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

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Roxane Gay & Alexander Chee

Dec 27, 2017

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...

Migrant Father Fragment (ft. QM Zhang, lê thị diễm thúy, & Hua Hsu)

Dec 20, 2017

Q.M. Zhang and lê thị diễm thúy, writers of fragmented, hybridic, family narratives explore themes of immigration, grief, and the father with The New Yorker’s Hua Hsu. A hybrid memoir/novel that’s part espionage, part historical documentary, Q.M. Zhang’s Accomplice to Memory tells the story of her father’s...

Searching for Home (ft. Alia Malek, Dina Nayeri, Rami Karim, and Roja Heydarpour)

Dec 13, 2017

Novelist Dina Nayeri, journalist Alia Malek, and poet Rami Karim's work surrounds Middle East politics, revolution, and the refugee experience. You may have read Iranian-American novelist Dina Nayeri’s viral story in The Guardian, “The Ungrateful Refugee: We Have No Debt to Pay.” She reads from her book Refuge, a...

Refugee Requiem (ft. Bao Phi, Patrick Rosal, Sokunthary Svay)

Dec 6, 2017

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...

The Face (ft. Ruth Ozeki and Tash Aw)

Nov 29, 2017

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.

In Ruth Ozeki’s piece A...