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AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature — Arts
AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

AAWW Radio is the podcast of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, an NYC literary arts space at the intersection of migration, race, and social justice. Listen to AAWW Radio and you’ll hear selected audio from our current and past events, as well as occasional original episodes. We’ve hosted established writers like Claudia Rankine, Maxine Hong Kingston, Roxane Gay, Amitav Ghosh, Ocean Vuong, Solmaz Sharif, and Jenny Zhang. Our events are intimate and intellectual, quirky yet curated, and dedicated to social justice. 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 left. A sanctuary for the immigrant imagination, we believe Asian American stories deserve to be told. Learn more by visiting aaww.org

Produced by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Latest Episodes:

Poetry Potluck I with Ocean Vuong, Janine Joseph, Wendy Xu, and Jennifer Hayashida Mar 14, 2018

Show notes

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.

Love and Korean Democracy (ft. Jimin Han, Grace Yoojin Wuertz, & E. Tammy Kim) Mar 07, 2018

Show notes

We're featuring two Korean American novelists, Jimin Han and Yoojin Grace Wuertz, who read from their debut novels that interrogate 1970s and 1980s Korean politics. Both books 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. Wuertz’s novel, Everything Belongs to Us, centers around two Seoul National University students under President Park Chung-hee’s 1970s authoritarian industrialization, while Han’s novel, A Small Revolution, flashes back to the student protests that helped inculcate Korean democracy. Introduced and moderated by E. Tammy Kim, former AAWW Open City Fellow and Editor at The New Yorker.

Archive Seance (ft. M. NourbeSe Philip & Phinder Dulai) Feb 28, 2018

Show notes

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.

Speculative Visions (ft. Ted Chiang & Alice Sola Kim) Feb 21, 2018

Show notes

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.

White Tears, Michael Jackson, Cultural Appropriation (ft. Hari Kunzru, Margo Jefferson & Kevin Nguyen) Feb 14, 2018

Show notes

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.

Celebrating Nick Joaquin (ft. Gina Apostol, Ninotchka Rosca, Alex Gilvarry, & Melissa R. Sipin) Feb 07, 2018

Show notes

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.

Family Vs Migration (ft. Shanthi Sekaran, Rinku Sen, & Kavita Das) Jan 31, 2018

Show notes

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.

Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion Jan 24, 2018

Show notes

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.

The Woman Warrior (feat. Maxine Hong Kingston & Monique Truong) Jan 17, 2018

Show notes

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

Short Story Invention (ft. Akhil Sharma, Kanishk Tharoor, & Meera Nair) Jan 10, 2018

Show notes

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.

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