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

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

May 19, 2020

Today is the legendary activist Yuri Kochiyama’s birthday! We’re celebrating by revisiting one of our favorite episodes of AAWW Radio, You Don’t Say No to Yuri Kochiyama. 

 

In 2005, scholar and activist Diane C. Fujino released the biography Heartbeat of Struggle: the Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama. An in-depth examination of Kochiyama's life, the book follows her early years in a concentration camp in Arkansas during World War II, to her friendship with Malcolm X in New York City, and her years of radical political activism. 

 

We hosted an event celebrating the release of this text in November 2005. Co-sponsored by the NYU A/P/A Institute, the event was curated by activist and musician Fred Ho. Fred Ho invited activists and political organizers Baba Herman Ferguson, Esperanza Martell, and Laura Whitehorn, all of whom had known and worked with Yuri over the years years, to discuss and celebrate her legacy. You’ll hear about how Yuri’s Harlem apartment was a social hub for activists in the 60s, the tireless work she did with the Jericho Movement to liberate political prisoners, fight for Puerto Rican independence, her prolific note taking, and more. Finally, Diane. C. Fujino will share the story of Yuri’s political awakening, and how she transformed from a budding activist to a symbol of revolutionary change.