Aaww Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

Travel writing is a genre rife with fantasies of escape, luxury, and finding oneself through an experience in an unfamiliar place—in other words, colonial tropes. Is it possible to write about travel while decolonizing the narrative? We’re featuring several writers whose work focuses on humanizing the people who become backdrops to western tourism. Canadian writer Farzana Doctor joins us for the US launch of All Inclusive, her book written from the perspective of a worker at a Mexican resort. Reading alongside her are queer travel writer and activist Bani Amor, and writer and professor Tiphanie Yanique, whose debut novel, Land and Love of Drowning chronicles the changes in the US Virgin Islands over the 20th century. They're joined by Julia Hori, a graduate student who researches the colonial underpinnings of tourism in the Caribbean. Watch the video for the full event here on our YouTube channel. Music by Robert Rusli & Lu Yang.  http://aaww.org

In 2014, just after the publication of her landmark essay collection Bad Feminist we hosted Roxane Gay in conversation with writer Alexander Chee at our event, The Popular is Political. They spoke about the representation of people of color in pop culture and publishing, their favorite problematic TV shows, and Roxane's obsession with Ina Garten. Music by Robert Rusli and Lu Yang

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 Asian American classic, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, tells the collage-like, semi-autobiographical story of a refugee family that immigrates to San Diego, leaving behind a stark past of war and liberation in Vietnam. Watch the video for Migrant Father Fragment here.  Music by Robert Rusli & Lu Yang.  http://aaww.org

Novelist Dina Nayeri, journalist Alia Malek, and poet Rami Karim's work surrounds Middle East politics, revolution, and the refugee experience. You may have read Iranian-American novelist Dina Nayeri’s viral story in The Guardian, “The Ungrateful Refugee: We Have No Debt to Pay.” She reads from her book Refuge, a powerful story of a daughter who leaves Iran, but leaves her father behind. Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek returned to Damascus to live in her grandfather’s home–just as the Syrian conflict started. She writes about it in The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria. They read with AAWW Margins Fellow Rami Karim, the author of lyric poems set against the Civil War in Lebanon. This mashup of poetry, fiction, and memoir speaks to the complex nature of home: a place that elusively remains in flux through return and exile. This event is moderated and introduced by AAWW Muslim Community Fellow Roja Heydarpour. Watch the video for Searching for Home here. Music by Robert Rusli & Lu Yang.  ht

Poets Patrick Rosal, Bao Phi, and Sokunthary Svay confront nationalist mythology with lyrical odes to the America we struggle against, and the one being built through struggle. Patrick Rosal—who the Academy of American Poets honored for writing the best book of poetry of the year—uncovers forgotten multi-racial histories through his family’s journey from the Phillipines to Brooklyn. Bao Phi and Sokunthary Svay trace their arrival into Minneapolis and the Bronx as refugees. They speak into existence defiant new American imaginaries, inspired by hip hop and the invisible Asian American urban poor. This event is briefly introduced by musician Taiyo Na. Watch the video for Refugee Requiem here.  Music by Robert Rusli & Lu Yang.  http://aaww.org  

Authors Ruth Ozeki and Tash Aw read from their contributions to an innovative new series from Restless books titled THE FACE, which asks writers to offer a guided tour of that most intimate terrain: their own faces. Afterwards they have a conversation with AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen.   In Ruth Ozeki’s piece A Time Code, she provides a Buddhist meditation of the second-by-second experience of the author watching her own face. Tash Aw’s Strangers on a Pier gives the reader--in the words of Yiyun Li--“whirlwind personal history of modern Asia, as told through his Malaysian and Chinese heritage.”   Music by Robert Rusli and Lu Yang

AAWW Radio is the podcast of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, a national nonprofit dedicated to the idea that Asian American stories deserve to be told. Listen to AAWW Radio and you’ll hear selected audio from our live events. We’ve hosted established writers like Claudia Rankine, Maxine Hong Kingston, Roxane Gay, Amitav Ghosh, and Hanya Yanagihara, as well as more emerging writers like Ocean Vuong, Solmaz Sharif, and Jenny Zhang. Our events are intimate and intellectual, quirky yet curated, dedicated to social justice but with a sense of humor and weirdness. We curate our events to juxtapose novelists and activists, poets and intellectuals, and bring together people who usually wouldn’t be in the same room. We’ve got it all: from avant-garde poetry to post-colonial politics, feminist comics to lyric verse, literary fiction to dispatches from the racial justice left. AAWW Radio features curated audio from the literary events we hold weekly in our New York City reading room, a legendary downtown art space