AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

For Asian American poets, what is the relationship between bearing witness to history and giving voice to marginalized communities? At the 2019 AWP Conference and Bookfair held in Portland in March, AAWW hosted a panel titled Poets vs. Community vs. History, moderated by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello with E.J. Koh, Yanyi, Emily Jungmin Yoon, & Monica Sok. These multidisciplinary writers talk about how their work as poets, editors, translators, and scholars allows them to uncover intimacies among seemingly disparate colonial histories, and contextualize narratives of intergenerational trauma. They draw on their varied practices to explore how the individual pursuits of poets can build empathy and community.

E.J. Koh is the author of A Lesser Love, awarded the Pleiades Editors Prize, and her memoir The Magical Language of Others. Koh has accepted fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, MacDowell Colony, and elsewhere.

Yanyi is a poet and critic. The recipient of fellowships from Poets House and Asian American Writers' Workshop, his debut collection The Year of Blue Water was recently released in March. He serves as associate editor at Foundry.

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species and Ordinary Misfortunes, winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize. A PhD student at the University of Chicago, she is the poetry editor for the Asian American Writers' Workshop.

Monica Sok is the author of Year Zero. Her work has been recognized with a 2018 "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from Hedgebrook, Jerome Foundation, Kundiman, and NEA among others. She is a 2018–2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox, winner of the Donald Hall Poetry Prize and a Florida Book Award Bronze Medal. She has received fellowships from Kundiman and the American Literary Translators Association, and serves as a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.

In March, we co-presented a series of conversations with DVAN, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. For this podcast we’ll be listening to an introduction by DVAN founder and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer Viet Than Nguyen. Following this is a conversation around the concept of Vietnamese ghost stories moderated by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis and featuring authors Violet Kupersmith, Thanhha Lai, & Vu Tran. The order they’re listed here is the same order they answer the first question. Together, they dissect the concept of the ghost story, as a metaphor for the immigrant, a reflection of the self and one’s deepest fears and insecurities, and then broaden the conversation to talk about community and what a Vietnamese diasporic literary community looks like to them.

Violet Kupersmith is the author of The Frangipani Hotel, a collection of supernatural short stories about the legacy of the Vietnam War. She is writing a forthcoming novel about ghosts and American expats in modern-day Saigon. Thanhha Lai is the author of the National Book Award-winning novel Inside Out & Back Again and the novel Listen, Slowly.  Her third novel, Butterfly Yellow, will be published this fall. Vu Tran is the author of Dragonfish, which was a NY Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and an NEA Fellowship. Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis is curator of Asian Pacific American Studies at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. He is also founding Director of the Washington, DC-based arts nonprofit The Asian American Literary Review.

Co-sponsored by the APA Institute at NYU.

We're featuring audio from a 2017 event collaboration with the Tenement Museum. We celebrated the launch of author Min Jin Lee’s second novel Pachinko, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2017 and National Book Award Finalist. Pachinko follows one Korean family through generations. The story begins in Korea in the early 1900s and then moves to Japan. The family endures harsh discrimination, catastrophe, and poverty. They also encounter joy as they rise to meet the challenges their new home presents. Through desperate struggle and hard-won triumph, they are bound together by deep roots that are set as their family faces enduring questions of faith, family, and identity. Min Jin Lee reads from her novel and then is interviewed by Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers Workshop. They discuss her extensive research and interview process, how growing up in Queens, New York helped her write Pachinko, and much more.

Watch the full event on our YouTube channel, as well as our other past events.

Gina Apostol’s latest work of fiction, Insurrecto, is a tour de force about about the Philippines’ past and present told through rivaling scripts from an American filmmaker and her Filipino translator. The book was one of the New York Times’ Editor’s Choices for 2018 and won comparisons to Nabokov and Borges for its kaleidoscopic structure. With her trademark wit, uncommon humor, layering of forgotten histories and dueling narratives, Gina tells the story of the atrocities that faced Filipinos who rose up against their colonizers during the Philippine-American war at the turn of the 20th century.

Gina Apostol reads from Insurrecto and then is joined by Filipina-Australian writer Sabina Murray, author of the novel Valiant Gentlemen. Together they discuss weaving together nonlinear narratives, the uselessness of white guilt, Duterte reprising the role of the American colonizer in the Philippines through violence, and much more.

Featuring the songs Ang Lupa ang Dahilan & Agit Speech by Material Support, a Filipina-fronted agit punk band from New York City, agitated by state repression, government corruption, and patriarchy.

Watch the event on our YouTube Channel!

In 2017, we hosted novelists Kamila Shamsie and Hirsh Sawhney, both writers who released new novels about South Asian families fractured in the diaspora. Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire takes Sophocles’s classic tragedy Antigone as the starting point for her novel about political tensions in the War on Terror and the way it impacts Muslim families in the West. Hirsh Sawhney’s debut novel South Haven illustrates how grief complicates and splinters intimacy in an Indian-American family.

The two authors read from their work, and talk with journalist Rozina Ali about power structures, American Empire in literature, the collective grief following Partition in 1947, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, as well as speak to America’s complicity in the formation of ISIS, and debunk myths on the War on Terror.

The authors also do a deep dive on craft, and discuss authenticity and the responsible imagination; as well as how to control (and not control) when your audience misreads your writing.

We're featuring writers Rahul Mehta and SJ Sindu who read from debut novels No Other World and Marriage of a Thousand Lies featuring complex queer South Asian characters. They have a conversation with writer and Shoreline Review editor Sreshtha Sen about writing transnational narratives, how cultural trauma affects what we write, and resisting the common coming out story. How do you come out to family members whose language you don’t speak?

We’re reaching back over a decade into our archives to 2005, when Diane C. Fujino released Yuri Kochiyama's biography Heartbeat of Struggle. To celebrate the book's release, activist and saxophonist Fred Ho invited Yuri's friends & contemporaries Baba Herman Ferguson, Esperanza Martell, & Laura Whitehorn to our space to speak on Yuri Kochiyama's legacy as a radical Asian American political activist. Afterwards Diane C. Fujino talks about Yuri Kochiyama's political awakening from 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 after as a tireless advocate for political prisoners and countless struggles around the world.

Cosponsored by the NYU A/P/A/ Institute

How is resistance possible when reality itself is obscured? In an era of "fake news" and more facts than anyone could hope to grasp, authoritarians rely on this uncertainty to consolidate their hold on power.

This episode we're featuring audio from our 2017 event Speaking Truth to Power. Legendary journalist Raissa Robles joins us from the Philippines to share her work, Marcos Martial Law: Never Again, which reappraises the era of Marcos and applies it lessons to what is unfolding today. Former AAWW Open City Fellow and journalist Raad Rahman will share her research on state repression in Bangladesh, from the Rohingya refugees fleeing attacks in Myanmar to the persecution of LGBTQ Bangladeshis, and writer and translator Tenzin Dickie will discuss writing and translating work about Tibetans navigating the ongoing Chinese occupation.

Following the readings will be a Q&A moderated by Jeremy Tiang, acclaimed translator and author of State of Emergency, the award winning novel that traces leftist movements throughout Singapore’s history. Together they discuss the rise in authoritarianism as a symmetrical reaction to colonialism, and the importance of remembering the past -- with help from a few key books and resources.

We hear from Open City Neighborhood Fellows Roshan Abraham, Pearl Bhatnagar, and Huiying Bernice Chan, who have been documenting the pulse of metropolitan Asian America as it's being lived on the streets of New York right now, and our Muslim Communities fellows, Aber Kawas, Humera Afridi, and Sarah Moawad, who have been writing on the city's Muslim American communities over the past six months.

They read from their recently published pieces about a donation-based sufi in Brooklyn, immigration activist Ravi Ragbir, and Nepali Working Class Women fighting for TPS Status. You’ll also learn about the BDS-supporting, pro-Palestinian City Council candidate el-Yateem in Bay Ridge  how to search for your family roots as a Chinese American, and the annual pilgrimage people take to Malcolm X’s resting place.

Moderated by Roja Heydarpour.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice outlines what it means to create spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of color. In this episode of AAWW Radio, Leah reads from her essay collection and then has a conversation with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson about meaningful inclusion of disability justice, Intersectional disability, the nuances and multitudes of the disability experiences, and “crip wealth.”