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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Podcasts:
A special discussion about music and cultural appropriation with two highly acclaimed authors. Hari Kunzru’s novel White Tears, which connects contemporary cultural appropriation with the history of racism. Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Margo Jefferson’s classic work of cultural criticism, On Michael Jackson reckons with child stardom and the specter of racial ghosts that shaped his celebrity. They read from their work and have a deep discussion on cultural appropriation with GQ senior editor Kevin Ng
Celebrate the new edition of works by Nick Joaquin, one of the most important writers of the Philippines who is only now being published in the United States for the first time by Penguin Classics. To read and discuss Joaquin’s work, we’re featuring Pen Open Book winning author Gina Apostol alongside legendary activist and author Ninotchka Rosca, and Five-Under-35 winning author Alex Gilvarry. They are joined in a Q&A with writer and editor Melissa R. Sipin.
On our newest episode Family Vs Migration, we’re featuring writers and activists confronting our immigration system that threatens families of people of color in this age of xenophobic resurgence. Author Shanthi Sekaran, Race Forward Senior Strategist and author Rinku Sen, and upcoming author Kavita Das join us to break down the mechanisms of structural racism and how immigration enforcement splits apart children from their families.
Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion is a collection of intimate, heart-breaking, political, and hilarious coming-of-age essays written by South Asian American women that explode the notion of the perfect Asian daughter. This episode features the book's editor, Piyali Bhattacharya, alongside three of this anthology’s contributors: Swati Khurana, Jyothi Natarajan, and Ankita Rao. 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 wild adaptation of the story of Fa Mulan, the book combined lyric fiction and nonfiction, shapeshifting fabulism with memoiristic prose. For the 40th anniversary of this feminist classic, we brought Maxine Hong Kingston in conversation with author Monique Truong, where they discuss spirituality, titling the Woman Warrior, and Maxine hanging out with Alice Walker in jail by the Arizona border.
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. Akhil Sharma’s new book simmer with a barely hidden, devastatingly emotional undercurrent. 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. Akhil Sharma and Kanishk Tharoor read, followed by a discussion on short story craft with author Meera
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 author Farzana Doctor, travel writer and activist Bani Amor, author and professor Tiphanie Yanique, and researcher Julia Hori.
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.
Writers Q.M. Zhang (Accomplice to Memory) and lê thị diễm thúy (The Gangster We Are All Looking For) explore themes of immigration, grief, and the father. These writers of fragmented, hybridic family narratives discuss the silence and love that you’ve come to know from your Asian immigrant family, but with added subterfuge and geopolitics, and leaving behind a stark past of war and liberation. Afterwards, they have a conversation with writer and AAWW board member Hua Hsu.
Novelist Dina Nayeri, journalist Alia Malek, and poet Rami Karim's work surrounds Middle East politics, revolution, and the refugee experience. Dina Nayeri reads from her book Refuge, a powerful story of a daughter who leaves Iran, but leaves her father behind. Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek writes about her return to Damascus as the Syrian conflict started in The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria. AAWW Margins Fellow Rami Karim, reads lyric poems set against the Civil War in Lebanon.
Poets Patrick Rosal, Bao Phi, and Sokunthary Svay confront nationalist mythology with lyrical odes to the America we struggle against, and the one being built through struggle. Patrick Rosal—who the Academy of American Poets honored for writing the best book of poetry of the year—uncovers forgotten multi-racial histories through his family’s journey from the Phillipines to Brooklyn. Bao Phi and Sokunthary Svay trace their arrival into Minneapolis and the Bronx as refugees.
What would it be like to stare at your face in the mirror for three hours? Who would it reveal? Authors Ruth Ozeki and Tash Aw read from their contributions to an innovative new series from Restless books titled THE FACE, which asks writers to offer a guided tour of that most intimate terrain: their own faces. Afterwards they have a conversation with AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen.
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. A sanctuary for the immigrant imagination, we’re inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. This podcast contains selected audio from our weekly events with authors like Maxine Hong Kingston, Roxane Gay, Amitav Ghosh, and Hanya Yanagihara. Starting November we'll be releasing weekly episodes. Subscribe!
