AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

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 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. 

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 discuss topics like deciding on whether to do an MFA, finding your writing community, breaking into Speculative Fiction, and working in the publishing world. 

Then, for those of you who are new to our podcast and haven’t listened through our past 50 episodes, we’ll be picking a few of our personal favorites to republish for listening.

And beyond that, we’re brainstorming ideas for new original formats for future episodes! If you have any suggestions for us or have any feedback, feel free to reach out and email us at [email protected] .

We hope everyone is staying safe, social distancing to protect those at risk, and helping each other out. See you next week.

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-determination and liberation is just as critical today as it was more than 70 years ago. Stand With Kashmir has compiled resources on their website. Here's a snapshot of where to begin:

• Ten non-fiction and fiction books to read about Kashmir 
• 13 films to watch on Kashmir
• The Kashmir Syllabus: this list of material for teaching and learning about Kashmir foregrounds voices, histories, and aspirations of people from and within Kashmir.
• Wande Magazine, an online magazine of longform writing run by young Kashmiris: 
• Ather Zia’s ethnography Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women's Activism in Kashmir (2019) which was discussed in the podcast and follows mothers and "half-widows" as they step boldly into courts, military camps, and morgues in search of their disappeared kin.
• Ather Zia’s and Javaid Iqbal Bhat’s A Desolation Called Peace: Voices from Kashmir (2019) about the political aspirations of the people of Kashmir and the change in their perceptions since Independence.
• Kashmir Lit, an online journal of Kashmiri & Diasporic Writing

For more of Agha Shahid Ali's poetry:

• Agha Shahid Ali’s collection Rooms are Never Finished (2001), a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, excavates the devastation wrought upon Kashmir and the personal devastation of losing his mother
• Agha Shahid Ali’s The Country without a Post office, which takes its impetus from the 1990 Kashmiri uprising against India, which led to political violence and closed all the country’s post offices for seven months 
•  

How can you help?

Here is how you can help stand in solidarity with Kashmiris at this critical juncture:  https://www.standwithkashmir.org/stand-in-solidarity

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 listening. - R.O.R., AAWW AV Producer

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

Is language adequate to describe the harsh reality of incarceration? Which words are used too often, too lazily, not often enough? We’ll hear from four people who are writers, journalists, and professors, approaching these subjects surrounding incarceration from different angles; Sarah Wang, Aviva Stahl, Nicole R. Fleetwood, Madhu Kaza. They read and talk with AAWW's Prisons Editor Daniel A. Gross about the evolving language of 2019 and the way it shapes lives, going in-depth on subjects such as how bureaucratic prison language invalidates and harms trans people, the stigma of a murder conviction, how to use alternative language to subvert carceral language, and much more.

Watch the whole event (especially if you're curious about Nicole Fleetwood's slideshow) on our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9IhmEa46TQ

We hosted a reading and conversation with novelist Esmé Weijun Wang, author of the New York Times-bestselling new essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias. She was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and has won a Whiting Award. The Collected Schizophrenias, which won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, is, as NPR writes, “riveting, honest, and courageously allows for complexities in the reality of what living with illness is like.”

After reading from her work, Esmé has a conversation with Larissa Pham, writer and author of the novella Fantasian. Together they discuss how to write vulnerably while maintaining boundaries, little things we can do for each other when our friends and family are going through difficult times, and much more.