AAWW is a national literary nonprofit dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told. We host events in NYC and broadcast them here! Please support us by donating at aaww.org/donate so we can continue this work. You can also become a fanclub member and receive custom designed pins & stickers at aaww.org/fanclub/.
0:17 Introduction by Ken Chen
2:46 Reading by Ruth Ozeki
15:45 Reading by Tash Aw
27:14 Conversation with Ken Chen
50:00 Q&A with Audience
Celebrate the launch of an innovative new series from Restless Books with two of contemporary literature’s most exciting transnational writers: Booker Finalist Ruth Ozeki and Tash Aw. Both writers have slim new editions with a new series by Restless Books called THE FACE, which asks writers to offer a guided tour of that most intimate terrain: their own faces.
Ruth Ozeki’s THE FACE: A Time Code (Restless Books 2016) provides a Buddhist meditation of the second-by-second experience of the author watching her own face. Meanwhile, Tash Aw’s THE FACE: Strangers on a Pier (Restless Books 2016) gives the reader--in the words of Yiyun Li--“whirlwind personal history of modern Asia, as told through his Malaysian and Chinese heritage.” Check out an excerpt of it in The New Yorker here.
Co-sponsored by The Center for Fiction.
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AAWW is a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans-in other words, we’re the preeminent organization dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told.
We’re building the Asian literary culture of tomorrow through our curatorial platform, which includes our New York events series and our online editorial initiatives. In a time when China and India are on the rise, when immigration is a vital electoral issue, when the detention of Muslim Americans is a matter of common practice, we believe Asian American literature is vital to interpret our post-multicultural but not post-racial age. Our curatorial take is intellectual and alternative, pop cultural and highbrow, warm and artistically innovative, and vested in New York City communities.
Our curatorial platform is premised on the idea of a big-tent Asian American cultural pluralism. We’re interested in both the New York publishing industry and ethnic studies, the South Asian diasporic novel and the Asian American story of assimilation, high culture and pop culture, Lisa Lowe and Amar Chitra Katha, avant-garde poetry and spoken word, journalism and critical race theory, Midnight’s Children and Dictee. We are against both an exclusive literary culture that believes that race does not exist and Asian American narratives that lead to self-stereotyping and limit the menu of our identity. We are for inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Named one of the top five Asian American groups nationally, covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Poets & Writers, we are a safe community space and an anti-racist counterculture, incubating new ideas and interpretations of what it means to be both an American and a global citizen.