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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- Copyright: AAWW 2017
Podcasts:
In this episode of AAWW Radio, we’re celebrating the launch of Marianna’s Beauty Salon, Bushra Rehman’s debut poetry collection that captures the nuances and magic of growing up as a South Asian American femme in Queens. Bushra Rehman reads alongside writers Quincy Scott Jones, Sadia Shepard, and Jai Dulani. You’ll hear a hilarious story about a plane full of Pakistanis marooned in Charles De Gaulle airport, police brutality interpolated into James Brown lyrics, and poetic reflections on resistance.
On this episode of AAWW Radio we hear from New York Times Hungry City columnist Ligaya Mishan, Number One Chinese Restaurant author Lilian Li, and Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race author Naben Ruthnum. They read from their work and have a conversation with writer and chef Rohan Kamicheril about "authentic" food, the power dynamics of cultural appropriation, and the role of food as a cultural gateway. Shout out to MSG.
In this episode of AAWW Radio, authors Yiyun Li and Porochista Khakpour discuss how depression and chronic illness have transformed their existence not only as writers, but as people. Author Elif Batuman guides us in a conversation exploring the relationship between trauma and physical illness, the authors’ influences, and for who they tell their stories.
We're hosting a reading on India and caste with writers Neel Mukherjee and Sujatha Gidla. In Mukherjee's novel A State of Freedom and Gidla's memoir Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family, class and caste divisions are addressed at the forefront.The two authors read from their work and afterwards have a conversation with author Gaiutra Bahadur. Together they discuss the connection between caste and women’s oppression, Dalit solidarity with Black Americans, their love of Samuel Beckett, and much more.
For this episode of AAWW Radio, we listen to AAWW Muslim Community Fellows Roja Heydarpour, Raad Rahman, Sumaya Awad and Humera Afridi read their stories published in Open City about their own experiences as Muslim American women, and the unique experiences Muslim Americans face in the current xenophobic political climate. Sarah Khan's documentary: http://opencitymag.aaww.org/collateral-damage/ Apply for Open City Fellowships: https://aaww.submittable.com/submit
We’re featuring three Arab American writers exploring the boundaries between personal and political: novelist/poet Hala Alyan and poets Hayan Charara and Marwa Helal. From the Six-Day War and the invasion of Iraq to explosive poetic experimentations, these writers explore what it means to have a private self, a family space, and a home in the conditions of war, displacement, and migration. They speak with novelist and former AAWW Open City Fellow Tanaïs.
Elaine Castillo's debut novel America is Not the Heart is a vibrant and starkly hilarious novel about the De Vera family who flees Marcos-era Philippines in stages for the immigrant suburbs of the Bay Area. Elaine Castillo reads with poets Luis H. Francia and Joseph O. Legaspi, and together join Gun Dealer's Daughter author Gina Apostol for a conversation about Filipinx-American history, migration, queerness, and writing for Asian Americans vs the white establishment.
Listen to Patty Yumi Cottrell, Eugene Lim, and Anelise Chen, three thrilling experimental novelists whose books are about pushing forward against life-killing forces, whether it’s capitalism, the political status quo, or more existential threats like grief and suicide. After reading from their work, poet Lisa Chen moderates a conversation about survival strategies, self-awareness, and the balance of tension in the books.
This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Iraq War, so for this episode of AAWW Radio we’re bringing you an interview that Executive Director Ken Chen hosted with experimental poet Philip Metres back in 2016. Phil Metres is the author of the poetry collection Sand Opera, created by redacting text from Guantanamo Bay's Standard Operating Procedure. They dive deep into Metres’ research of the people at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and the influence of these documents in response to violence as a
As an Asian American, what is your Wakanda? Did you ever consider it being the obscure 2005 Xbox game Jade Empire? Listen to Part 2 of our Go Home! Anthology launch episode with writers Alexander Chee, Karissa Chen, Chaya Babu, Wendy Xu, Gina Apostol, & the anthology’s editor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. They talk about community, books that made them feel seen, and of course, appreciating Black Panther.
We’re highlighting the recent launch of Go Home!, our anthology published in collaboration with the Feminist Press, featuring Asian diasporic writers who imagine “home” in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Listen to readings with contributing writers Alexander Chee, Karissa Chen, Chaya Babu, Wendy Xu, Gina Apostol, & the anthology’s editor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. Introduced by AAWW Editorial Director Jyothi Natarajan.
We’re starting a new series called Poetry Potluck featuring audio from our favorite AAWW poetry events and showcasing exciting poets of the moment. In Poetry Potluck 1, we have poets Ocean Vuong, Janine Joseph, and Wendy Xu reading from their work and having a conversation about writing process, family, and the body. Jennifer Hayashida introduces and moderates the conversation.
A special discussion about two debut novels that interrogate 1970s and 1980s South Korean politics. Yoojin Grace Wuertz's Everything Belongs to Us and Jimin Han's A Small Revolution follow university students in the US and in Seoul as they fall in love, build friendships, and understand how they relate to the turbulent changes in South Korean society. Introduced and moderated by E. Tammy Kim, former AAWW Open City Fellow and Editor at The New Yorker.
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. Introduced and moderated by AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen.
We're featuring one of the country’s most prominent and decorated science fiction writers, Ted Chiang. 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 film Arrival was based. After he reads, he has a discussion with Whiting Award winner Alice Sola Kim.
