AAWWTV: Fractured Selves with Akwaeke Emezi, Mira T. Lee & TANAÏS

AAWW is a national literary nonprofit dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told. We host events in NYC and broadcast them here! Please support us by donating at aaww.org/donate so we can continue this work. You can also become a fanclub member and receive custom designed pins & stickers at aaww.org/fanclub/.
Join us for a reading with two of this spring’s most exciting literary fiction debuts that explore the metaphysics of identity, mental health, and migration. Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (Grove, 2018), named a Most Anticipated Book of 2018 in Esquire, the Huffington Post, and more, follows the story of a young Nigerian woman named Ada born “with one foot on the other side” who develops separate selves. Mira T. Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful (Pamela Dorman Books, 2018) alternates the between the perspectives of two Asian American sisters grappling with the the loss of a parent, illness, and the strains of intimacy. In conversation with TANAÏS, the author of Bright Lines.
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AAWW is a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans-in other words, we’re the preeminent organization dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told.
We’re building the Asian literary culture of tomorrow through our curatorial platform, which includes our New York events series and our online editorial initiatives. In a time when China and India are on the rise, when immigration is a vital electoral issue, when the detention of Muslim Americans is a matter of common practice, we believe Asian American literature is vital to interpret our post-multicultural but not post-racial age. Our curatorial take is intellectual and alternative, pop cultural and highbrow, warm and artistically innovative, and vested in New York City communities.
Our curatorial platform is premised on the idea of a big-tent Asian American cultural pluralism. We’re interested in both the New York publishing industry and ethnic studies, the South Asian diasporic novel and the Asian American story of assimilation, high culture and pop culture, Lisa Lowe and Amar Chitra Katha, avant-garde poetry and spoken word, journalism and critical race theory, Midnight’s Children and Dictee. We are against both an exclusive literary culture that believes that race does not exist and Asian American narratives that lead to self-stereotyping and limit the menu of our identity. We are for inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Named one of the top five Asian American groups nationally, covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Poets & Writers, we are a safe community space and an anti-racist counterculture, incubating new ideas and interpretations of what it means to be both an American and a global citizen.

[@TEE_MALATJI]

I struggle a lot with internal thoughts and voices and i feel like if i have to speak of them out loud , i sound crazy or confused but it all makes sense in my head and its thoughts that keeps me as me , they not negative or positive but they are my thoughts , thoughts and voices that guides me that question things i do, they can be confused sometimes but they are there and talking about them out loud makes me nervous. I have recently discovered these videos so its amazing to hear that , this is a spiritual war indeed

[@TheGabriellepp]

The audacity of the man with that ‘question’

[@Dmagedsteezz]

Akwaeke emezi 😭😭😭😭😭😭🔥🔥🔥🔥

[@whiskeyonmykindle]

Loved hearing these two talk more in depth on their books. 👌

[@QueenOfTheDamned]

I really enjoyed this talk. Thanks.

[@cclaude100]

This was interesting

[@suzy8109]

Emezi is beautiful. You can see she inherited the genes of her Indian mother.

[@alerio369]

They

[@TEE_MALATJI]

🥰

[@nectarwulf9132]

They