Writing About Asian & Muslim American Neighborhoods

AAWW’s online magazine Open City documents metropolitan Asian America on the streets of New York City. Every year we grant two fellowships, the Neighborhoods fellowship and the Muslim Communities fellowship, to six writers to cover Asian American & Muslim American communities in New York City. We celebrated the end of our last cohort of Open City Fellows last month with a reading.  Writers Mohamad Saleh, Maryam Mir, Syma Mohammed, Hannah Bae, Astha Rajvanshi, and Nora Salem read from pieces that you can find on Open City: on racial tensions in Bay Ridge, a Syrian baker in Brooklyn passionate for baking Baklava; a personal essay on childhood trauma and foster care as an Asian American, and much more. Afterwards, former Open City fellow Humera Afridi held a Q&A with the fellows on translation in reporting, how writing about immigrant communities has shaped their ideas of home, and how sharing your work in community with others improves your writing craft. Sweet Refuge Video: https://youtu.be/6YKiwx6U2HU

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.