Maxine!

The Asian American Writers' Workshop (AAWW) is a national literary nonprofit dedicated to amplifying Asian and Asian diasporic storytelling.

Asian American Writers' Workshop

NOTE: This event is taking place at Verso Books!
We’re delighted to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Woman Warrior by legendary Asian American novelist and poet Maxine Hong Kingston, one of the most influential and formally adventurous forerunners in Asian American literature. She’ll appear in conversation with Guggenheim Fiction Fellow Monique Truong.
RESERVE A SEAT! $5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | DOORS AT 6:30 PM 
Forty years ago last year, Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Knopf 1976). A wild adaptation of the story of Mulan, the book combined lyric fiction and nonfiction, shapeshifting fabulism with memoiristic prose. A searing (and subtly funny) book about who gets to tell our stories, this feminist classic established themes and controversies central to Asian American literature today: what we carry from our homelands and pasts, the role of myths and family secrets, what narratives are silenced. Kingston’s other books include: the National Book Award-winning retelling of Chinese American immigrant history China Men (Vintage 1981), Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage 1990); a jazzy Flower Power riff off of the Monkey King, To Be the Poet (Harvard University Press 2002); The Fifth Book of Peace (Knopf, 2003); and the recent Whitmanesque poetic/memoir I Love a Broad Margin in My Life (Vintage 2011), which we celebrated to mark our Twentieth Anniversary. In addition to receiving the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton and President Obama, respectively, Kingston won the very first AAWW Lifetime Achievement award in 2006.
Kingston will speak with Monique Truong, whose bestselling novel The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin 2003) retold the story of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas from the perspective of their queer Vietnamese chef. The book won the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and our AAWW Asian American Literary Award. Her second novel--Bitter in the Mouth (Random House 2010), a Southern Gothic novel written in synaesthesia--won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. A refugee from Vietnam, a Guggenheim Fellow, Truong is a former AAWW Board Member and AAWW Van Lier Fellow.
This event will be conducted the day after Kingston speaks at NYU’s The Contemporary Lecture Series for our co-sponsored panel “<A HREF="http://apa.nyu.edu/event/make-your-mind-as-large-as-the-universe-celebrating-40-years-of-the-woman-warrior/" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Make Your Mind As Large As the Universe</A>.” The Wednesday, April 19th event features Maxine Hong Kingston, Hua Hsu, Jenny Zhang, Jess Row, and Pacharee Sudhinaraset at NYU.

Verso Books

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Maxine!

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