We Invented Tomorrow

FREEDOM FORUMS 2017 A Conversation on Freedom Tuesday, September 26, 6-8:30pm

Federal Hall, 26 Wall Street, New York, NY

Talk freedom -- personal, artistic and civic -- with a group of accomplished poets, activists and performers in Federal Hall's Grand Rotunda. Hear what freedom means to them at this critical juncture in American democracy, and join the conversation with your insight and experience. Additional readings and performances by the talented Poets in Unexpected Places.

EMERGENCY CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: This past week, the Supreme Court reinstated the Muslim Ban for all but those travelers with a “bona fide relationship” with the United States. At AAWW, we want to ask what’s a bona fide relationship, anyway?

Drumroll, please… We are thrilled to announce AAWW’s Spring 2017 Open City Muslim Communities Fellows and our 2017 Margins Fellows.

The Open City Muslim Communities Fellowship supports emerging writers of color from communities under attack from Islamophobia as they write about low-income immigrant neighborhoods in New York City.

The Margins Fellowship incubates emerging Asian American creative writers, giving them a home for their writing, guidance from mentors, residency time, and more.

Now on AAWWTV: Surreal Lives with Alex Kleeman, Deepak Unnikrishnan, and Katie Raissian

"When I was still young learning the tongue of my mother’s

language was like hiking the distance for a view you didn’t care to see."

EVENT: It’s been 40 years since Asian American legend Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. On Thursday, April 20th, we're celebrating Kingston’s oeuvre and the magical, feminist ur-text that helped define Asian American literature with Guggenheim Fiction Fellow Monique Truong. While this event was previously sold out, we’re relocating this event from AAWW to Verso Books, so sign-up before we run out of seats! Register here: http://aaww.org/curation/maxinehongkingston2017/.

No Language

can ever be enough, I say, only the dirt will wash us clean. The way it must sound. And I cling to the languages, the dirt, I’ve lost with the one that clings to me.

- Hari Alluri

EVENT: Have you ever felt like you don't belong? Drop by our SURREAL LIVES reading this Thursday. Authors Alexandra Kleeman and Deepak Unnikrishnan will chat with Grove Atlantic Editor Katie Raissian. Chinese American fiction writer Alexandra Kleeman--author of Author of You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine--explores feral children, fake and real blood, and the apocalypse in her new short story collection. Deepak's book tells the story of the migrant gulf workers through a fabulist lens: gulf labor via George Saunders. The book's been acclaimed for telling the "plight of 'temporary people'" and gripping with "the realities of a new unruly twenty-first-century global English.”