CONTACT
The Asian American Literature Festival is designed to support and nurture Asian American literature and the literary community.
It is curated and produced by The Asian American Literature Festival Collective, a cooperative devoted to stewarding the futures of Asian American literature as art form and social ecosystem. Organising partners within the collective include the Asian American Literary Archive, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Bamboo Ridge, The Georgia Review, Kaya Press, Kearny Street Workshop, KidLit with Sarah Park Dahlen, Reorienting Reads, and Slow Currents.
The 2024 Festival took place both across the country and globally, with an international presence in Aotearoa and Australia. Cities hosting events include Athens and Atlanta, GA; Champaign-Urbana, IL; Los Angeles, CA; Honolulu, HI; New York, NY; San Francisco, CA; and Seattle, WA.
The Slow Currents contribution to the 2024 Festival was developed by Rosabel Tan (Aotearoa) and Leah Jing McIntosh (Australia).
“rock flight is relentlessly potent,” writes Korean American poet Don Mee Choi about Hasib Hourani’s debut book, a personal and historical narrative of Palestine’s occupation. At once claustrophobic and unsettlingly exposed, this book-length poem seeks new forms of language to articulate this ongoing horror and the ongoing resistance. Hasib speaks with writer and artist Cathy Linh Che about writing into the wound, explorations with form, and the state of literature in Australia and the US.
“Revenge, hair, ghosts, signs and omens, inheritance, the sun; sharp or dissolved, the double, the unsayable, the outward landscape manifest in the body, beauty, heat, fervour, betrayal, the material of memory” — marginalia scrawled by one journalist in Saraid de Silva’s debut novel, Amma, which follows three generations of South Asian women who reject, who regret, who brawl and search for love in the worlds they have inherited. From Aotearoa, she joins writer, performing artist and lawyer Gowri Koneswaran to discuss grief, rage, and writing across Sri Lanka’s diaspora.
‘Best of’ poetry collections, as Chris Tse writes in his introduction to Best New Zealand Poems 2023, “provide something of a ‘state of the nation’ view of poetry.” As Best of Australian Poems 2023 co-editor Panda Wong reflects, they are “what poets were feeling, thinking and imagining across many different forms, mediums and lexicons” — in those times when the events around us are “too much for us to process or express in everyday language”. So what are those feelings, those thoughts, those imaginings — how do they collide and diverge from across our oceans, and what are our poets telling us about the world in which we live? Join Chris and Panda as they reflect on 2023 through the eyes of our poets in Aotearoa and Australia