AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

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. A sanctuary for the immigrant imagination, we’re inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Learn more by visiting aaww.org.

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Pachinko (ft. Min Jin Lee & Ken Chen)

Mar 13, 2019

We're featuring audio from a 2017 event collaboration with the Tenement Museum. We celebrated the launch of author Min Jin Lee’s second novel Pachinko, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2017 and National Book Award Finalist. Pachinko follows one Korean family through generations. The story begins in Korea in...

Insurrecto & Filipinx Resistance ft. Gina Apostol & Sabina Murray

Feb 27, 2019

Gina Apostol’s latest work of fiction, Insurrecto, is a tour de force about about the Philippines’ past and present told through rivaling scripts from an American filmmaker and her Filipino translator. The book was one of the New York Times’ Editor’s Choices for 2018 and won comparisons to Nabokov and Borges for...

Subjects of Interest (ft. Kamila Shamsie, Hirsh Sawhney, & Rozina Ali)

Feb 13, 2019

In 2017, we hosted novelists Kamila Shamsie and Hirsh Sawhney, both writers who released new novels about South Asian families fractured in the diaspora. Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire takes Sophocles’s classic tragedy Antigone as the starting point for her novel about political tensions in the War on Terror and...

Queer South Asian Literature (ft. SJ Sindu, Rahul Mehta, & Sreshtha Sen)

Jan 30, 2019

We're featuring writers Rahul Mehta and SJ Sindu who read from debut novels No Other World and Marriage of a Thousand Lies featuring complex queer South Asian characters. They have a conversation with writer and Shoreline Review editor Sreshtha Sen about writing transnational narratives, how cultural trauma affects what...

You Don't Say No To Yuri Kochiyama (ft. Fred Ho, Diane C. Fujino, Baba Herman Ferguson, Esperanza Martell, Laura Whitehorn)

Jan 9, 2019

We’re reaching back over a decade into our archives to 2005, when Diane C. Fujino released Yuri Kochiyama's biography Heartbeat of Struggle. To celebrate the book's release, activist and saxophonist Fred Ho invited Yuri's friends & contemporaries Baba Herman Ferguson, Esperanza Martell, & Laura Whitehorn to our space...