Date: 7 May 2011
8 + 1: A Symposium
Voices from the Asian American Literary Review
Los Angeles, CA
A day-long celebration of nine of today’s most accomplished and exciting Asian American writers. Hosted by the Japanese American National Museum, to be held on May 7th, 2011, from 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Free to the public. Please direct any inquiries to editors@aalrmag.org.
FEATURING: Joy Kogawa • R. Zamora Linmark • Ray Hsu • Viet Nguyen • Brian Ascalon Roley • Reese Okyong Kwon • Kip Fulbeck • Hiromi Itō & translator Jeffrey Angles • Rishi Reddi
COMMUNITY & MEDIA SPONSORS:
Japanese American National Museum • International Center for Writing and Translation • UCLA Asian American Studies Center • USC Asian American Studies Program • Coffee House Press • Hyphen Magazine • Philippine Expressions Bookshop • Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network • Giant Robot • Asian American Journalists Association, Los Angeles Chapter • Audrey Magazine • Asian Arts Initiative • Kaya Press • Calypso Editions
This event is supported by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.
SCHEDULE:
Introductory remarks by AALR editors-in-chief Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis and Gerald Maa
10 a.m.-11:30 a.m.
Brian Ascalon Roley & Viet Nguyen
11:30 a.m.-1 p.m.
R. Zamora Linmark & Reese Okyong Kwon
1 p.m.-2:30 p.m.
Kip Fulbeck & Ray Hsu
2:30 p.m.-4 p.m.
Joy Kogawa & Rishi Reddi
4 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Hiromi Itō & translator Jeffrey Angles
4:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
Book Signing
SPEAKER BIOS:
Joy Kogawa is the author of Obasan, the seminal literary work on Japanese Canadian internment, named one of Canada’s 100 Most Important Books, winner of the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. Poet, teacher, and activist, she dredges up erased histories and forces us to confront the ghosts living among us.
Of Rishi Reddi’s work, Kiran Desai has said, “sad, sweet, tender…[it has] a stillness and clarity of language that allow immediate closeness to the emotional lives of the characters.” An environmental lawyer and a board member of South Asian Americans Leading Together, Reddi is at work on her first novel, which chronicles the Sikh community in California in the early 20th century.
Hiromi Itō is one of the most important poets of contemporary Japan. In the 1980s, she wrote a series of collections about sexuality, childbirth, and women’s bodies in such dramatically new and frank ways that she is often credited with revolutionizing postwar Japanese poetry. Since moving to the U.S., her work has focused on migration and the psychological effects of linguistic and cultural alienation.
Jeffrey Angles is an associate professor of Japanese and translation studies whose masterful translations of leading contemporary Japanese poets have earned the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, the PEN Club of America Translation Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a writer in the broad sense, moving from the scholarly to the imaginary to the political with a mixture of delicacy and moral purpose. For his current project, a collection of photo-essays, he travels across the landscapes of Vietnam and America, tracing not simply the legacies of wars but the undercurrent continuities.
In Reese Okyong Kwon’s work we find optimism of the intellect and the will. Everywhere is moral and spiritual wisdom and faith in the promise of literature. Art is a mover in her hands, language the engine and the nerve. One of Narrative’s “30 Below 30” emerging writers, with scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, and publications in The Kenyon Review, The Believer, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals, she is at work on her first novel.
Called “the face of hapa,” Kip Fulbeck is a pioneering artist-as-ambassador. Through his photography, memoir, slam poetry, and filmmaking, he has shattered received notions of race and asked us to see multiracial America in a revolutionary way: as it sees itself.
Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son is the natural descendant of Nella Larsen’s Passing, an augury of the terrible violence, psychic and physical, of racial belonging. Traversing the Philippines and far-flung pockets of Filipino America, his award-winning fiction shows us the damage we do to ourselves in the name of desire.
An award-winning young poet from Canada, Ray Hsu has published and studied on both sides of the border. Experimental and expressive, cerebral while utterly insistent on the social world, his vibrant poems push language to its various limits only from a reverence for a life well lived.
Through poems, fiction, and drama, R. Zamora Linmark populates our world with vocal characters, people driven and nourished by language, working through the innumerable forces that form and constantly reshape identity. For this writer, some of the forces are named Filipino, Hawaiian, queer, American, citizen, traveler.
Support the project here.
8 + 1: A Symposium
Voices from the Asian American Literary Review
Los Angeles, CA
A day-long celebration of nine of today’s most accomplished and exciting Asian American writers. Hosted by the Japanese American National Museum, to be held on May 7th, 2011, from 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Free to the public. Please direct any inquiries to editors@aalrmag.org.
FEATURING: Joy Kogawa • R. Zamora Linmark • Ray Hsu • Viet Nguyen • Brian Ascalon Roley • Reese Okyong Kwon • Kip Fulbeck • Hiromi Itō & translator Jeffrey Angles • Rishi Reddi
COMMUNITY & MEDIA SPONSORS:
Japanese American National Museum • International Center for Writing and Translation • UCLA Asian American Studies Center • USC Asian American Studies Program • Coffee House Press • Hyphen Magazine • Philippine Expressions Bookshop • Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network • Giant Robot • Asian American Journalists Association, Los Angeles Chapter • Audrey Magazine • Asian Arts Initiative • Kaya Press • Calypso Editions
This event is supported by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.
SCHEDULE:
Introductory remarks by AALR editors-in-chief Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis and Gerald Maa
10 a.m.-11:30 a.m.
Brian Ascalon Roley & Viet Nguyen
11:30 a.m.-1 p.m.
R. Zamora Linmark & Reese Okyong Kwon
1 p.m.-2:30 p.m.
Kip Fulbeck & Ray Hsu
2:30 p.m.-4 p.m.
Joy Kogawa & Rishi Reddi
4 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Hiromi Itō & translator Jeffrey Angles
4:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
Book Signing
SPEAKER BIOS:
Joy Kogawa is the author of Obasan, the seminal literary work on Japanese Canadian internment, named one of Canada’s 100 Most Important Books, winner of the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. Poet, teacher, and activist, she dredges up erased histories and forces us to confront the ghosts living among us.
Of Rishi Reddi’s work, Kiran Desai has said, “sad, sweet, tender…[it has] a stillness and clarity of language that allow immediate closeness to the emotional lives of the characters.” An environmental lawyer and a board member of South Asian Americans Leading Together, Reddi is at work on her first novel, which chronicles the Sikh community in California in the early 20th century.
Hiromi Itō is one of the most important poets of contemporary Japan. In the 1980s, she wrote a series of collections about sexuality, childbirth, and women’s bodies in such dramatically new and frank ways that she is often credited with revolutionizing postwar Japanese poetry. Since moving to the U.S., her work has focused on migration and the psychological effects of linguistic and cultural alienation.
Jeffrey Angles is an associate professor of Japanese and translation studies whose masterful translations of leading contemporary Japanese poets have earned the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, the PEN Club of America Translation Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a writer in the broad sense, moving from the scholarly to the imaginary to the political with a mixture of delicacy and moral purpose. For his current project, a collection of photo-essays, he travels across the landscapes of Vietnam and America, tracing not simply the legacies of wars but the undercurrent continuities.
In Reese Okyong Kwon’s work we find optimism of the intellect and the will. Everywhere is moral and spiritual wisdom and faith in the promise of literature. Art is a mover in her hands, language the engine and the nerve. One of Narrative’s “30 Below 30” emerging writers, with scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, and publications in The Kenyon Review, The Believer, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals, she is at work on her first novel.
Called “the face of hapa,” Kip Fulbeck is a pioneering artist-as-ambassador. Through his photography, memoir, slam poetry, and filmmaking, he has shattered received notions of race and asked us to see multiracial America in a revolutionary way: as it sees itself.
Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son is the natural descendant of Nella Larsen’s Passing, an augury of the terrible violence, psychic and physical, of racial belonging. Traversing the Philippines and far-flung pockets of Filipino America, his award-winning fiction shows us the damage we do to ourselves in the name of desire.
An award-winning young poet from Canada, Ray Hsu has published and studied on both sides of the border. Experimental and expressive, cerebral while utterly insistent on the social world, his vibrant poems push language to its various limits only from a reverence for a life well lived.
Through poems, fiction, and drama, R. Zamora Linmark populates our world with vocal characters, people driven and nourished by language, working through the innumerable forces that form and constantly reshape identity. For this writer, some of the forces are named Filipino, Hawaiian, queer, American, citizen, traveler.
Support the project here.
