Matthew Salesses Interviewed by May Ngo

We have a special interview with author Matthew Salesses, conducted by writer and anthropologist May Ngo back in February. Together, they dissect Matthew’s book Craft in the Real World, and have deep conversations about making writing workshops more equally accessible and how to think about one’s audience. They question the concept of agency, and how stories of lack of agency can actually feel more grounding, as well as dig into difficult questions of responsibility to our communities as writers of color and people from marginalized communities, and the complexity of wanting to represent a community but also be free from expectation. This is also the last episode produced by AAWW AV Producer Robert Ouyang Rusli.

Om Podcasten

AAWW Radio is the podcast of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, an NYC literary arts space at the intersection of migration, race, and social justice. Listen to AAWW Radio and you’ll hear selected audio from our current and past events, as well as occasional original episodes. We’ve hosted established writers like Claudia Rankine, Maxine Hong Kingston, Roxane Gay, Amitav Ghosh, Ocean Vuong, Solmaz Sharif, and Jenny Zhang. Our events are intimate and intellectual, quirky yet curated, and dedicated to social justice. We curate our events to juxtapose novelists and activists, poets and intellectuals, and bring together people who usually wouldn’t be in the same room. We’ve got it all: from avant-garde poetry to post-colonial politics, feminist comics to lyric verse, literary fiction to dispatches from the left. A sanctuary for the immigrant imagination, we believe Asian American stories deserve to be told. Learn more by visiting aaww.org Produced by the Asian American Writers' Workshop.