Local/Express: Asian American Arts and Community in 90s NYC

Presented by the Center for Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU

Come join us as we celebrate the release of this exciting, new anthology, from the publishers of the Asian American Literary Review. With readings by contributors Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Sung Rno, Monique Truong, Swati Marquez, and Curtis Chin. Hosted by co-editor Terry Hong.

Image credit: We were making History 3, 2013. Courtesy of Jaishri Abichandani

Curtis Chin is an award-winning writer and producer who has written for both network television and cable. He’s also won awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the San Diego Asian American Film Festival. He co- founded the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Asian Pacific Americans for Progress and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, where he is working on a new documentary on the specialized high schools in New York City.

Terry Hong is a writer and arts consultant, specializing in books, theater, and film. She created and maintains Smithsonian BookDragon, a multi-culti book review blog for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. She is currently an Advisor for 10×10: Educate Girls, Change the World, a global action campaign highlighting girls’ education; she served as the Literary Coordinator for the groundbreaking film, Girl Rising. She co-authored two books, Eastern Standard Time: A Guide to Asian Influence on American Culture from Astro Boy to Zen Buddhism and What Do I Read Next? Multicultural Literature.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s next novel is forthcoming with Simon & Schuster in 2015. She has also published six novels for young adults. She was the first recipient of a creative writing Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea and has won the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fiction fellowship and the Richard Margolis award for social justice reporting. Non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, Salon, The Washington Post, and she is a regular contributor to The Atlantic. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University, where she is the Our Word Writer-in- Residence. She is a founder and the former board president of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Swati Marquez loves stories, especially when they involve fragments and memories. She was born in India and lives and works in New York City. Her writing has appeared 
in Columbia Review, The Feminist Wire, and The Margins and is forthcoming in Jaggery; it recieved an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest. She is currently working on her MFA in Fiction at Hunter College and making broadsides at the Center for Book Arts. Every time she uses her iPhone calendar, she misses her Filofax.

Sung Rno’s plays include Galois, Happy, wAve, Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen, Behind the Masq, Weather, Cleveland Raining, Gravity Falls From Trees, Drizzle and Other Stories, New World, and The Trajectory of a Heart, Fractured. Honors include the New Dramatists Whitfield Cook Prize, a New York Fringe Festival Best Overall Production Award, two Van Lier Fellowships (with New Dramatists and New York Theater Workshop), and first prize in the Seattle Multicultural Playwrights’ Festival.

Monique Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a 25 Best Fiction Books of the year by Barnes & Noble and a 10 Best Fiction Books by Hudson Booksellers. Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Fiction Book. Truong co-edited Watermark: An Anthology of Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998). She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University School of Law.