featuring three thrilling experimental novelists whose books are about pushing forward against life-killing forces, whether it’s capitalism, the political status quo, or more existential threats like grief and suicide. Novelists Patty Yumi Cottrell, Eugene Lim, and Anelise Chen all navigate the universe of crisis--all with a touch of bleak literary experimentation that would make Samuel Beckett proud! After reading from their work, poet Lisa Chen moderates a conversation about survival strategies, self-awareness, and the balance of tension in the books.

This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Iraq War, so for this episode of AAWW Radio we’re bringing you an interview that AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen hosted with experimental poet Philip Metres back in 2016. Phil Metres is the author of the poetry collection Sand Opera. 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.

As an Asian American, what is your Wakanda? Did you ever consider it being the obscure 2005 Xbox game Jade Empire? On this episode, we're continuing to highlight the recent launch Go Home!, our anthology of Asian diasporic writers published in collaboration with the Feminist Press. Contributing writers Alexander Chee, Karissa Chen, Chaya Babu, Wendy Xu, Gina Apostol, & the anthology’s editor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan had a hilarious and heartwarming conversation and Q&A in the final act of our two-hour event. They talk about the first books that made them feel seen, the importance of community, and of course, appreciating Black Panther.

We’re highlighting the recent launch of Go Home!, our anthology published in collaboration with the Feminist Press, featuring Asian diasporic writers who imagine “home” in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. On March 12th, we hosted a release party at our event space in Manhattan with contributing writers Alexander Chee, Karissa Chen, Chaya Babu, Wendy Xu, Gina Apostol, & the anthology’s editor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan who read to a packed house. It was an incredible evening and we’re excited to share the audio with you. Because it was a two-hour event, we’re splitting it into two podcast episodes: this episode will feature the introduction and readings, including Alexander Chee on his first roommate and Gina Apostol on Kundimans.

We’re starting a new series called Poetry Potluck featuring audio from our favorite AAWW poetry events and showcasing exciting poets of the moment. In Poetry Potluck 1, we have poets Ocean Vuong, Janine Joseph, and Wendy Xu reading from their work and having a conversation about writing process, family, and the body. Jennifer Hayashida introduces and moderates the conversation.

We're featuring two Korean American novelists, Jimin Han and Yoojin Grace Wuertz, who read from their debut novels that interrogate 1970s and 1980s Korean politics. Both books follow university students in the US and in Seoul as they fall in love, build friendships, and understand how they relate to the turbulent changes in South Korean society. Wuertz’s novel, Everything Belongs to Us, centers around two Seoul National University students under President Park Chung-hee’s 1970s authoritarian industrialization, while Han’s novel, A Small Revolution, flashes back to the student protests that helped inculcate Korean democracy. Introduced and moderated by E. Tammy Kim, former AAWW Open City Fellow and Editor at The New Yorker.

We had Canadian experimental poets M. NourbeSe Philip and Phinder Dulai in our space for a reading and conversation on working between poetry and the archive. Phinder Dulai's dream / arteries remixes archival photos, ships manifests, passenger records, and interviews from the traumatic Komagata Maru event. M. NourbeSe Philip explodes genre boundaries with Zong!, Philip's response to the Zong slave ship massacre through legal poetry. Zong! is generally regarded as one of the most significant experimental poetry books of the last decade. Introduced and moderated by AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen.  

We're featuring one of the country’s most prominent science fiction writers, Ted Chiang, the winner of four Locus awards, four Nebula awards, four Hugo Awards, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Junot Díaz wrote, “Ted Chiang is so exhilarating, so original, so stylish, he just leaves you speechless.” Chiang’s short story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, includes the Nebula Award-winning story “Story of Your Life,” of which the 2016 Academy Award-nominated film Arrival was based. After he reads, he has a discussion with Whiting Award winner Alice Sola Kim, whose work has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s Literary Quarterly, Buzzfeed Books, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. They discuss how each reprint of Stories of Your Life and Others affects Chiang, how his relationship with literary genre has evolved, and how expectations of race play into his fiction.

A special discussion about music and the ghosts of America’s racial past featuring two highly acclaimed authors. A murder mystery, a ghost story, and two cultural tourists collide in Hari Kunzru’s spellbinding novel White Tears, which connects contemporary cultural appropriation and white hawkers of black music with the history of racism and the forgotten geniuses of American music and Delta Mississippi Blues. Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Margo Jefferson’s classic work of cultural criticism, On Michael Jackson, a complex and tender portrait of the King of Pop, reckons with child stardom and the specter of racial ghosts that shaped his celebrity. She reads from her evolving work on Michael Jackson and current writing on jazz singers. After reading from their work, they have a deep discussion with GQ senior editor Kevin Nguyen about cultural appropriation.

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we’re celebrating the new edition of works by Nick Joaquin titled The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic. Nick Joaquin is one of the most important writers of the Philippines who is only recently being published in the United States for the first time by Penguin Classics. Born in 1917, Joaquin wrote a surreal, anguished sentence that cast an ironic eye at colonialism’s longue durée and Catholic rites, both of which he depicted through magical realism and baroque splendor. To read and discuss Joaquin’s work, we’re featuring Pen Open Book winning author Gina Apostol alongside legendary activist and author Ninotchka Rosca who was a friend of Joaquin’s, and Five-Under-35 winning author Alex Gilvarry. After these contributors read excerpts of their pieces, they are joined in a Q&A with writer and editor Melissa R. Sipin.

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we’re featuring writers and activists confronting our immigration system that threatens families of people of color in this age of xenophobic resurgence. In early 2017, Shanthi Sekaran released her newest novel Lucky Boy which follows an undocumented eighteen-year-old Chicano mother who winds up in immigration detention--causing her son to be adopted by an upper class Desi foster mother. To write the book, Shanthi relied partly on the "Shattered Families" report produced by the racial justice organization Race Forward. Race Forward Senior Strategist and author Rinku Sen also joins us to break down the mechanisms of structural racism and how immigration enforcement splits apart children from their families. Their conversation is moderated by Kavita Das, former Race Forward staff member and author of the upcoming biography Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar.

In late 2016 we celebrated the launch of Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion. This is the first anthology to examine the multiple facets of daughterhood in South Asian American families. The title, Good Girls Marry Doctors, is a tongue-in-cheek jab at the things Asian American mothers sometimes say. These first person essays are intimate, heart-breaking, political, and hilarious; and examine what it means to be the perfect Asian daughter. This episode features the editor of Good Girls Marry Doctors, Piyali Bhattacharya, alongside three of this anthology’s contributors: Swati Khurana is a visual artist and writer, Jyothi Natarajan is the Editorial Director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Ankita Rao is an editor at Vice. After these contributors read excerpts of their pieces, author Sejal Shah joins them for a Q&A.

In 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. A searing and subtly funny book about who gets to tell our stories, this feminist classic established themes and controversies central to Asian American literature today: what we carry from our homelands and pasts, the role of myths and family secrets, and what narratives are silenced. For the 40th anniversary of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, we brought her together with Monique Truong, AAWW board member and the author of the best-selling novel The Book of Salt, for a wonderful conversation about spirituality, titling the Woman Warrior, and Maxine hanging out with Alice Walker in jail by the Arizona border.   Watch the video for the full event here on our YouTube channel. Music by Robert Rusli & Lu Yang.  http://aaww.org

In this episode of AAWW Radio, we're exploring the craft of the short story with two authors who released short story collections in 2017. The quotidian stories in Akhil Sharma’s new book simmer with a barely hidden, devastatingly emotional undercurrent―and have earned him comparisons to Chekov. Reminiscent of Calvino and Borges, Kanishk Tharoor’s lush and inventive collection ranges from science fiction to historical pastiche, delving into what is lost from environmental collapse and language loss. After Akhil Sharma and Kanishk Tharoor read from their short story collections, they discuss the craft of the short story in a conversation with Meera Nair, cofounder of the reading series Queens Writers Resist and author of the novel Video won the won the 7th Annual Asian-American Literary Award and was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.