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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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...

AAWW Fave: Disability Justice (ft. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha & Cyrée Jarelle Johnson)

May 13, 2020

One of our favorite episodes of AAWW Radio was from 2018 featuring Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in conversation with poet Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, author of SLINGSHOT. Leah reads from her work and together they discuss meaningful inclusion of disability...

AAWW Fave: Breaking Caste (ft. Sujatha Gidla, Neel Mukherjee & Gaiutra Bahadur)

May 6, 2020

We’re bringing back one of our favorite events from 2018 called Breaking Caste, featuring Sujatha Gidla, Neel Mukherjee, and Gaiutra Bahadur. The episode features a wonderful conversation at the end about Dalit exclusion in the publishing industry, the connection between caste and women’s oppression, Dalit...

AAWW Fave: I Can't Go On...I'll Go On ft. Patty Yumi Cottrell, Anelise Chen, Eugene Lim, & Lisa Chen

Apr 29, 2020

One of our favorite episodes is this reading and conversation from 2018 with brilliant experimental Asian American writers Anelise Chen, Patty Yumi Cottrell, and Eugene Lim. They read passages from their novels So Many Olympic Exertions, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, and Dear Cyborgs, all of which have unique perceptions...

AAWW Fave: Migrant Father Fragment (ft. lê thị diễm thúy, M Zhang, & Hua Hsu)

Apr 22, 2020

Now that we’ve published over 50 episodes of AAWW Radio, we’re selecting a few of our favorites to republish for our new listeners. One of our earliest episodes is Migrant Father Fragment from 2017 featuring authors lê thị diễm thúy, Q.M. Zhang, and moderated by Hua Hsu. It features wonderful readings of...