War on Terror

Words on Terror

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• published: 10 Aug 2016
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Hear poet and former AAWW managing director Solmaz Sharif read from her debut poetry collection Look, which appropriates Department of Defense lingo to critique the War on Terror. She is joined by poets Ricky Laurentiis, Mariam Ghani and Cathy Park Hong, who all read from Look and share their own work. Jyothi Natarajan, AAWW managing editor and editor of The Margins, gives introductions and moderates a question-and-answer session. 0:25 Introductions by Jyothi Natarajan 1:33 Ricky Laurentiis introduction 3:40 Ricky Laurentiis reads 18:14 Mariam Ghani introduction 19:53 Mariam Ghani reads 30:15 Cathy Park Hong introduction 32:25 Cathy Park Hong reads 44:30 Solmaz Sharif introduction 49:30 Solmaz Sharif reads 1:00:52 Question and answer moderated by Jyothi Natarajan -- http://aaww.org http://facebook.com/AsianAmericanWritersWorkshop http://twitter.com/aaww 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.