Page Turner - The Asian American Literary Festival: Writers

Festival Guests

Meakin Armstrong

MEAKIN ARMSTRONG is the fiction editor at Guernica. His work has appeared in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Our Stories Literary Journal, InDigest, Sweeeeet, and in the book New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg. Forthcoming are pieces in NOÖ Journal, a fiction anthology, and a book of travel essays. For eight years, he worked at The New Yorker. Among his awards, he received a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference “waitership” and a scholarship to SLS, the Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Morteza Baharloo

MORTEZA BAHARLOO was born in Darab, Fars in southern Iran, in 1961. He conceptualized and co-founded Healix, Ltd. in 1989, a 600-plus employee healthcare conglomerate based in Houston, Texas. Mort started work on his first novel in 2001, The Quince Seed Potion, which was released, in November of 2004 by Bridge Works Publishing, an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield. He devoted most of 2005 and 2006 in researching the history, culture and contributions of his ancestors to Persia and Iran. He has compiled this extensive work into two compendia: The Baharlu Ethnographic Projects, Essays Based on Ali Gholi Khan Baharlu’s Photographs (accepted for publication by a scholarly house in New York); and The Baharlu, A Turco-Persian Tribal Confederacy; Their Contributions to Persia and India, which is currently a work-in-progress.

Continuing a long familial tradition of exploration and nomadism, Mort divides his time in Houston, Manhattan and Shiraz, Iran where he holds residences. He considers his two daughters Sahar Claire, a senior in linguistics at Reed College in Portland and Yasmine Grace, a sophomore at Columbia College of Arts in Chicago his best friends.

Zoe Beloff

ZOE BELOFF's work investigates the unconscious process of the mind and the possibility of graphically recording mental states. She considers herself a medium, an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imagined. Beloff¹s work has been featured in many international exhibitions and screenings; venues include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Freud Dream Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pompidou Center in Paris. She recently participated in the 2009 Athens Biennale, and has an upcoming project with MuHKA Museum in Antwerp. She will introduce her new project "Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and their Circle 1926-1972" currently on view at the Coney Island Museum and screen a selection of "Dream Films" from this show.

Marina Budhos

Marina Budhos is an author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction. She has published the novels, Ask Me No Questions (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster), about a Bangladeshi family snared in the post-9/11 crackdown, which was an ALA Notable and winner of the first James Cook Teen Book Award, and is currently being developed as a film. She has also published the novels The Professor of Light, House of Waiting and a nonfiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers. Her short stories, articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared in publications such as The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Literary Review, The Nation, Dissent, Marie Claire, Redbook, Travel & Leisure, Ms., The Women’s Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and in numerous anthologies. As a journalist, she has written about India and the Caribbean, covered international news for Ms. magazine, reported on sex tourism to Asia, for which she received an EMMA (Exceptional Merit Media Award). She has also received a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers and a Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She has been a Fulbright Scholar to India, and is currently on the faculty of the English Department and Asian Studies at William Paterson University. Her next novel, Tell Us We’re Home, is due out in 2010 (Atheneum/Simon and Schuster). She is married to editor and author Marc Aronson and their book, Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom & Science, is also forthcoming next year from Clarion/Houghton Mifflin. She is currently at work on a historical novel set in 19th century India and the Caribbean and lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with her husband and two sons.

Alexandra Chang

ALEXANDRA CHANG is a writer and independent curator. She has curated and written on contemporary art, graffiti, design and architecture. She has served as the Managing Editor for Art Asia Pacific magazine and Features Editor for amNew York. Her writing has appeared in Art Asia Pacific, ArtKrush, Asiance magazine, Art in Asia, amNew York, Time Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and Boston Globe among other publications. She is a co-organizer of the Diasporic Asian Art Network, a member of ArtTable, and on the organizing board of THE DROP: Urban Art Infill art festival. She is also the Director of Public Programs & Research Manager at A/P/A Institute at NYU and holds a Master's from the NYU John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's program in Humanities and Social Thought.

Henry Chang

HENRY CHANG is the author of Chinatown Beat and The Year of the Dog. The Chicago Sun-Times called Chinatown Beat "a worthy debut" and praisedChang's ability to write "with stark power and authority, covering the territory as only an insider can. He evokes the spirit, sights, smells and language of his setting in compelling fashion." Chang's follow-up, The Year of the Dog, is a novel with a "cool, measured style" that ... "should make the locals sit up and gasp" (New York Times Book Review). Read about Chang's thoughts on Chinatown and the literary imagination in this New York Times story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/nyregion/thecity/26chin.html.

Alexander Chee

ALEXANDER CHEE was born in Rhode Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the VCCA. 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 is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught fiction writing at the New School University and Wesleyan. He is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College and lives in Western Massachusetts. He blogs at Koreanish. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Abha Dawesar

ABHA DAWESAR is the author of four novels. Her novel Babyji won a Lambda award and the ALA’s Stonewall award; it was also short-listed for the Prix Médicis Etranger and the Prix Bel Ami in France. Her most recent book Family Values was shortlisted for both the Prix Femina and the Prix Médicis Etranger. It is also shortlisted for the Prix RFI Témoin du Monde. She received a NYFA Fiction Fellowship in 2000. Her writing has also been published in Le Monde, General-Anzeiger Bonn, Publishers Weekly and various magazines in France and India. She has held several international writing residencies and spoken at conferences all over the world including the Women’s Forum for Economy and Society, the female Davos. India Today magazine named her one of twenty-five path breaking Indians in 2007 and Youth Organization India honored her with a Global Youth Leadership Award this year. Her visual art has been exhibited internationally and her voice will be used to narrate the new sound and light show at the Vivekananda Memorial in Kanyakumari. On and off she keeps a blog on her site www.abhadawesar.com

Sesshu Foster

SESSHU FOSTER has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 25 years. He's also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. One of his last readings at St. Mark's Poetry Project NYC is Mp3 archived at www.salon.com and local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, www.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex (City Lights) and World Ball Notebook (City Lights).

Mr. Foster is the winner of the 2009 Asian American Literary Award for poetry.

V.V. Ganeshananthan

V.V. GANESHANANTHAN, a fiction writer and journalist, is a graduate of Harvard College, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the new M.A. program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in arts and culture journalism. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sepia Mutiny, and The American Prospect, among others. A board member and former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she also serves on the board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and on the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson. Her short fiction has appeared on Esquire.com and in Himal Southasian magazine, and is forthcoming in Granta. She is a past recipient of Phillips Exeter Academy's Bennett Fellowship and residency, and has taught at Skidmore College. She is now the Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. Random House published her first novel, Love Marriage, in April 2008. Washington Post Book World named the book one of its Best of 2008. It was also longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Jennifer Hayashida

JENNIFER HAYASHIDA is the translator of Fredrik Nyberg’s A Different Practice (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007) and Eva Sjödin’s Inner China (Litmus Press, 2005). Additional work has appeared in journals and art exhibitions domestically and abroad, most recently in the Spring 2009 issue of Salt Hill and as part of the 2009 Luleå Biennial. She is currently a 2009 NYFA Fellow in Poetry, and has been an LMCC Writer-in-Residence, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, as well as the recipient of a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. She recently completed A Machine Wrote This Song, a manuscript of poems, and is now at work on a long essay entitled “The Autonomic System.” She lives in Brooklyn NY, and is Acting Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, The City University of New York. Her website can be found at www.jenniferhayashida.info.

Ron Hogan

RON HOGAN helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. He has also written about the business side of publishing as a senior editor for GalleyCat. He is the author of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, a visual tribute to ’70s Hollywood, and a contributor to the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning. The free e-book of his “translation” of the Tao Te Ching has been downloaded in various formats by more than 25,000 readers a year for several years running.

Andrew Hsiao

ANDREW HSIAO is a senior editor with Verso Books and a producer of Asia Pacific Forum on WBAI 99.5FM. He was the executive editor of the non-profit publishing house The New Press, and a senior editor and staff writer with The Village Voice. He’s written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Spin, American Theatre, and many 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 of the Asian American Writers Workshop.

Hua Hsu

HUA HSU teaches in the English Department at Vassar College. His work has appeared in the Atlantic (for whom he blogs), the New York Times, Bookforum, Slate, the Village Voice, the Believer and The Wire (for whom he writes a bi-monthly column). He was also on the editorial board of the recently published New Literary History of America. For the 2009-2010 school year, he will be a visiting assistant professor in the English Department at Harvard.

David Henry Hwang

DAVID HENRY HWANG’s plays include M. Butterfly (1988 Tony Award, 1989 Pulitzer Finalist), Yellow Face (2008 OBIE Award, 2008 Pulitzer Finalist), Golden Child (1997 OBIE Award, 1998 Tony Nomination), FOB (1981 OBIE Award) and The Dance and the Railroad. He wrote libretti for the Broadway musicals Aida (co-author), Flower Drum Song (2002 revival, Tony Nomination) and Disney’s Tarzan. His opera libretti include Philip Glass’s The Voyage (Metropolitan Opera), Bright Sheng’s The Silver River, Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar (two 2007 Grammy Awards), and Howard Shore’s The Fly. Hwang penned the feature films M. Butterfly, Golden Gate, and Possession (co-writer), and also co-wrote the song “Solo” with Prince. He serves on the Council of the Dramatists Guild, and was appointed by President Clinton to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Tania James

TANIA JAMES was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, after a brief stint in Chicago from ages 0 to 4. She graduated from Harvard University in 2003 with a bachelor's degree in Visual Environmental Studies, with a focus in filmmaking. She received her Master of Fine Arts in fiction from Columbia's School of the Arts in 2006. Her debut novel Atlas of Unknowns (Knopf, April 2009) was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and an Editor's Choice for The San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story magazine, Guernica, Elle India, and fivechapters.com. To learn more, visit www.taniajames.com.

Paolo Javier

PAOLO JAVIER is the author of Megton Gasgan Krakooom (Cy Gist Press, forthcoming), LMFAO (OMG!), Goldfish Kisses (Sona Books), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada Books), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He edits 2nd Avenue Poetry (2ndavepoetry.com), an online and print publisher of innovative language art, and lives in Queens.

Mitra Kalita

MITRA KALITA is the deputy global economics editor at the Wall Street Journal and the author of Suburban Sahibs: Three immigrant families and their passage from India to America. At the Journal, she anchors the weekly column, New Global Indian. Most recently, she helped launch Mint, a business newspaper in New Delhi, as a founding editor, columnist and member of the editorial leadership team. Before that, she was a reporter at the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press. She has covered a wide range of general assignment and business stories, including the impact of 9/11 on New York City's economy, on immigration and on South Asians and Arabs.She has spent much of her career writing about immigration, globalization and emerging economies, especially India. She is currently at work on two books, an economic memoir of India and a workplace manual. A native of Brooklyn, Mitra grew up in Massapequa, Long Island; Puerto Rico, and West Windsor, N.J. Mitra has a BA in history and journalism from Rutgers University and a master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has received many awards and her work is included in an anthology of the "Best Business Stories." She is a past president of the South Asian Journalists Association. Mitra is married to Nitin Mukul, an artist. They have a 4-year-old daughter and live in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

FIROOZEH KASHANI-SABET teaches Middle Eastern history and directs the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946 (Princeton University Press, 1999) looks at the significance of land and border disputes in Iranian nationalism, with attention to Iran’s shared boundaries with the Ottoman Empire (and later Iraq and Turkey), Russia, Afghanistan, and the Gulf states. Frontier Fictions is currently being translated into Persian by Kitabsara Press, Iran. In addition to pursuing her academic work, Professor Kashani-Sabet spends time writing fiction. Her first novel, Martyrdom Street, will be published by Syracuse University Press in 2010. She has started a second novel and hopes to complete a series of children’s books in the future.

Zohar Kfir

ZOHAR KFIR is a video artist whose work includes experimental video, interactive art, net.art and writing. She holds a BFA in Digital Media from Camera Obscura School of Arts in Tel Aviv,  and a MPS Degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Zohar has shown her video works in galleries and video festivals in Israel, Europe and USA. Her time-based works focus formally on the isolation of single instances from the continuous flow of video data, using these images in turn to create painterly, emotive collages.  Currently, she is investigating non-linear and responsive forms of story telling using interactivity. www.zzee.net.

Porochista Khakpour

POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Marie Claire, Paper, Flaunt, Nylon, Bidoun, Canteen, nerve.com and FiveChapters.com, among others. She has been awarded fellowships from The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, Northwestern University, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Ucross Foundation, and The Corporation of Yaddo. Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic)--a New York Times "Editor's Choice," Chicago Tribune "Fall's Best," and 2007 California Book Award winner--is out in paperback. She currently teaches fiction at Bucknell University. For more information, see www.porochistakhakpour.com.

Katie Kitamura

KATIE KITAMURA has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired and Frieze. She lives in New York CIty, and is the author of The Longshot.

Amitava Kumar

AMITAVA KUMAR grew up in Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. 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. Kumar's forthcoming book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, is a writer’s report on the global war on terror. Currently, he is Professor of English at Vassar College.

Hari Kunzru

HARI KUNZRU is the critically acclaimed and multi-award winning author of The Impressionist, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award in 2002, Transmission, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2004, and the short story collection, Noise. He was named one of Granta's "Twenty Best Fiction Writers under Forty" and has been compared to Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk, and Don DeLillo by the New York Times. He currently serves are deputy president of English PEN and is a member of the editorial board of Mute magazine. For more, visit his blog at HariKunzru.com.

Jen Kwok

JEN KWOK is a writer and performer whose comedic exploits have been featured on CNN, PBS, MTV,The New York Times and Rolling Stone Magazine. From comedy clubs to rock shows, Jen's distinct act - a twinkling combination of music, tongue, and cheek! - has made her a favorite on the NYC performance scene. Jen was also a finalist in NBC Stand-Up for Diversity, and has an upcoming role in the film, Eat, Pray, Love. Her website can be found at http://www.jenkwok.net.

Jhumpa Lahiri

JHUMPA LAHIRI was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and author of two previous books. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award and The New Yorker Debut of the Year. Her novel The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jennifer 8. Lee

Jennifer 8. Lee is a metropolitan reporter at The New York Times, where she has worked for many years. She harbors a deep obsession for Chinese food, the product of which is The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, 2008), which explores how Chinese food is all-American. At the Times, she has written about poverty, the environment, crime, politics, and technology. She has been called, by NPR, a “conceptual scoop artist.”

Dennis Lim

DENNIS LIM writes frequently for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, and is the founding editor of Moving Image Source, the online publication of the Museum of the Moving Image. He was a film critic at the Village Voice from 1998 to 2006, as well as its film editor from 2000 to 2006. He is a member of the the New York Film Festival selection committee and the National Society of Film Critics and he teaches in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University.

Ed Lin

ED LIN is the author of Waylaid and This Is a Bust. Both books were published by Kaya Press, in 2002 and 2007, respectively, and both were widely praised. Lin is the first author to win two Members' Choice Awards in the Asian American Literary Awards. His forthcoming book, Snakes Can't Run, will be published in hardcover by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's/Minotaur in April 2010; it is the sequel to This Is a Bust. Lin lives in New York with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung.

Sunaina Maira

SUNAINA MAIRA is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City and co-editor of Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global and Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America, which won the American Book Award in 1997. Her new book, Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire After 9/11 (Duke University Press), is on South Asian Muslim immigrant youth in the U.S. and issues of citizenship and empire after 9/11. Maira was one of the founding organizers of Youth Solidarity Summer, a program for young activists of South Asian descent, and the South Asian Committee on Human Rights (SACH), that focused on post-9/11 civil and immigrant rights issues in the Boston area. She has also worked with various community and immigrant rights groups in the Bay Area.

Ye Mimi

YE MIMI was born and raised in Taiwan, where she received a MFA in Writing. Her first poetry book Pitch Dark attracted the attention of several influential critics and translators, which led to an invitation to the International Poetry Festival in Rotterdam in 2007. To portray her vision, she combines poetry, photography, and film. She has discovered that in writing a poem or creating a still or moving image, the process is similar. For three years, she devotes herself to making poetry films. She got another MFA degree in filmmaking from School of the Art Institute of Chicago recently.

Meera Nair

MEERA NAIR is the author of VIDEO: Stories and a forthcoming novel from Pantheon, tentatively titled HARVEST. VIDEO won the Asian-American Literary Award and was chosen a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and Book magazine. Her stories, articles and essays have also appeared in the New York Times magazine, the National Post , The Threepenny Review, Calyx, Discover as well as in various anthologies and on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. Meera has won fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2004 & 2008) and the MacDowell Artists’ Colony.

Mae Ngai

MAE NGAI is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University. She is author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton 2004), which won six prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner prize from the Organization of the American Historians, the Littleton Griswold Prize from the American Historical Society, and the Lora Romero Prize from the American Studies Association. She has held fellowships awarded by the Social Science Research Council, NYU Law School, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. This year she holds fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She has written on immigration history and policy for the LA Times, Washington Post, NY Times, and the Nation. Ngai is now completing a family biography about Chinese immigrant brokers and translators, and is working on a comparative history of Chinese gold miners in the nineteenth-century American west, Australia, and South Africa.

Julie Otsuka

JULIE OTSUKA was born and raised in California and currently lives in New York City, where she is finishing her second novel. She received her B.A. in studio art from Yale University and pursued a career in painting for several years before later turning to writing. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, was published by Knopf in 2002 and has been translated into six languages. It has been assigned to all incoming freshmen at a number of colleges and universities and has been chosen for City Reads programs in more than a dozen cities nationwide. She is a winner of the 2003 Asian American Literary Award, the 2003 American Library Association Alex Award, and a 2004 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.

Ed Park

ED PARK is the author of the novel Personal Days (Random House, 2008), which was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Foundation Award and was named one of the top ten fiction books of the year by Time. He is a founding co-editor of The Believer, and his essays and reviews appear in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Most recently his essay on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha appeared as an introduction to her posthumous collection Exilee/Temps Morts (University of California Press). He teaches at Columbia University's graduate writing program.

Deborah Poe

DEBORAH POE is assistant professor of English at Pace University and fiction editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. She is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010) and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008). She has received literary awards including several Pushcart Prize nominations, the Thayer Fellowship of the Arts (2008) and most recently a writing residency at Soapstone (2010). Deborah’s writing is forthcoming or has appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Sidebrow, Ploughshares, Filter Literary Journal and Denver Quarterly. Deborah is also co-editor of the fiction anthology, provisionally entitled “Between Worlds,” with her colleague Ama Wattley. For more information, visit www.deborahpoe.com.

Kavitha Rajagopalan

KAVITHA RAJAGOPALAN is the author of Muslims of Metropolis:The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West, and a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute, where she specializes in migration and social cohesion. She teaches courses on aspects of global migration at New York University's Center for Global Affairs and at Rockland Community College, and sits on the programming and development committee at the CEJJES Institute for racial and social justice and the steering committee for the Carnegie New Leaders program. She has worked as a research consultant in the financial services and as a journalist in India, Germany and the US. She received a Master's degree in International Affairs from Columbia University and a Bachelor's degree in International Relations from the College of William & Mary, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and the John J. McCloy Journalism Fellowship. Kavitha is currently at work on two books -- a collection of nonfiction short stories and photojournalistic portraiture, and her second narrative nonfiction book. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband.

Rakesh Satyal

RAKESH SATYAL is the author of the novel Blue Boy, a gender-bending comedy about a young Indian American boy's fascination with the Hindu god Krishna. Satyal is an editor at HarperCollins, where he works with such authors as Paulo Coelho, Clive Barker, Armistead Maupin, and Paul Rudnick. A member of the planning committee for the annual PEN World Voices Festival, he speaks frequently at writers' conferences. He also sings in a popular cabaret show in New York. He is a graduate of Princeton University and lives in Brooklyn.

Hirsh Sawhney

HIRSH SAWHNEY edited and contributed a short story to Delhi Noir, an anthology of brand-new fiction published by Akashic Books. The book will be released by HarperCollins in India, Asphate in France, and Metropoli d'Asia in Italy. In 2005, he moved to Delhi, the city his parents abandoned during the 1960s. While based in the Indian capital for the next three years, he wrote for a variety of publications including the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Outlook, the Indian Express, and Helsinki's Vihreä Lanka. Having recently returned to the US, Hirsh, 30, is working on a novel. He has received a fellowship to study and teach writing at Rutgers University in Newark. He is also an Associate Editor at Wasafiri Magazine and a Contributing Editor for The Brooklyn Rail.

Purvi Shah

PURVI SHAH was born in Ahmedabad, India and lives in New York City where she works as a consultant on violence against women, language access, and media issues. She is the author of Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press), which won a Many Voices Project prize. Her poetry has been published in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Brooklyn Review, Many Mountains Moving, The Massachusetts Review, Meridians, and Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (which won an American Book Award in 1997.) She served as a poetry editor for The Asian Pacific American Journal for six years, and received the Virginia Voss Poetry Award at the University of Michigan in 1994. She earned her M.A. in American Literature from Rutgers University.

Ravi Shankar

RAVI SHANKAR is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat, located at http://www.drunkenboat.com. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards, and with Reb Livingston, a collaborative chapbook, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books, 2006). He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book, reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.). He is a recipient of a Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism (CCT) FY09 fellowship in Poetry, an occasional commentator on NPR and will have two chapbooks of poetry coming out in 2010.

Mohan Sikka

MOHAN SIKKA's story “Uncle Musto Takes a Mistress” was selected for a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize. His fiction has also been published in the journal One Story, the Toronto South Asian Review, Trikone Magazine, and in anthologies, including Take Out: Queer Writing from Asian Pacific America. Mohan’s story “Railway Aunty” just appeared in Delhi Noir, part of the award-winning urban noir series from Akashic Books. In 2006, Mohan graduated with an MFA from the Brooklyn College fiction program, where he received the Hiram Brown Award and the CUNYarts First Prize for Graduate Short Fiction. Mohan is a past recipient of a New Forms Regional Grant Award, for a project to write and produce a series of one-man performances about growing up in India and Africa. Before his MFA, Mohan toured these semi-biographical sketches in venues around the US and Canada. Mohan is currently working on a linked story collection that includes “Uncle Musto.” You can learn more about him at mohansikka.com.

Hasanthika Sirisena

HASANTHIKA SIRISENA was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Glimmer Train, Narrative Magazine, Epoch, StoryQuarterly, Witness, Best New American Voices, and other publications. In 2008, she received a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award.

Sree Sreenivasan

SREE SREENIVASAN is the Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor to DNAinfo.com.

Rea Tajiri

REA TAJIRI is a film and video artist who earned her BFA and MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in post-studio art. Tajiri’s 1991 award winning film History and Memory, premiered at the Whitney Biennial and received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association and a New Genres: Special Jury Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival. History and Memory has screened in over 250 venues around the world and is currently part of the state of Washington’s K-12 curriculum on the Japanese American Internment. Tajiri and civil-rights organizer Pat Saunders co-produced a film on the life of Harlem human-rights activist Yuri Kochiyama entitled: Passion for Justice. Her debut dramatic feature film Strawberry Fields (written by Japanese-Canadian author Kerri Sakamoto), received its European premiere at the Venice International Film Festival and won the Grand Prix at the Fukuoka Asian Film Festival. It is currently available on Netflix. Several of Tajiri’s recent shorts have been included in the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Toronto Asian American Film Festival and Manhattan Cable Network. Tajiri received numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies for her work from Art Matters, Inc; the MacDowell Colony, the NEA, NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, Smack Mellon Studios and ITVS. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Film Media Arts Department at Temple University and is completing post-production on a new documentary short, Bridge.

Jack Tchen

JOHN KUO WEI (JACK) TCHEN is a historian and cultural activist who for 30 years has been helping to give voice to individuals and communities of the past and the present who have been absent from our public history. He is the founding director of the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific/American) Studies Program and Institute at New York University (1996) where he is an associate professor of history and individualized study. He is co-founder of the New York Chinatown History Project (1980), now called the Museum of Chinese in the Americas which recently reopened in a Maya Lin designed space. In 1991, he was awarded the Charles S. Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities (National Humanities Medal) for his work in the public humanities. He is author of the award-winning books: Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown, 1895-1906 (1987) and New York before Chinatown: Orientalism, and Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (1999). And recently, he was the co-principal investigator for a national study on higher education access called: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders: Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight (The College Board 2008).

Monique Truong

MONIQUE TRUONG’s first novel, The Book of Salt, was a New York Times Notable book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction, a Village Voice 25 Favorite book, and a Miami Herald Top 10 book of 2003. Truong was also the recipient of the Bard Fiction Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Stonewall Book Award, the PEN American-Robert Bingham Fellowship, the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Award, and the Asian American Literary Award, among other honors. Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, is forthcoming from Random House (Fall of 2010). Truong was a contributing co-editor of Watermark: An Anthology of Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose published by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (1998). Most recently, she was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University (academic year 2007-08). Born in Saigon, Monique Truong came to the United States in 1975 at the age six. She graduated from Yale College and the Columbia University School of Law, going on to specialize in intellectual property. Truong lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Peter Vilbig

PETER VILBIG is a writer and teacher in Brooklyn, New York. His short fiction has appeared in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Cottonwood, and Wordwrights, and is forthcoming in The Ledge Poetry and Fiction Magazine. He has recently completed a novel, The Penalty. He holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Joel Whitney

JOEL WHITNEY is a founding editor of GuernicaMag.com. His writing and commentary have appeared in The New Republic, The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Paris Review, The Nation, Agni, New York magazine—and on NPR. Internationally his work has appeared in several languages, including in France's Courrier, and in Esquire Russia. Joel has done more than 30 interview for Guernica, including Nobel Prize winners, members of Congress, heads of state, Oscar-nominated filmmakers, and Grammy-nominated singers, from a dozen countries. For his poetry, he was awarded a "Discovery"/The Nation Prize by the 92nd Street Y and The Nation. He lives in Brooklyn.

Lijia Zhang

LIJIA ZHANG is a factory-worker-turned writer, journalist, social commentator and TV talk show host. Her articles have appeared in many international publications, including The Independent, The Observer, The New Statesman, Far Eastern Economic Review, South China Morning Post, Japan Times, Newsweek, Asian Wall Street Journal and New York Times. She was a participant in the prestigious International Writers’ Program at University of Iowa in 2009. She is a regular speaker on the BBC, Channel 4, CNN and National Public Radio in America. She lives in Beijing with her two daughters.

Judges

Sarah Fan

SARAH FAN is an editor at The New Press, a not-for-profit publishing house operated editorially in the public interest. She lives in Brooklyn.

Ms. Fan is a judge for the 12th Annual Asian American Literary Awards in the nonfiction category.

Deepti Hajela

DEEPTI HAJELA is a newswoman in the New York City bureau of The Associated Press, where she covers race, immigration and demographics. She is the author of "How Hip-Hop Helped An Indian Girl Find Her Way Home," an essay in the anthology "Desi Rap." Deepti is also a past president of the South Asian Journalists Association.

Ms. Hajela is a judge for the 12th Annual Asian American Literary Awards in the nonfiction category.

Cathy Park Hong

CATHY PARK HONG's first book, Translating Mo'um, was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by WW Norton. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a NYFA grant. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Paris Review, Poetry, American Letters & Commentary, the Nation, Conjunctions, Jubilat, and other journals, and she has reported for the Village Voice, The Guardian, Salon, and Christian Science Monitor. She now lives in New York City and is an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

Ms. Hong is a judge for the 12th Annual Asian American Literary Awards in the poetry category.