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

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

Jan 31, 2018

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.