Deborah Baker

Deborah Baker was born in Charlottesville and is a graduate of the University of Virginia. She is the author of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2008 Penguin published her book A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, a narrative account of Allen Ginsberg’s travels in India. While a Fellow at the New York Public Library, she researched and wrote The Convert, which is currently a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction. She is married to Amitav Ghosh, with whom she has two children, and together they divide their time between Goa, Kolkata, and Brooklyn, New York. Photo credit to Julienne Schaer.

Christine Balance

Christine Bacareza Balance is currently an Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Her writing has been published in Women & Performance: a feminist journal, the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Theatre Journal, as well as online at In Media Res. From 2003-2004, Balance had the honor of assisting Jessica Hagedorn in editing the anthology Charlie Chan is Dead 2: At Home in the World (Penguin, 2004) as well as co-organizing with her, At Home in the World: Asian American Literatures (New York University), a conference featuring leading Asian American literary scholars and artists. In 2007, she wrote a short piece, Searching for Cunanan: Filipino America and Its Notorious Son, that appeared in the La Jolla Playhouse's Engagement Guide published for the 2007 premiere of Hagedorn and Mark Bennett's music theatre production Most Wanted. She is currently writing a book on popular music and performance in post-World War II Filipino America.

Elizabeth Mendez Berry

Elizabeth Méndez Berry's work has appeared in the Washington Post, Vibe, the Village Voice, Smithsonian, and Time, among many others. She has written about topics from music to immigration to Mexican wrestling. "Love Hurts," her investigative article on domestic violence in the hip hop industry, won ASCAP's 2006 Deems Taylor award for music reporting. In 2008, she won the Columbia Journalism School's Hechinger award for best education coverage for her piece on the death of a Bronx high school. Méndez Berry has been interviewed about music and culture by NPR, NBC, CBC, CNN en español, and many more. She is an adjunct professor at NYU's Clive Davis School of Recorded Music, where she teaches music journalism. Born and raised in Toronto, she now lives in Queens, New York.

Nancy Bulalacao

Nancy Bulalacao studied performance poetry at New School University. She was co-founder and Executive Director of Poets Theater on St Mark’s Place and for over 16 years has organized Asian American public programs for organizations including Asia Society, Museum of Chinese in America, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Tina Chang

Tina Chang, Brooklyn Poet Laureate, is the author of Half-Lit Houses and co-editor of the W.W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, among others. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Her new collection of poetry, Of Gods & Strangers, has just been released by Four Way Books.

Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony , the VCCA, Ledig House, the Hermitage and Civitella Ranieri . His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. In 2003, Out Magazine honored him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His essays and stories have appeared in Granta.com, Out, The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, Men On Men 2000, His 3 and Boys Like Us. He has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at the New School University, Wesleyan, Amherst College, and in spring 2011 he taught in the Fiction program at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in New York City and blogs at Koreanish. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Ken Chen

Ken Chen is the Executive Director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Award, the oldest annual literary award in America, for his book Juvenilia selected by the poet Louise Glück. A Yale Law School graduate, Ken represented a Guinean teenager detained by Homeland Security, in a case profiled by the New York Times. A NYFA and Breadloaf fellow, Ken co-founded cultural website Arts & Letters Daily. In addition to blogging for Montevidayo, his writing has appeared in Best American Essays 2006, Fence, Jubilat, Boston Review and CNN.

Teju Cole

Teju Cole is a writer, art historian, street photographer. Born in the US (1975) to Nigerian parents, raised in Nigeria. Lives in Brooklyn. Author of two books, a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, and a novel, Open City. The New York Times praises Open City as “An indelible novel. Does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders…A compassionate and masterly work.” James Wood at the New Yorker writes, “Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original…What moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing. Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition.” Contributor to Qarrtsiluni, Chimurenga, The New Yorker, Transition, Tin House, etc. Currently at work on a book-length non-fiction narrative of Lagos, and on Small Fates. Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College (from Spring 2012).

Siddhartha Deb

Siddhartha Deb teaches creative writing at the New School in New York City and is the author of two novels: The Point of Return, which was a 2003 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and An Outline of the Republic. His most recent book is The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India. His reviews and journalism have appeared in The Boston Globe,The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, the New Statesman, n+1, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), in Pushcart Prize XXII and in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2009. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Danielle Evans

Danielle Evans is the author of the short-story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, which was a co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book, the winner of the 2011 Paterson Prize for Fiction, was named one of the best books of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews and O Magazine, won an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway award, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, Callaloo, and Phoebe, has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and 2010, and in New Stories from the South. She teaches literature and creative writing at American University in Washington DC. Photo credit to Nina Subin.

Negin Farsad

As a standup comedian she has opened for the likes of Al Franken and Bobby Lee (Mad TV) in venues ranging from the Laugh Factory in New York, the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, and Town Hall on Broadway. Negin has provided original comedy content for PBS, Pacifica and Sirius Radio stations. She has been an active comedian and producer for over ten years earning a nomination for the Emerging Comics of New York Awards and her own off-Broadway run for the comedy show The Dirty Immigrant Collective. Her solo show Bootleg Islam, which she wrote and performed, has appeared in the DC, Dallas, and Chicago Comedy Festivals among others. Her work has been called “smart, funny, and fascinating” by the Wall Street Journal, a Critic’s Choice by the Chicago Tribune, “a shining exception,” by the Dallas Morning News, and Backstage cheered that it “doesn’t get much funnier than this!”

Sujatha Fernandes

Sujatha Fernandes is a former MC and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Cuba Represent! Cuba Arts, State Power, and the Making of the New Revolutionary Cultures, Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chavez's Venezuela and, most recently, Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation.

John Freeman

John Freeman has been editor of Granta since 2009. He is the author of The Tyranny of E-Mail and former president of the National Book Critics Circle. His criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and the Independent.

Molly Gaudry

Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart (Novel(La)), which was shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil, and she is the founder of The Lit Pub.

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and Sea of Poppies, which is the first volume of a projected series of novels, The Ibis Trilogy. Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award. Amitav Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. In January 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, Amitav Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. His next novel, River of Smoke, is forthcoming from John Murray (UK) in June 2011; Penguin India (July, 2011) and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (US) in October 2011.

Jessica Hagedorn

Novelist, playwright, poet, early supporter of the Workshop, and former punk band leader, Jessica Hagedorn is the recipient of the Workshop’s 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the author of several books, including the new novel Toxicology (Viking), a Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week, and Dogeaters, a National Book Award nominated instant classic, which The New York Times Book Review described as a “fast, frequently hair-raising first novel... that maps the ruin at the heart of Philippine society in the last four decades.” Hagedorn also edited the landmark two-volume collection Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Asian American Fiction (Penguin), which showcased two generations of writers, many of them published there for the first time. These writers included Chang-rae Lee, R. Zamora Linmark, Monique Truong, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Han Ong, Fae Myenne Ng and many others. More recently, she traveled to the Arizona border as part of the Asian American Writers' Workshop's CultureStrike delegation. As the novelist Russell Banks has said, “Jessica Hagedorn is one of the best of a generation of writers who are making the American language new and who in the process are creating a New American Literature.”

Kimiko Hahn

Kimiko Hahn, author of eight collections, finds her material from disparate sources--whether exhumation (The Artist's Daughter) or classical Japanese texts (The Narrow Road to the Interior).   Rarified fields of science triggered her latest work in Toxic Flora and continue in her current writing on various aspects of the brain. Excerpts from the latter will be featured in the Nov./Dec. 2011 issue of The American Poetry Review.  She is also collaborating on translation from Japanese. Other writing projects have taken her to film and TV.  Her most recent award was a Guggenheim Fellowship and she is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York. (Photo by N. Bareis.)

Bob Holman

Bob Holman, is a leader of the spoken word poetry movement including slam and hiphop poetries. Holman also teaches at Columbia and NYU and is a founder of the downtown New York spoken word mecca, the Bowery Poetry Club. For years he has been a public poet in the oral traditions of the skaldic bards, Homeric  warblers, and West African griots. He has published/edited fifteen books, including American Book Award winner Aloud!: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (co-editor), A Couple of ways of Doing Something, a collaboration with Chuck Close (Aperture) and Crossing State Lines: An American Renga from Farrar Strauss (co-editor). Holman is a proponent of poetry-media collaborations: he produced five seasons of "Poetry Spots" for WNYC-TV, winning three Emmys, and his five-part PBS series, The United States of Poetry, won an INPUT (International Public Television) Prize. He was host on MTV's "Spoken Word Unplugged," appeared on "HBO Def Poetry Jam," and created the first major spoken word record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury. He is co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, and in preparation for hosting "Word Up!," a new PBS documentary on the poetry of Endangered Languages, he spent two months in West Africa filming the West African griot traditions, spending time with Toumani Diabate and Vieux Toure, and the Tuareg and Dogon tribes, and has just returned from Wales where he is learning the language and how it has recently moved from the Endangered category.

Garrett Hongo

Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai`i and grew up on the North Shore of O`ahu and in Los Angeles.  He was educated at Pomona College, the University of Michigan, and UC Irvine, where he received an M.F.A.  His work includes three books of poetry, three anthologies, and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai`i. He is the editor of The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (Anchor) and Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian America (Anchor).  Poems and essays of his have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, APR, Honolulu Weekly, Amerasia Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, Raritan, and the LA Times. Among his honors are the Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, and the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His latest book of poetry, Coral Road, was published by Knopf in Fall 2011.  He is presently at work on a book of non-fiction entitled The Perfect Sound. He teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences.

Andrew Hsiao

Andrew Hsiao is a senior editor with Verso Books. He was the executive editor of The New Press, and an editor and staff writer with The Village Voice. He’s written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Spin, and other publications, and is the author of a deck of playing cards, Regime Change Begins at Home. He’s been a labor organizer and a board member of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities and former board chair of the Asian American Writers Workshop. He joined the Asia Pacific Forum in 1999.

Eddie Huang

Open for just over a year, Eddie's restaurant, Baohaus, has received critical acclaim and coverage from the New York Times, Time Magazine, The New York Post, New York Magazine, Serious Eats, Time Out New York, The Tasting Table, CNN, The New York Observer, Cooking Channel, Food Network, Village Voice and many more. The closest Eddie came to “formal” cooking training was from his mother. Influenced by her style, he developed his own unique recipes and techniques by eating out, taking notes and recreating dishes at home. He believes that everyone has three cooking classes-a-day: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner. He is a culinary outsider who became an insider by creating his own opportunities. Before Baohaus, Eddie enjoyed various professions including writer (ESPN.com, Orlando Sentinel, Yahoo, XXL), lawyer and stand-up comedian. In his spare time, Eddie enjoys watching the Redskins, Knicks, hitting the roor, and hollering at birds. More on Eddie: 101 People You Must Meet in 2011, Village Voice Web Award, Best Internet Character, NY Magazine Best Bun in NY, TIME Out NY best Fries, NY Magazine Best Cheap Eats, and got a flawless $25 and Under NYT Review. Photo credit: Phil Chang

Lisa Ko

Lisa Ko has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellow, and the recipient of a Jerome Foundation fellowship for emerging writers. Her fiction has been published in Narrative, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, and Brooklyn Review, among other publications. She has received writing residencies from the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She was a co-founder of the Asian American print magazine Hyphen and teaches literature and fiction writing at the City College of New York, where she earned an MFA in creative writing.

Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar is the author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb (non-fiction) and Nobody Does the Right Thing (fiction). Part reportage and part protest, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb is an inquiry into the cultural logic and global repercussions of the war on terror. The book follows two ineffectual men--whom Kumar calls "accidental terrorists"--who are entrapped by the US Government into becoming actual terrorists, as well as analyzing the visual art that has risen to represent the war on terror. In his New York Times review, Dwight Garner called it in turns an "angry and artful" and a "perceptive and soulful" meditation on "the cultural and human repercussions" of the global war on terror. A board member of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Amitava grew up in Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar, he is the author of Husband of a Fanatic (The New Press, 2005), an "Editors' Choice" book at the New York Times. He is also the author of Bombay-London-New York (Routledge, 2002), and Passport Photos (University of California Press, 2000). His novel, Home Products (Picador-India, 2007) was a finalist for India's premier literary award, Vodafone Crossword Prize.

Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007) and Gods Without Men (2011), as well as a short story collection, Noise (2006). His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and won him prizes including the Somerset Maugham award, the Betty Trask prize of the Society of Authors, a Pushcart prize and a British Book Award. In 2003 Granta named him one of its twenty best young British novelists. Lire magazine named him one of its 50 "écrivains pour demain". He is Deputy President of English PEN, a patron of the Refugee Council and a member of the editorial board of Mute magazine. His short stories and journalism have appeared in diverse publications including The New York Times, Guardian, New Yorker, Financial Times, Times of India, Wired and New Statesman. He lives in New York City. For more, visit his blog at HariKunzru.com.

Jen Kwok

Jen Kwok is a delightful ukulele comedian who loves to entertain you! Armed with a velvety voice and razor-sharp wit, Jen’s unique performance style flips stereotypes and takes a twisted spin on everyday life. In college, Jen triple-majored in business, but traded in spreadsheets for punch lines after being named a national finalist in NBC’s Stand-Up for Diversity. Since then, Jen has been profiled by The New York Times, PBS, and MTV, and her viral web videos – including the much loved, yet mildly controversial “Date an Asian” - have pulled in over 3 million views. Her music video, “Take You Home”, was featured on Comedy Central. Jen also made her film debut this past summer in “Eat, Pray, Love”. Based in New York, Jen performs everywhere from “classy” venues like Highline Ballroom and Gotham Comedy Club to bawdy basement burlesque shows and college campuses. A prominent member of the Asian American performing community, Jen hosts PBS’ Asian America and the Asian-American Writer’s Workshop’s Open Mic series. As a writer, Jen’s work has also appeared on Marieclaire.com, VH1.com and TV Grapevine.

Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee’s debut novel FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES was a No. 1 Book Sense Pick, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and a Wall Street Journal Book Club selection. A national bestseller, it was a Top 10 Novels of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air and USA Today. Her short fiction received the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story and was featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts.  Her writings on culture, travel, 19^th century literature, race and feminism have been published in anthologies and Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, and Food & Wine. She has served three terms as a columnist for the leading South Korean newspaper the Chosun Ilbo. She has lectured about literature, transnationalism, race and feminism at Columbia, Stanford, Johns Hopkins (SAIS), Yale University, Ewha University, Waseda University, the Asia Society (New York, San Franciso, and Hong Kong) and the Tokyo American Center of the U.S. Embassy.  A graduate of Yale College and Georgetown University Law Center, she worked as a lawyer prior to writing full time. She lives in New York with her husband and son.

Jennifer 8. Lee

Jennifer 8. Lee is the author of the bestselling The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, an exploration of the Chinese roots of all-American “Chinese” food, a summary which can be seen on TED.com. The book, which earned her appearances on the Colbert Report and Martha Stewart, reveals the inventor of the fortune cookie and the biography of General Tso, as well as talking about the fascinating history of the Chinese in American. Lee is a former fixture at The New York Times, where her journalistic work garnered her the title (bestowed by NPR) of “conceptual scoop artist.” She was listed in the 2003 Esquire “Women We Love” issue.

Brian Leung

Brian Leung is the author of the novel Take Me Home, recipient of the 2011 Willa Award for Historical Fiction. He is also the author of the novel Lost Men as well as the story collection World Famous Love Acts, a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. His poetry, creative nonfiction, and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is a collector of animation art and of the artist Charles Harper. He was born and raised in San Diego County, and currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky where he is the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville. Photo credit: John Nation

Ed Lin

Ed Lin is the author of Waylaid, This Is a Bust and Snakes Can't Run. His fourth book, One Red Bastard, will be published in April. Ed has won two Members' Choice Asian American Literary Awards. A member of AAWW since 1992, he lives in New York City with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung. www.edlinforpresident.com.

Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. His first novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It won six international literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. It has been translated into twenty-six languages. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, has just been published. Matar lives in London, and serves as an associate professor at Barnard College in New York City. Photo credit to Diana Matar.

Suketu Mehta

Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta's work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Granta, Harpers Magazine, and Time, and has been featured on  NPR's 'Fresh Air'. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written an original screenplay for 'The Goddess,' a Merchant-Ivory film starring Tina Turner, and 'Mission Kashmir', a Bollywood movie.

Sabina Murray

Sabina Murray was born in 1968 and grew up in Australia and the Philippines.  She is the author of the novels Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Slow Burn. Her short story collection The Caprices was the winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award.  Tales of The New World, short stories, is just out from Black Cat/Grove.  Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charilie Chan is Dead II: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian Fiction.  She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, which was an Independent Spirit Award Best First Screenplay nominee. Murray completed her Master of Arts as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and is a former Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a recipient of a major grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.  She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and served as the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy Andover.  She recently received the Brown Literary Award from the University of Pittsburgh.  Murray is Professor of English and teaches in the MFA/Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu was born in Kenya and currently creates and lives in New York. With a deep investment in the female subject and issues that pertain to the picture of a post-colonial African, Wangechi manages her meta-global dialogues by masterfully unfolding the complexities of gender, culture, and mass media. Reflecting her varied interests, Mutu samples from printed image sources like medical diagrams, glossy magazines, anthropology, pornographic materials, traditional African arts, and mechanical and hunting publications. The artist’s signature is a remaking of that typical, misguided narrative and placement of the contemporary African and female African. Her work is included in major collections of the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, San Francisco MoMA, New York MoMA, and the Whitney Museum.

Derek Nguyen

Mark Nowak

Mark Nowak is a documentary poet, social critic, and labor activist, whose writings include Shut Up Shut Down (afterword by Amiri Baraka), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and the recently published book on coal mining disasters in the US and China, Coal Mountain Elementary (2009), that Howard Zinn has called “a stunning educational tool.”  Nowak’s transnational worker-to-worker poetry dialogues create a unique opportunity for working people to analyze, communicate, and express (through poetry) their ideas and emotions about their work, particularly in work spaces experiencing the effects of downsizing, plant closings, worker-management tensions, or strikes. Nowak’s poetry, similarly, has engaged central issues of work, family, and community. In his projects and publications, Nowak is, as poet Adrienne Rich has written of his work, “regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature.”

Peter Ong

Peter Ong grew up in Queens as a child of immigrant parents. He is an Associate Director of Pastoral and Laity Ministries and is developing an Asian American Church project to equip and serve Asian American leadership in local New York churches. He currently is Director of Gospel Community at Living Faith Community Church where he works in the area of Mercy and Justice.In addition to working in ministry, Peter has published reviews on graphic novels, and comics.He writes on his blog at www.peterwong.wordpress.com. Peter Ong is happily married to Jamie Ong; they are now living out in Long Island with their son, Nicolas, and welcomed their newest addition, Noah in 2010.

Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. After studying art as an undergraduate at Yale University she pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing at age 30. She received her MFA from Columbia. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian American Literary Award, and the American Library Association Alex Award. Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine (Knopf, 2002), is about the internment of a Japanese-American family during World War II. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers finalist. The book is based on Otsuka’s own family history: her grandfather was arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and her mother, uncle and grandmother spent three years in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah.When the Emperor Was Divine has been translated into six languages and sold more than 250,000 copies. The New York Times called it “a resonant and beautifully nuanced achievement.” It has been assigned to all incoming freshmen at more than 35 colleges and universities and is a regular ‘Community Reads’ selection across the US. Otsuka’s fiction has been published in Granta and Harper’s and read aloud on PRI’s “Selected Shorts” and BBC Radio 4’s “Book at Bedtime.” Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf, 2011), is about a group of young Japanese ‘picture brides’ who sailed to America in the early 1900s to become the wives of men they had never met and knew only by their photographs. It has been nominated for the 2011 National Book Award.

Jennifer Pan

Jennifer Pan is currently the web managing editor at the Center for Fiction. She has also worked for the Asian American Writers' Workshop, the Magnum Foundation, a gourmet salt store, and a hat empire. A transplant from the Pacific Northwest, she received her BA from Reed College in 2008.

Nimesh Patel

Nimesh Patel once fought two girls and lost. At his party, he cried not because he wanted to, but because no one showed up. He's violated all of Notorious BIGs 10 crack commandments. His hatred for weathermen is only surpassed by his fear of cats that shed hair. Lastly, he wrote this on the bus this morning, because that's where his life is right now. When he's not busy crying, he performs comedy at colleges and clubs all over. He is from New Jersey, a fact he regrets mildly. Find him on Twitter @findingnimesh. Please. He needs you.

Ralph Peña

For EST/Youngblood, Ralph directed Michael Lew’s Microcrisis prior to its Off-Broadway premiere at Ma-Yi Theater Company.   Other directing credits include Savage Acts by Kia Corthron, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Han Ong, and Sung Rno, Lloyd Suh’s Children of Vonderly (Ma-Yi);  Nicky Paraiso’s House/Boy (LaMama ETC, Singapore and Dublin Theater Festivals), Will Sing! For Philadelphia Shakespeare, and Lloyd Suh’s Happy End of the World (Children’s Theater Company and Ma-Yi at Arena Stage). He is the author of several plays, including Flipzoids, Dead Man’s Socks, Project: Balangiga (co-written with Sung Rno), additional text for The Romance of Magno Rubio (Obie Award), and I__NY. Ralph is the recipient of two residencies to the Bellagio Study Center in Italy, and was a lead organizer of the first U.S. Artists delegation to the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya. He is a founding member, and the current artistic director of Ma-Yi Theater Company.

Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips was born and raised in West Virginia. Her first book of stories, Black Tickets, published in 1979 when she was 26, won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Featured in Newsweek, Black Tickets was pronounced "stories unlike any in our literature . . . a crooked beauty" by Raymond Carver and established Phillips as a writer "in love with the American language." She has gone on to write numerous novels, including Shelter, her 1994 novel, a haunting, suspenseful evocation of childhood rite-of-passage, was awarded an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Her work has appeared most recently in Harper's, Granta, Doubletake, and the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She has taught at Harvard University, Williams College, and Boston University, and is currently Professor of English and Director of a new MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. Her triumphant new novel, MotherKind, published by Knopf in May, 2000, examines timeless questions of birth and death.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Pushcart Prize nominee Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer Sri Lankan writer, teacher and cultural worker. The author of Consensual Genocide and Love Cake and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities (South End, 2011), her work has appeared in the anthologies Persistence: Still Butch and Femme, Yes Means Yes, Visible: A Femmethology, Homelands, Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Brazen Femme, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The World. She co-founded Mangos With Chili, the national queer and trans people of color performance organization, is a lead artist with Sins Invalid and teaches with June Jordan's Poetry for the People. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press' “40 Feminists Under 40 Who Are Shaping the Future.”

Nina Shen Rastogi

Nina Shen Rastogi is a Bay Area-raised writer and editor whose pieces on culture and science have appeared in Slate, the Washington Post,the International Herald Tribune, and other publications. Nina was a 2007 recipient of the Paul and Daisy SorosFellowship for New Americans and is currently the head of creative content andmarketing at Figment, the online community for young writers.

Bino A. Realuyo

A fervent and passionate social change agent, Bino A. Realuyo was born and raised in Manila Philippines. He is the son of a survivor of the Death March and Japanese Concentration Camp in the Philippines during World War 2. Realuyo is the author of the award-winning books, The Umbrella Country, and The Gods We Worship Live Next Door. His poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines including The Nation, The Literary Review, The Kenyon Review, New Letters, and in the recent anthology, Fire in the Soul: 100 Poets for Human Rights. He was a co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and is on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s international MFA program in Creative Writing. Recently, he founded { We Speak America }, a social enterprise that leverages internet-based technology to provide education, training, and work-based literacy for low-wage, low-skilled immigrants in the U.S.

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author of the memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, which is a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, an Asian American Literary Award finalist, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee and the winner of the Grub Street National Book Award.  Her first novel, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award in 2000, received a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Honolulu Advertiser.  She is also a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.  Rizzuto has been a guest on television and radio internationally, including appearances on The Today Show, The View, The Joy Behar Show, MSNBC-TV and PBS-TV, Oprah Radio, CBC Radio and NPR. She writes for Salon.com and is a featured Huffington Post blogger, and her essays and stories have appeared in the L.A. Times, the Crab Creek Review, New York Family Magazine, The Progressive, Newsday, The San Jose Mercury News, The St. Petersburg Times, The Providence Journal, the anthologies Mothers Who Think, Because I Said So, Topography of War, and Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing, among others. She was Associate Editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City, which was a Pen Open Book Honoree. She is on the faculty of the MFA program for creative writing at Goddard College. Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is half-Japanese/half-Caucasian. She grew up on the Big Island of Hawaii and lives in Brooklyn.  She was the first woman to graduate from Columbia College with a BA in Astrophysics. Her website is:  www.r3reiko.com.

Zohra Saed

Zohra Saed is a Brooklyn-based poet, academic and editor. She holds an M.F.A in Poetry from Brooklyn College and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in English at The City University of New York Graduate Center. Her poetry and essays have been published in numerous anthologies and journals. She has performed as part of the cast of the theater director Ping Chong’s “Undesirable Elements” in 2000 and in 2007, where the ensemble cast performed at the first National Asian American Theater Festival. Her academic work focuses on Central Asian & Middle Eastern American literature, film and video art. Zohra most recently co-edited One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Afghan American Literature with Sahar Muradi.

Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy is a poet and editor.  Her most recent book, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon, 2008), won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Her first book, Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999) was a finalist for the Lambda Award, Norma Farber Award, and the PEN/Joyce C. Osterweil Award.  She is the poetry editor of Tin House Magazine, has been a Radcliffe Institute Fellow and a Japan-US Friendship Commission fellow.  She teaches at Rutgers Newark campus and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.

Sadia Shepard

Sadia Shepard’s first book, The Girl from Foreign, was published by The Penguin Press in 2008. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, The Indian Express, Wall Street Journal Magazine and the New York Times. As a documentary producer, Shepard’s credits include The September Issue, an inside look at Vogue, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Excellence in Cinematography at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. She has taught non-fiction writing at Columbia University and the Wesleyan Writers Workshop and is the recipient of The Dorothy and Granville Hicks Residency in Literature at Yaddo. She is currently directing a new media project about women in Pakistan and divides her time between New York and Karachi.

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith is the author of Life on Mars, as well as two previous collections: Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essence Literary Award, and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Smith is currently a protégé in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, and a member of the Creative Writing Faculty at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. (Photo by Tina Chang.)

Saadia Toor

Saadia Toor is originally from Pakistan and is currently Assistant Professor in Sociology, Social Anthropology and Social Work at CUNY. Her scholarship revolves around issues of culture, nationalism, gender/sexuality, state formation, and international political economy. Her book The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan was published by Pluto Press in 2011.

Dora Calott Wang

Dora Calott Wang, M.D., “blows the whistle on the health care industry,” says Maxine Hong Kingston about Wang’s memoir, The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World (Riverhead/Penguin, 2010), which a starred Kirkus Review called, “A beautifully written memoir about…the transformation of the profession of medicine into the business of health care.” Wang’s widely-circulated article, “Is Wall Street Making Life or Death Decisions?” first appeared in her Huffington Post and Psychology Today blogs. An AAWW member since the 1980’s, Wang has published fiction and poetry in the Asian Pacific American Journal. She has been the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Writers Residency. A graduate of the Yale School of Medicine, Wang earned her M.A. in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She has hosted a New Mexico television talk show, Duke City Magazine. In 2006, she spearheaded the repeal of a New Mexico law forbidding Asians and persons of color from owning land.

Joel Whitney

An editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics, Joel writes on art and politics. Recent work includes a book review on Cambodia for the New York Times and an essay on the Western canon and multiculturalism for World Policy Journal. His reporting on the U.S. role in Burma has appeared in The New Republic and The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. Other work includes a book review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali for The Village Voice; short pieces on terrorism, torture and Jose Padilla for New York magazine; interviews on Burma sanctions and Obama’s soft power for Courrier International in France; criticism on poetry, neuro-lit, and an interview on the death of neoconservatism for The San Francisco Chronicle. His poems appear in The Paris Review, The Nation, and Agni—his commentary on NPR. For his poetry, he was awarded a "Discovery"/The Nation Prize by the 92nd Street Y and The Nation. He lives in Brooklyn. He’s on Twitter.

Jeannie Wong

Jeannie Wong formerly worked as the Administrative Director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop. She currently resides in Philadelphia with her partner, Edward, and their daughter, Violet.

Monica Youn

Monica Youn is the author of Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. She has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies including Fence, The Paris Review, and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress and has received residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation / Bellagio. She has taught creative writing at Pratt Institute and Columbia University, and is currently the Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at NYU Law School.

Vincent Young

Vincent Young is an educator, blogger, curriculum designer, and program developer with over a decade of experience serving teachers of students from elementary to high school with engaging lessons and activities. He is the founder of Cranial Gunk, a curriculum design and program development consultancy. He currently works as the Director of Curriculum Initiatves at the SIFMA Foundation for Investor Education. As a blogger, his posts can be read at cranialgunk.org, k2twelve.com, and ricedaddies.com.

Jianying Zha

Jianying Zha (查建英) is a writer, television commentator, and China Representative of the India China Institute at The New School. She is the author of two books in English, Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China (2011), and China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture (1995) and five books in Chinese: three collections of fiction and two non-fiction books. Bashi Niandai (The Eighties), her book published in 2006, is a cultural retrospective of the 1980s in China which has won numerous awards and is now in its ninth print run. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she has published widely in both Chinese and English for a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Dushu and Wanxiang. Born and raised in Beijing, she was educated in China and the United States, receiving degrees from Peking University, University of South Carolina, and Columbia University. She divides her time between Beijing and New York. She appears frequently in television talk-shows in China as a commentator on social and cultural topics.