Asian American Writers Workshop Inc

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop works every day to empower and amplify marginalized voices. Since our founding in 1991, we have been dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told. At a time when migrants, women, people of color, Muslims, and LGBTQ people are specifically targeted, we offer a new countercultural public space in which to imagine a more just future.

We achieve our goals by:
(1) Building an inclusive pipeline
(2) Nurturing a new generation of Asian diasporic writers
(3) Creating a sanctuary space for the imagination
(4) Taking stories from the margins and pushing them to the center

The AAWW is the nation's preeminent organization in amplifying marginalized voices. We are a publisher, an incubator for emerging writers, a sanctuary space for readers and ideas. We are a community of activists who use our artistry to advocate for and center the voices and ideas on the margins. Our public space is designed for gathering communities and building critical dialogue between literature and movement culture.

FELLOWSHIPS

In January 2020, we welcomed a new cohort of five Open City Fellows, who have begun their nine-month fellowship writing on Asian and Muslim immigrant communities across NYC. We also welcomed a new cohort of four Margins Fellows who are at work on book-length works of fiction, poetry, narrative nonfiction. Fellows' projects include a family history that also investigates conflicts over land and sovereignty in Martha's Vineyard; a collection of “reversible poems,” drawing on the centuries-old tradition in Chinese poetry to examine the circularity of melancholy and migration; a novel that explores the meeting points of immigration, political ambition, love, and violence; and a project that chronicles on writer's journey as a survivor of abuse, a teen parent, a witness testifying for a criminal trial, and an inpatient in psychiatric units.

MAGAZINE

Our online magazine The Margins was awarded a 2019 Whiting Foundation Literary Magazine Prize, which recognizes literary magazines that publish extraordinary writing with verve and flair, support talented writers on the page and in the world, connect with readers, and advance the literary community. The judges' citation for the award reads: “An indispensable incubator for audacious intellect and human complexity, The Margins reshapes literature even as it creates space for nuance, voice, imagination, and connection. As an institution, it has a profound impact on our cultural consciousness: the legion of writers The Margins has nurtured redefines our understanding of what it is to be Asian American in this country, and in the world.”

Since July 2019, we have published 145 pieces on The Margins, including essays by Adiba Talukder, Julia Shiota, Julian Saporiti, and Nina Sharma; interviews with Ishmael Reed, Monique Truong, E.J. Koh, and Poupeh Missaghi; poems by Khaty Xiong, Jess Rizkallah, Michael Prior, and Sham-e-Ali Nayeem; fiction by Bishakh Som and Ji Hyun Joo; and more.

PUBLIC PROGRAMMING

From July 2019 through February 2020, we hosted 27 live events in our performance space in New York City, including five editions of our open mic Mouth to Mouth series. In March 2020, we made the difficult decision to cancel all live programming and close our public space indefinitely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, we have shifted to a more robust slate of digital programming and virtual readings.