Description

Founded in 1991, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) is a national literary arts non-profit dedicated to “the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told.”  Led by executive director Ken Chen, a poet and graduate of Yale Law School and winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, the Writers’ Workshop publishes an online magazine, The Margins , which attracts about half a million readers.  Helped by the fact that it is based in New York, home to the country’s largest Asian American community and the capital of the publishing industry, AAWW punches above its weight and limited resources, providing a forum for prominent Asian American Pulitzer Prize-winners such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Viet Thanh Nguyen, while also fostering emerging voices.
 
AAWW has traditionally focused on Asian American writings.  However, with globalization, the lines separating Asian American and Asian concerns are increasingly blurred.  Recognizing limited public engagement in the United States with East and Southeast Asian literature, AAWW launched a pilot Transpacific Literary Project (TLP) in December 2016 with a discretionary grant from the Foundation.  Within the past year, AAWW published four series of new writings on themes such as ASEAN and remittance, representing 25 writers selected from over 100 submissions.  It also hosted nine events with visiting authors.
 
AAWW requests our support to build TLP into a stronger platform for promoting East and Southeast Asian literature.  It proposes to translate, edit and publish 20 to 30 pieces per year, organized around themes including exile and refugees, and to continue to hold live events featuring Asian writers.  Selected work would include poetry, fiction and nonfiction.  In addition, the grant would allow TLP to expand its literary network of writers, translators, editors and presses in the U.S. and Asia, and to convene an advisory group of scholars, thereby potentially connecting work published by TLP with college course offerings.  AAWW is also collaborating with Luce-supported projects such as the “China Channel” of the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Southeast Asia Network.  Our grant would support a part-time editorial position and other staff time associated with running the program, author honoraria, editorial and translation costs, web design, space rental for events and marketing.
 
Annie Tucker, the American translator of the award-winning Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan, writes of the TLP, “the fact that Indonesian literature was even included is a testament to the vision of the work being done, since such literature is often overlooked even within specifically Southeast Asian-focused anthologies.  This seems to me the promise of the project: the ability to gather voices, some established and some unknown to this literary community, and put them in conversation with one another to glean new insights and sense new affinities.”
Recommendation:                                That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $200,000 to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for The Transpacific Literary Project .
Approved by the Board: March 7, 2018