Photo: The Asian American Writers' Workshop Executive Director Ken Chen (Left) with two novelists exploring the Chinatown experience, Fae Myenne Ng (Center), author of the bestselling novel Bone, and Henry Chang (Right), author of Chinatown Beat.

When I sat down to talk with Ken Chen, Executive Director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW), he said, “People become members of things because they believe in it and want to be a part of it, and I think the Workshop has a lot of potential to become the kind of place that people want to have an affinity with or that they come to and see this as their community. [Membership] is not about us raising money or you getting a free tote bag.” That may be true, but after attending the AAWW’s Mixtape Reading on July 31^st, I walked away with lots of goodies – beer, ice cream, and a CD of songs chosen by the night’s readers – all for the price of a mere five dollar donation at the door.

The Mixtape Reading, eight writers who wrote about songs that inspired them, is part of the many events that have been going on at the AAWW. “This summer alone we have more than thirteen programs and that’s about as many as we held all last year. We’re aggressively trying to create a communal feel where there’s creative energy.” The reading was held in Manhattan at the AAWW office, a 6,000 square-foot loft where the walls are decorated with posters and many, many paper cranes. There were several in the audience of about sixty who had attended the AAWW classes in the past. With people greeting friends and acquaintances, the atmosphere was more than communal; it felt downright familial.

Welcome to the AAWW. The Workshop was founded in 1991 by six writers and became a nonprofit in 1992 committed to supporting Asian American writers. The Workshop boasts 800 members and is growing. Past workshops have also been taught by preeminent writers, such as Tony and Obie Award winning playwright David Henry Hwang. Min Jin Lee, who published her critically acclaimed debut novel Free Food for Millionaires in 2007, took a class taught by Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri. The AAWW has an annual Asian American Literary Awards Ceremony (Maxine Hong Kingston was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006) and may bring back the Van Lier Fellowship, which supports three writers under the age of thirty, that the organization offered in the past. The Workshop also publishes journals and anthologies. There is even a youth program. Basically, if you’re an Asian American writer – aspiring, emerging, mid-career, or successful – AAWW should be on your radar.

Due to the title, most people think of the national organization as a place to take writing workshops, but it is just as much an events venue. “Come to all our events. It’s a great way to meet other writers and readers. We’re going to have a monthly panel series called ‘The Practice of Writing’ starting in the fall. It’s going to be talks on the craft and career of writing,” said Chen. As further inducement for attendance, Chen added, “If there is a writer who is a novelist, usually their publisher, publicist and agent show up.”

Of course, you should not feel excluded if you aren’t Asian American. Chinese, Indian and Filipino were among the many ethnicities represented by the readers at the Mixtape Reading and the audience was even more diverse. There were people who were Black, White, Asian, Hapa, etc. Chen emphasized that AAWW tries to be as inclusive as possible, “We believe that Asian American literature is for everyone, so we try to do a lot of outreach... We have an event coming up at Bryant Park ("The Word for Word Poetry Reading" on August 26^th, free and open to the public). We use the term ‘Asian American,’ but it’s a historically loaded term, and a lot of it comes out of civil rights protest movements. When you say to most people, Asian American, they think Chinese, Japanese, Korean. We’re a very Pan Asian organization, so it’s not as though every reading is just one type of ethnicity. A single reading is like a multi-ethnic dialogue.”

The diversity also extended from the individuals present at the Mixtape event to the literature that was read. The night was full of poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, as well as reading and singing. Chen was newly appointed as the Executive Director in March, and he enthused, “This job is really exciting, because you can see the range of Asian American writing. When you interview someone on the street what they think of Asian American writing, they think of intergenerational, coming of age, immigrant stories, but if you came to every one of our events you would see that Asian American writing could be hip-hop, science-fiction novels, crime novels, or it could be literary fiction.”

If you’re Asian American, you may be wondering--issue of ethnicity aside--why you should be interested in the AAWW instead of one of the countless other writing workshops available throughout New York. After all, Asian American names are increasingly getting published. “When I first took this job,” Chen related, “An acquaintance of mine asked, ‘Do Asian Americans actually write?’ I think that people seem like exceptions to the rule. I think there is a tendency to think that since one great writer like Jhumpa Lahiri can get into The New Yorker, it means that the problem of representation is over, but I don’t think that’s the case. There is one debut novelist who came through here, and her book was pretty well-reviewed, and she said that the first publicist that she brought it to said, ‘We already publish our two Asian American novelists here.’ I’ve heard a lot of other people say things like that. I feel that the pressures are more complicated than not being able to get published in the sense that there might be pressure to be a certain type of Asian American writer or do a certain type of work as well… Also, there are no Asian Americans in publishing.”

Such comments bring us full circle to the idea of community again. Writing workshops can breed competition and camaraderie in equal measure. The AAWW brings people together with a collective goal of fostering Asian American literature, which helps slacken the sails of more purely selfish pursuits of individual writers. One woman I met at the reading had moved to California but had returned to New York for a visit and was re-immersing herself with apparent glee into the AAWW, where she took a class years ago, and she wasn’t the only person who spoke of the Workshop with nostalgia. People who take workshops tend to stay in touch and become members. Do Asian Americans write? Indubitably. The question is: Are you reading us?