Asian American

“I had a substantially different version of this book that just wasn’t working, scrapped it, did that again, and then the third time was a charm.” —Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

In her second novel, Julie Otsuka returns to the chapter in Japanese American history that captured the attention of so many fans of her debut: the relocation camps of World War II.

Studying poetry under J. D. McClatchy; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s remains rediscovered in a wine cellar; the Restoration’s filthiest poet; and other news.

Cathy Park Hong is a poet interested in the porous boundaries between languages and cultures. In her newest collection, Dance Dance Revolution (Norton, 2007), winner of the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize, Hong creates a poem sequence that takes place in a future city called the Desert. It is in this tourist town, modeled on the likes of Las Vegas and Dubai, that Hong introduces the Guide, an amalgam of new and extinct English dialects, Korean, Latin, Spanish, and other miscellaneous pidgins. Acting as the reader's escort, Hong uses the Guide to address the issues of identity, both personally and geographically, in an increasingly globalized world.

Kundiman, the New York City–based organization that hosts a prestigious annual retreat for Asian American poets, celebrates its ten-year anniversary by launching its inaugural fiction retreat this spring.

The Asian American Writers Workshop rings in its twenty-fifth year at the forefront of the movement to diversify the publishing industry, and to provide advocacy, education, opportunity, and visibility to Asian American poets and writers.