We welcome you to an intimate dinner honoring legendary writer JESSICA HAGEDORN and celebrating the twentieth anniversary of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Novelist, playwright, poet, early supporter of the Workshop, and former punk band leader, 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.” The award will be presented by poet BOB HOLMAN, founder of the Bowery Poetry Club. Tickets include free passes to all other PAGE TURNER events. Click here for tickets and more information.

Hosted by novelist Ed Lin and comedian Jen Kwok (“Date an Asian”), the Workshop’s famous open mic pairs stand-up comics and literary writers. Come read your own story alongside poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, whose book Love Cake combines “escaped working class girl,” “sexy queer femme,” and “bittersweet love” (Aya de Leon), and comic/filmmaker Negin Farsad, the HuffPo Top 50 Funniest Woman behind Nerdcore Rising, the feature film about nerds and hip hip.

Occupy Wall Street has grown from an Adbusters cover image and a few pepper-sprayed protestors at Zuccotti Park to a major international movement dedicated to class equality. A leaderless coalition, the #OWS protestors have rallied against broad economic injustice--such as the corporate takeover of electoral politics and the healthcare industry. Our panelists include: Guggenheim Fellow Mark Nowak, an SEIU organizer-poet who’s blogging about #OWS for The Monthly Review; Dora Calott Wang, author of The Kitchen Shrink, a memoir that “blows the whistle on the heath-care industry” (Maxine Hong Kingston) and founder of the Occupy Healthcare page on Facebook; and the Brennan Center’s Monica Youn, a National Book Award-nominated poet who has testified before Congress about campaign finance reform and edited Money, Politics, and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United. Moderated by Joel Whitney, editor of Guernica / A Magaine of Arts & Politics.

It’s been said that before September 11, no one had an opinion on Islam--but after September 11, everyone did--just not the right ones. After three wars, Islam, West and South Asia, and the Arab world remain places that are insufficiently imagined, to paraphrase Salman Rushdie. The media usually presents Pakistan, in particular, via the pernicious clichés of suicide bombers, infanticide, and general-purpose terror. Against this orientalist narrative, two new books question the Huntingtonian underpinning of the West’s view of Islam and illustrate the continuity between the Cold War and the War on Terror, painting a more granulated portrait of the sixth most populated country in the world: Deborah Baker’s The Convert, just shortlisted for the National Book Award, and Saadia Toor’s The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan. Deborah Baker’s biography tells the story of a single woman: Maryam Jameelah  née Margaret Marcus, a secular Jew in Mamaroneck, N.Y. who converted to Islam and moved to Pakistan in 1962, becoming a leading critic of American foreign policy. “Sweeping books on the big wars can’t do what this focused gaze on a single misfit so vividly accomplishes,” writes Kiran Desai. Against the mainstream account of Islamic militants, Saadia Toor tells the untold story of the Pakistani left and re-imagines Pakistani nationalism and the history of Cold War cultural production. As historian David Ludden writes, "Saadia Toor reveals a country that is nothing like the hotbed of Islamic extremism and military dictatorship we read about constantly. This book is a powerful antidote to reactionary stereotypes of Pakistan that dominate academic research and popular media."

In 2011, the biggest conversation regarding Asian America wasn't about the rise of China and India or some UCLA student’s rant about Asians in the library. It was about moms--hard-ass, unsympathetic, perpetually dissatisfied Tiger Moms, to be more specific. This year, we held two-installments of MOM MIC: The Mom Open Mic, during which real-life Asian American mothers shared stories about the joys and woes of motherhood. Now we’re back with an all-star discussion about the special and vexing state of being a mother or a daughter. National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Brenda Shaughnessy, a recent mother of two, offers a stunning riposte to the Tiger Mom phenom. National Book Award Finalist Jayne Anne Phillips’s novel MotherKind follows a woman who loses her terminally ill mother just as her first child is being born--it’s “a book about forfeiting the strongest link one has to one's self, about turning around and spinning a web toward the baby in one's arms” (Salon.com). Danielle Evans, one of the National Book Foundation’s Top 5 Writers Under 35, is the author of story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, which mostly centers around teen girls and young women coming of age--in the words of novelist Victor LaValle, it’s “funny as hell.”

This September, the Workshop sent more than 50 writers, artists, and organizers to Arizona to witness the ground zero of the national civil rights battle over immigration. We called it CultureStrike--a movement of artists seeking to re-invent how our country imagines immigration. Hear four CultureStrike delegates--music journalist Elizabeth Mendez Berry (Washington Post, Vibe), novelist Teju Cole (author of Open City, praised by James Wood in The New Yorker), Verso editor Andrew Hsiao, and visual artist Wangechi Mutu (MOMA, Guggenheim), discuss the national crackdown on immigration and what artists can do about it.

Have you already converted all your dollars to Yuan? Or are you planning on outsourcing your future to Bangalore? Well, put down that Thomas Friedman editorial! We may be accustomed to hearing triumphalist crowing about China and India dominating the 21st century. This panel presents a more nuanced account of the two largest nations in the world undergoing world historical transformations. Granta Editor John Freeman talks with Siddhartha Deb, author of The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India (a “subtle, startlingly intelligent narrative”--The Guardian) and Jianying Zha, author of Tide Players (a “panorama of the strange journey taken by her generation of Chinese, who’ve gone from being Mao’s little red children to bitterly disillusioned adults”--Kirkus).

How does one write as a global citizen? How does the way we talk about literary craft change in the age of the Arab Spring and U.S. interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen? Join us for a conversation with two cosmopolitan writer-intellectuals, Amitava Kumar and Hisham Matar. Winner of the 2011 Asian American Literary Award in Nonfiction, Amitava Kumar is the author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, a "perceptive and soulful" meditation on the global war on terror and how visual artists have chosen to represent it (New York Times). The Booker-shortlisted author of Anatomy of a Disappearance, Hisham Matar was described by the New York Times as the most powerful “authentic interpreter and witness” capable of speaking “across cultures and make us feel the abundant miseries that fueled the revolt.” Matar’s father, a Libyan dissident, was kidnapped by the Qaddafi regime and taken to Tripoli’s notorious Abu Selim prison, his fate still unknown. Moderated by Zohra Saed, editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Afghan American Literature with Sahar Muradi.

Four incredible poets re-imagine the world we live in. This year’s winner of the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry, Kimiko Hahn makes you feel like “someone [is] tearing the past apart and rebuilding with naked, raw hands” (Adrienne Rich). Her newest collection, Toxic Flora, plunders the language of the New York Times Science section to weave stunning poems of supernovae and sexual cannibalism. In Tracy K. Smith’s stellar collection Life On Mars, sometimes the darkest matter is the space between people held together by something other than love. Guggenheim Fellow Garrett Hongo’s Coral Road recounts the experience of his Japanese American great-grandparents laboring in Hawaiian plantations via sumptuous narrative poems and Sebaldian photograph. A poetry finalist in this year's Asian American Literary Awards, Molly Gaudry's We Take Me Apart is "a scissor-sharp fairytale in verse for adults" (Wing Tek Lum).

Booker Finalist Amitav Ghosh has written “one of the masterpieces of twenty-first century fiction” (The Literary Review)--a deconstructive mash-up of antiquated sea jargon and Dickensian melodrama that could only have been written in our own age of American empire, globalized trade and Chinese ascendancy. And did we mention that it’s a rollicking pirate novel? The first two installments of the Ibis trilogy--Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke--re-imagines the 19th Century opium trade of Canton and the Ganges via a uniquely multi-national cast: a half-Parsi, half-Chinese son of a wealthy opium merchant; a French orphan deckhand; a bankrupt Raja; and a mixed-race American freedman told to bring more coolie labor to India. Ghosh reimagines entire economic blocs of transnational Asian trade, performing “a subversive act of empathy, viewing a whole panorama of world history from the ‘wrong’ end of the telescope” (The Observer)--and it’s a dazzling page-turner! In conversation with Ken Chen, Executive Director of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop and author of Juvenilia.

We've invented a special teleportation device--it can take you anywhere, any time, any place. It’s called a book. Four writers pave at the edges of the map in wild, searing yarns of violence, frontiers, and exploration. A countercultural maximalist romp, Hari Kunzru’s forthcoming Gods Without Men tells the story of eclectic frontiersmen: an Eighteenth-century Franciscan explorer; a Mormon miner who can hear the silver singing in the rocks, and a guilt-ridden aircraft engineer trying to contact Venus. Winner of the 2005 Asian American Literary Award for his short story collection World Famous Love Acts, Brian Leung tells a classic story of the Chinese American experience in Take Me Home--only it’s a Western about an 1880s Wyoming coal-mining town. Whales swallow ships and Balboa takes a leak in PEN/Faulkner winner Sabina Murray’s Tales of the New World, a story collection whose intrepid, onward-marching, sadistic cast includes Balboa’s dog, Ferdinand Magellan, and Australian explorer William Dampier, the first man to circumnavigate the world three times. Julie Otsuka’s knife-like The Buddha in the Attic, recently shortlisted for the National Book Award, follows the second-class immigrant lives of Japanese mail-order brides in 1920s California. Enjoy these tales of conquistadors, gun-slingers and immigrants by four transporting writers.

Exactly what it says.

As you can see in our awards section, Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Jessica Hagedorn is a “Queen of Letters” (Ishmael Reed), the “coolest, hottest girl I’d ever met” (David Henry Hwang) and the possessor of “superlative hair product” (Kimiko Hahn). The culminating event at PAGE TURNER, we start our Hagedorn tribute with a no-holds-barred staged reading of Hagedorn’s newest novel Toxicology, directed by Ma-Yi Theater Company artistic director Ralph Peña. Hagedorn talks with University of California Irvine Professor and Filipina rocker ChristinE Balance and then reads from Toxicology, an edgy bohemian tour through the world of a celebrity New York of literati, cineastes, and cokeheads. As Publishers Weekly wrote in a starred review, “Hagedorn has composed a jazzy, stingingly smart tragicomedy of toxic substances, hate, and delusions; hustle and creativity; obsession and passion.”

The Saturday before Halloween join us for music, drinks, dancing, and fine company for the raucous afterparty for the PAGE TURNER Literary Festival.  Put on your finest duds (costume optional) and come out to DUMBO for the first big party of the season. We’ll have a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline at night, a killer playlist, 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."

Additionally, we’ll have a 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 honoring 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, Beer Laos, and NoveRoma wines.

Purchase tickets here: http://pageturnerfest.org/#afterword.