The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is the preeminent national literary arts nonprofit dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told. We’ve garnered coverage from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Huffington Post, Associated Press, Atlantic, Slate and NPR. Invited to the White House, named one of the top Asian American groups nationally, we seek to invent the future of Asian American intellectual culture. Check us out at http://www.aaww.org.
1. WE CURATE UNFORGETTABLE ART EVENTS. We hold fifty events a year at our Chelsea space. They’re fresh, progressive, funny, interdisciplinary, and community-based. We have curated events with Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje, Zadie Smith, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ha Jin, Das Racist, Eddie Huang, Tea Obreht, Junot Díaz, Roxane Gay, and other writers, activists, and scholars.
2. WE PUBLISH THE ONLINE MAGAZINES THE MARGINS AND OPEN CITY. The Margins magazine (aaww.org) seeks to invent the future of Asian American arts and ideas and imagine ethnic identity as counterculture, both aesthetically and politically. We have published Pulitzer Finalist Chang-rae Lee, National Book Award Finalist Jessica Hagedorn, and MacArthur Genius Vijay Iyer. Open City magazine (opencitymag.com) publishes stories about communities of color, those excluded from traditional power structures, and incubates the underprivileged writers who can write about them. Almost a third of a million readers have read our magazines.
3. WE INCUBATE EMERGING WRITERS OF COLOR. We give out grants to eight emerging Asian American writers a year. We hold open mics, writing workshops, and a big publishing conference. As Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri, arguably the most celebrated novelist in America, said at our 2009 PAGE TURNER literary festival: “I felt that AAWW was a secret door that opened and cared about and supported my work as a writer.”