AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

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.

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