From the Gardens of Our Grief: A Reading

Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. 

REGISTER (open to the NYU community only)

“In grief, we seldom arrive with the language to help us translate the pain of our losses; even when the sorrow is shared by others, the act of grieving can be quite solitary. Particularly in diasporic communities, where war and displacement have shaped many generations, concepts of healing may be hard to define (with the search for forgiveness and acceptance even harder paths to traverse). How, then, do we meet our grief and face it with confidence? In what ways can we nurture ourselves and each other while living under this current political climate?”

As part of her residency with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, Khaty Xiong curates a reading of creative and academic work about grief and loss, themes which have been central to the artist’s recent creative practice. 

This panel centers the experiences and histories of Asian American communities, and will feature both readings and remarks from Mimi Khúc (writer and scholar), Jennifer Cho (Boston University), David L. Eng (via Zoom, University of Pennsylvania), and Jess X. Snow (NYU Tisch Film graduate student and artist). Xiong, whose immersive poetry installation Grief Garden is currently on view, moderates.

This in-person event is open to the NYU community with a current NYU ID and green pass. Masks must be worn at all times. A recording will be posted online following the event date.

Accessibility note: The NYU Silver Center, Jurow Hall & Silverstein Lounge is on the first floor and is accessible for wheelchair users via the 31 Washington Place entrance. Restrooms (which are gender-segregated) are accessible via elevator. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Jennifer Cho is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston University, where she teaches at the intersections of Asian American literature, film and culture, gender studies, and theories of memory, affect, and trauma. She received her PhD in English from the George Washington University, and is an alumna of New York University (BA in English, MA in Humanities and Social Thought). Her work has been published (or is forthcoming) in MELUS, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and Modern Language Studies. Currently, she is working on a book that rescripts Asian American grief (and other negative affects) as potent sites of political critique, social redress and intracommunity, cross-racial, and diasporic identification.  

David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Professor in the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory and the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. Eng is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. In 2016, Eng was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. In 2021, he was awarded the Kessler Prize from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS), which is given to a scholar and/or activist who has produced a body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies. Eng is author of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han, Duke, 2019), The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke, 2010), and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001). His current book project, “Reparations and the Human,” investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Cold War Asia. 

Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, teacher of things unwell, and an adjunct lecturer, sometimes in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. She is the managing editor of The Asian American Literary Review and guest editor of “Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health,” a hybrid book-arts project that works to decolonize Asian American unwellness. Her work explores creative and critical approaches to building collective care. She likes to say that she makes cool shit, and she makes people cry.

Jess X. Snow is a non-binary writer/director, public artist, and poet, who creates genre-defying inter-generational stories from a queer Asian immigrant lens. Spanning large scale augmented reality murals, ad-takeovers, wheatpasted posters, children’s books, and narrative films, their stories and process explore how care, intimacy and imagination can help us disrupt borders and empire, and end cycles of violence. They were the Fall 2021 Student Artist-in-Residence at the A/P/A Institute at NYU and are finishing their thesis year in the NYU Graduate Film program. They bring their background in social movement art, poetry, and trauma-informed healing into their film and immersive work. Their murals, which center Asian, Pacific, Black, Indigenous femmes and queer & trans people of color, often created in collaboration with those communities, can be found on city walls across Turtle Island. They believe the process of filmmaking and community mural-making can be a way to deepen coalitions of solidarity amongst Asian, Black, and Indigenous communities and open a portal toward loving and abolitionist futures. Currently they are working on a children’s book and two feature films. 

Khaty Xiong is a Hmong American poet from Fresno, California. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015), and three poetry chapbooks: Ode to the Far Shore (Platypus Press, 2016), Deer Hour (New Michigan Press, 2014), and Elegies (University of Montana, 2013). She received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Montana and a Bachelor of Arts from Ohio Northern University. Her work has been featured in Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Adroit Journal, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Xiong’s honors include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship from MacDowell, and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Currently, she is working on her second poetry collection, a series of pastoral elegies detailing her grief over the sudden loss of her mother. She is the Spring 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Photograph by Khaty Xiong.