Poets & Writers Theater

In this AAWW conversation moderated by Piyali Bhattacharya, writers with debut essay collections recently published, including Cathy Park Hong, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Sejal Shah, discuss Asian American identity, genre, gender, race, publishing, and the ways that the essay form has allowed writers to tell important stories. 

“Didn’t they know, low in their bones, that as long as they moved and the land unfurled, that as long as they searched, they would forever be searchers and never quite lost?” reads C Pam Zhang from her debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020), in this conversation with writer and comedian Karen Chee hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

“It’s a book about being present to the world and accepting the complexity of the world.” In this virtual event hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Larissa Pham speaks about her new book, Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy (Catapult, 2021), and the subjects addressed in her essays, including relationships and the differences of expression through visual art and writing, in a conversation with R. O. Kwon.

Author, poet, and translator Rajiv Mohabir and scholar Kadji Amin speak on the topics of queer theory and scholarship, the process of writing creative nonfiction and poetry, and the term “Asian American” in this virtual conversation for the Radical Thinkers series hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

“There’s a sister who works so hard she never talks. / A sister who screams when she hears dogs bark.” Monica Sok reads “Sestina” from her debut poetry collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), for Women Warriors: A Solidarity Reading, presented by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, which featured over forty Asian American women writers. 

“I spent the first two years reworking the first twenty pages of this novel, over and over and over again,” says R. O. Kwon about writing her debut novel, The Incendiaries (Riverhead Books, 2018), in this 2018 Asian American Writers’ Workshop event with Alexander Chee. “I realized at the end of those two years that you can’t build a foundation if you don’t know what that house will look like,” says Kwon. “Am I building an opera house? Am I building a skyscraper?”

In this virtual launch of Land of Big Numbers (Mariner Books, 2021) hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, author Te-Ping Chen reads from her debut story collection and speaks with Charles Yu about releasing a book during a pandemic. Land of Big Numbers is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Is this a voice that I can sustain throughout this novel? Will it continue to be, and also most importantly, can it sustain my curiosity?” In this AAWW virtual event, Chang-rae Lee reads from his novel My Year Abroad (Riverhead Books, 2021) and speaks with Bryan Washington about developing characters and publishing a book during a pandemic.

“I come from a place of not belonging and perhaps I started writing in order to make a place where I belonged in the world of novels or plays.” In this AAWW video, Yu Miri answers questions about her life and writing process, and reads from her novel Tokyo Ueno Station (Riverhead Books, 2020), translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles, which won the 2020 National Book Award in translated literature.

In this Asian American Writers’ Workshop video, Arthur Sze reads and discusses the origin of his poem “Winter Stars,” featured in The Best American Poetry 2020 anthology guest edited by Paisley Rekdal. Sze won the 2019 National Book Award in poetry for his collection Sight Lines (Copper Canyon Press, 2019).