2024 | Slow Currents x Asian American Literature Festival
September 14—22, 2024
Join us for the 2024 Asian American Literature Festival (AALF), a historic multi-city gathering designed to support and nurture Asian American literature and the literary community. The AALF is a space of stewardship, kinship, and care, where we celebrate the role of Asian diasporic literature in creating community.
Curated and produced by a collective of artists, librarians, educators, scholars, and publishers, this is the only festival of its kind. The AALF will convene writers and readers through immersive in-person and hybrid events, including interactive installations, readings, salons, and workshops.
For the first time in its history, the AALF will take place both across the country and globally, with an international presence in Aotearoa and Australia. Cities hosting events include Athens and Atlanta, GA; Champaign-Urbana, IL; Los Angeles, CA; Honolulu, HI; New York, NY; San Francisco, CA; and Seattle, WA.
Slow Currents at The Asian American Literature Festival
Writing into Silence | Hasib Hourani + Cathy Linh Che
“rock flight is relentlessly potent,” writes Korean American poet Don Mee Choi about Hasib Hourani’s debut book, a personal and historical narrative of Palestine’s occupation. At once claustrophobic and unsettlingly exposed, this book-length poem seeks new forms of language to articulate this ongoing horror and the ongoing resistance.
Hasib speaks with writer and artist Cathy Linh Che about writing into the wound, explorations with form, and the state of literature in Australia and the US. Available from 14 September.
Violence, Justice + Ghosts | Saraid de Silva + Gowri Koneswaran
“Revenge, hair, ghosts, signs and omens, inheritance, the sun; sharp or dissolved, the double, the unsayable, the outward landscape manifest in the body, beauty, heat, fervour, betrayal, the material of memory” — marginalia scrawled by one journalist in Saraid de Silva’s debut novel, Amma, which follows three generations of South Asian women who reject, who regret, who brawl and search for love in the worlds they have inherited. From Aotearoa, she joins writer, performing artist and lawyer Gowri Koneswaran to discuss grief, rage, and writing across Sri Lanka’s diaspora. Available from 14 September.
Best Bets | Chris Tse + Panda Wong
‘Best of’ poetry collections, as Chris Tse writes in his introduction to Best New Zealand Poems 2023, “provide something of a ‘state of the nation’ view of poetry.” As Best of Australian Poems 2023 co-editor Panda Wong reflects, they are “what poets were feeling, thinking and imagining across many different forms, mediums and lexicons” — in those times when the events around us are “too much for us to process or express in everyday language”. So what are those feelings, those thoughts, those imaginings — how do they collide and diverge from across our oceans, and what are our poets telling us about the world in which we live? Join Chris and Panda as they reflect on 2023 through the eyes of our poets in Aotearoa and Australia. Available from 14 September.
The Asian American Literature Festival Collective
The Asian American Literature Festival Collective is a cooperative devoted to stewarding the futures of Asian American literature as art form and social ecosystem. Organizing partners within the collective include the Asian American Literary Archive, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Bamboo Ridge, The Georgia Review, Kaya Press, Kearny Street Workshop, KidLit with Sarah Park Dahlen, Reorienting Reads, and Slow Currents.
After the Smithsonian’s cancellation of the 2023 Festival, the AALFC is proud to convene an independently organized and collectively funded iteration of the Festival for 2024. We believe the AALF is not only a celebration of Asian American literature but also a dream enacted of what persistent, just, and caring stewardship could look like for Asian American literature. We work to include all attendees by remixing what literary programming can be.
We celebrate the Festival, and Asian American literature, as a social space: a place where friendships are born, mentorships are exchanged, and secret histories are passed down, so they no longer have to linger in the shadows.