Page Turner Festival

Saturday, October 29, 2011, 11AM-7PM
powerHouse Arena, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn & Melville House, 145 Plymouth St, Brooklyn
$5 per event / $20 All-Day Pass / $30 All-Day Pass (w/ Afterword Party)

Come rub elbows and knock knees with your favorite writers at one of Brooklyn’s best alternative literary festivals: the third annual PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival. Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the festival features a Korean taco trunk, two stand-up comedians, five National Book Award finalists, seven Guggenheim Fellows, a killer afterparty with the best playlist of all time, and you!

• An all-star line-up featuring: Junot Díaz, Amitav Ghosh, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Hari Kunzru, Jayne Anne Phillips, Suketu Mehta, Min Jin Lee, Mark Nowak, Amitava Kumar, Granta editor John Freeman, and Guernica editor Joel Whitney.
• Your favorite new voices: Teju Cole (author of Open City), Danielle Evans (NBA 5 Under 35 winner), Booker finalist Hisham Matar, Pen Faulkner winner Sabina Murray, Whiting Award winner Alexander Chee, Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang, National Book Award finalist Monica Youn, and NBCC finalist Brenda Shaughnessy.
• Multi-dimensional program includes: a staged reading directed by Ralph Peña; artist Wangechi Mutu (MOMA, Guggenheim) talking about immigration; an open mic featuring Jen Kwok (Date an Asian), Negin Farsad (Nerdcore Rising) and others; stories from twenty years of the Workshop; and hard-hitting conversations about Occupy Wall Street, Islam and the West, the rise of China and India, and the national crackdown on immigration.

Keep coming back as we update our full schedule here. Co-sponsored by Melville House, powerHouse Arena, Verso Books, MTV, Guernica, and Granta.

 Day-passes and tickets will be available for sale at the door. If you have already purchased a ticket, your name will be at the door.

The Afterword Party

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011, 8PM-11PM
Verso Press
20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn
$10; $30 for 4; $30 with Festival day pass

The Saturday before Halloween join us for music, drinks, dancing, and fine company for the raucous afterparty for the Page Turner Literary Festival.  We’ll have a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline at night, a killer playlist for your dancing shoes, cake, noisemakers, glitter, a giant piñata, and infinite quantities of beer and wine. Special guests include former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee and two special guest DJs: Baohaus celebrity chef Eddie Huang, star of upcoming show TV Dinners, and Sujatha Fernandes, author of Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Verso), a book Jeff Chang calls "a classic of hip hop writing." ?

Additional playlist selected by some of New York's hottest cultural figures: Kris Chen (head of XL Recordings in America, the label of Vampire Weekend, the XX, Sigur Ros), hip hop trio Das Racist, sports blogger Nathaniel Friedman (The Classical, Free Darko), literary enfant terrible Tao Lin, Jefferson “Chairman” Mao (Ego Trip NYC), writer Luc Sante (author of Low Life, Factory of Facts), novelist Lynne Tillman, music journalist Dave Tompkins (author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach), Michael Vazquez (Senior Editor, Bidoun magazine), music critic and DJ Oliver “O-Dub” Wang (soul-sides.com). Before the dancing starts, we’ll also honor the winners of the Fourteenth Annual Asian American Literary Awards: Amitava Kumar, winner of our nonfiction award which will be presented by past honoree Suketu Mehta, and Kimiko Hahn, our poetry award-winner. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, one of the country’s premiere literary arts spaces, is throwing the party to end all parties.  We want you there. Celebrate our twentieth anniversary and reserve your space today. Co-sponsored by MTV World, Verso, Granta, Guernica, Beerlao, NoveRoma wines.

*** Day-passes and tickets will be available for sale at the door. If you have already purchased a ticket, your name will be at the door.

GALA KICK-OFF DINNER HONORING JESSICA HAGEDORN with Bob Holman

Thursday, October 27, 2011, 8PM
Maharlika Filipino Moderno
111 1st Ave, New York
$250 Dinner ticket, $1000 for five

Celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Workshop at an intimate dinner honoring legendary writer Jessica Hagedorn with our 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award. (Read why Ishmael Reed, Maxine Hong Kingston and David Henry Hwang think she deserves thie award here.) She'll be honored by Bob Holman, founder of downtown New York spoken word mecca the Bowery Poetry Club and host on MTV's "Spoken Word Unplugged."

Maharlika Filipino Modern, a hip East Village foodie hotspot, has created a special three-course menu of arrozcaldo, a special main course and dessert. Praised by New York Magazine and Time Out New York, chef Miguel Trinidad trained not just from the culinary establishment, but also with “moms and grandmothers” in the Philippines. Event sponsored by NoveRoma wines, a family-run winery located in Lodi, California with a goal to produce and support artisan wines, local art, and sustainable food. Tickets include PAGE TURNER festival and Afterword party.

If you can’t join us, we encourage you to donate in absentia to honor Jessica and invest in one of the hottest cultural events in New York. You’ll be investing in workshops for underserved youth, scholarships for high school students, and an ambitious web-magazine set to launch this spring.(Photograph of Hagedorn courtesy of Marion Ettlinger.)

The Chindia Dialogues

November 3-6, 2011
Asia Society and Museum
725 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021

The inaugural Asian Arts & Ideas Forum, The Chindia Dialogues brings together established and emerging writers, thinkers and performing artists from China and India to engage in a vital cultural dialogue. Intellectual ties between China and India have stretched over most of the first millennium and beyond and are particularly relevant in understanding the history of a third of the world’s population and its contemporary political and social concerns. Through one-on-one conversations, panel discussions and music performances, The Chindia Dialogues explore the role that literature and the arts have played — and continue to play — in the shared values and interests that link two of Asia’s most influential nations, but also to America and the rest of the world.

Featuring writers Amit Chaudhuri, Siddhartha Deb, Amitav Ghosh, Yu Hua, Ha Jin, Meena Kandasamy, Suketu Mehta, Jonathan Spence, Su Tong, Xu Xiaobin, Murong Xuecun, and others. (For participant biographies and external links click here.) Featuring musicians Zhang Le, Dave Liang’s The Shanghai Restoration Project, Gingger Shankar, The Amit Chaudhuri Band, Qian Yi, Du Yun, and others.

The Chindia Dialogues (November 3 - 6) take place in conjunction with the Asia Society Museum exhibition Rabindranath Tagore: The Last Harvest (September 9-December 31, 2011), celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Asia’s first Nobel laureate in literature — his extraordinary achievement as a writer, composer and visual artist, and his visionary commitment to Asian cultural dialogue and global citizenship. Click on individual programs for prices and more information. All programs subject to change. For more information see here.