AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature
Summary: 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 current and past 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 that hosted Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book party. Founded in 1991, AAWW is an alternative literary arts space working at the intersection of race, migration, and social justice. A sanctuary for the immigrant imagination, we’re inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Learn more by visiting aaww.org. Produced by the Asian American Writers' Workshop.
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- Artist: Asian American Writers' Workshop
- Copyright: AAWW 2017
Podcasts:
We’re bringing back one of our favorite events from 2018 called Breaking Caste, featuring Sujatha Gidla, Neel Mukherjee, and Gaiutra Bahadur. The episode features a wonderful conversation at the end about Dalit exclusion in the publishing industry, the connection between caste and women’s oppression, Dalit solidarity with Black Americans, and much more. This event was cosponsored by Equality Labs.
One of our favorite episodes is this reading and conversation from 2018 with brilliant experimental Asian American writers Anelise Chen, Patty Yumi Cottrell, and Eugene Lim. They read passages from their novels So Many Olympic Exertions, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, and Dear Cyborgs, all of which have unique perceptions on living and surviving in this difficult world. Following their readings they have an insightful and honest conversation with poet Lisa Chen.
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.
The panel we’re sharing this week is from our 2016 Publishing Conference and titled “Finding Your Community”, featuring writers Jenny Zhang, Alice Sola Kim, Tony Tulathimutte, and moderated by editor Jarry Lee. Keep in mind this audio is from 2016, but we think it still has lots of relevant and helpful advice for writers looking for a writing community. Tony Tulathimutte's writing workshop in Brooklyn: https://crit.works/
Pubcon 2016 Episode 2: diving back into our 2016 Publishing Conference, listening to a panel called “Breaking into Speculative Fiction”, featuring Jennifer Marie Brissett, author of the novel Elysium, and Malka Older, author of the Centenal Cycle trilogy, which includes the novels Infomacracy, Null States, and State Tectonics Their conversation on speculative fiction will be moderated by editor Tim O'Connell.
We’re time traveling to our 2016 Publishing Conference, listening to a panel titled “What I Wish I Knew Before I Got My MFA”, featuring authors Naomi Jackson (MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), Karim Dimechkie, (the Michener Center), and Kaitlyn Greenidge (Hunter College). Together they speak on their MFA experiences in a conversation moderated by Brooklyn Rail Editor Joseph Salvatore. Keep in mind it's from 2016 but we find it still very relevant and hopefully will help people on their MFA jour
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, we’ll be picking a few of our personal favorites to republish for listening. See you s
How do you simultaneously disappear a 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 Agha Shahid Ali, connects Kashmiri diaspora to their home. Featuring Professors Ather Zia, Hafsa Kanjwal, Sameetah Agha, and journalist Syma Mohammed.
Today marks the 18th anniversary of 9/11. We're bringing back our episode from April 9th, 2018 called Remixing Guantanamo Bay where Ken Chen interviews experimental poet Philip Metres. 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.
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 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 hea
Listen this week for stories about Asian & Muslim American neighborhoods in New York City by our 2018 - 2019 Open City Fellows. 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 foster care as an Asian American child, and much more.
Is language adequate to describe the harsh reality of incarceration? Which words are used too often, too lazily, not often enough? Sarah Wang, Aviva Stahl, Nicole R. Fleetwood, Madhu Kaza talk with AAWW's Prisons Editor Daniel A. Gross about 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.
We hosted a reading and conversation with novelist Esmé Weijun Wang, author of the New York Times-bestselling new essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias, which is, as NPR writes, “riveting, honest, and courageously allows for complexities in the reality of what living with illness is like.” Esmé reads and talks with Larissa Pham about 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 mo
What is the relationship between bearing witness to history and giving voice to marginalized communities? Multidisciplinary writers E.J. Koh, Yanyi, Emily Jungmin Yoon, & Monica Sok read from their work and speak with poet Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello about how their work as poets, editors, translators, and scholars allows them to uncover intimacies among seemingly disparate colonial histories, give context to narratives of intergenerational trauma, and build empathy and community.
We’ll be listening to an introduction by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network founder & author of The Sympathizer, as well as a conversation around the concept of Vietnamese ghost stories moderated by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis featuring authors Violet Kupersmith, Thanhha Lai, & Vu Tran. 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 discuss Vietnamese diasporic literary community.
