By Corrie Martin

Last summer’s sudden cancellation by its lead sponsor, the Smithsonian Museum’s Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), galvanized an outraged, energized, and defiant literary community to go for broke and put on a festival of their own.

The Asian American Literature Festival roared back with a vengeance this past week after two successful D.C.-based incarnations in 2017 and 2019, and a weekend of events hastily improvised in the wake of APAC’s surprise torpedoing of August 2023’s highly anticipated post-Covid event.

Reinvented as a decentralized constellation of in-person, hybrid, live, and pre-recorded events and activities spanning the U.S. and the Pacific, the third iteration of the prominent festival launched this past Sunday, September 14 with a “Moonrise Invocation” highlighting the Festival’s theme of “Cosmic Kinship.”

Beaming live via Zoom from locations across the country and—with the participation from Hawaii of eminent poet Wing Tek Lum—from across the Pacific, the Moonrise Invocation set a welcoming and inspiring tone for the multi-day festival that promised a “literary constellation” connecting writers, artists, readers, publishers, activists, educators, and bibliophiles around the world.

Poet, playwright, scholar, teacher, avant-garde writer and community arts organizer Ching-in Chen spoke to AsAmNews just hours before participating in the Moonrise Invocation.

“It was very upsetting and challenging how one large funder can really impact a community, especially without even consulting that community,” commented Chen on last year’s cancellation.

“But out of the ashes of what happened last summer, we organized, first to just try to make sense of the Smithsonian’s decision, then to figure out how to keep the spirit of the festival moving forward,” said Chen.

One of the animating spirits of the 2023 festival had been the inclusion of groundbreaking programming featuring Trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer writers.

The Smithsonian and APAC have denied that the decision to pull out was because of the festival’s content, which included Trans, queer, nonbinary writers and texts, as well as other potentially “sensitive” topics, including a discussion about the banning of children’s literature by and about Asian Americans.

Instead, it said it cancelled the festival out of fears that organizers were too far behind in both promoting the festival and producing its content. Collaborating organizations and participating artists immediately disputed that there was merit to those fears in a July 17, 2023 open letter calling for “the Smithsonian to be accountable for the harms this cancellation has caused.”

But, the Smithsonian did not budge, nor provide further public explanations for their actions. As another Moonrise Invocation participant shared, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the someone at the institution balked at the prospect of unequivocally supporting Trans and queer artistic expression.

Yanyi, a Seattle-based writer who had also been slated to participate in the 2023 Festival, spoke to AsAmNews in anticipation of the “Bicoastal Trans Kinship Reading” that livestreamed from New York and Seattle on Wednesday, September 18th.

“I am excited about what tonight’s event means for the larger story of the festival,” said Yanyi, a leading member of the group of volunteers who organized this year’s event.

“We were concerned last year that the festival may have been cancelled because of our attempt to hold spaces for reading literature by and about Trans people. But now that fledgling gesture has grown into a project we call Reorienting Reads, a publication and an organization that amplifies trans, gender expansive, and nonbinary writers who are Asian American and of the Asian diaspora. So, this project that first came out of a reaction to our fears of erasure has grown into its own thing, and it feels like a full circle moment for us,” explained Yanyi.

A Festival Like No Other

Transcending the limitations of time, space, and airfare, this year’s event was not based in a single central location or region. Instead, the full program consisted of nearly two dozen in-person, hybrid, and online events featuring over 100 different writers happening on both coasts, in the Midwest, U.S. South, Hawaii, Aotearoa, and Australia. Attendees were invited to participate in the festival Discord server where they could share thoughts and pics, and access thoughtfully crafted daily creative writing prompts. Every component of the “decentralized” multi-city program was free and open to all.

As described on the event website, members of the grassroots effort behind this year’s festival organized themselves into The Asian American Literature Festival Collective:

“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.”

Noticeably absent from the program and from membership in the collective is the renowned literary arts organization, Kundiman, originally a key member of the collective that coalesced last summer to fill the leadership vacuum created by the Smithsonian’s abscondence.

As spring turned into summer, Kundiman’s then-executive director, Cathy Linh Che, was publicly promoting the upcoming festival and celebrating the collaborative, grassroots spirit of the organizers, but behind the scenes she was dealing with turmoil between her own staff, faculty, fellows, co-founders, and board members.

A decision by members of the Kundiman board to delete a staff-written social media post that explicitly condemned “the ongoing occupation of and genocide in Palestine” and that expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people’s “struggle for justice, liberation, and sovereignty,” eventually led to a call for the resignation of all Kundiman board members and its co-founders in a May 21, 2024 open letter signed by 620 individuals from the Kundiman community.

A former Kundiman Fellow with knowledge of the situation confirmed to AsAmNews that the Board’s actions and lack of transparency in decision-making have resulted in a crisis of confidence in the organization.

“The future of Kundiman is in question, not its existence but it’s identity. Will it continue to be less scrappy and grassroots and more corporate?”

“I hope it survives,” continued the Fellow.

“We need Kundiman and spaces like it. It is necessary in so many ways. I hope it comes back to its original shape. You know, that’s the way of Asian American letters, always already politicized and marginalized, and people on the margins need ways to find each other,” said the source.

In their programming choices, the grassroots members of the Asian American Literature Festival Collective are expressing a starkly different response to state-sponsored oppression, violence, and genocide, one that engages literature and the literary act as vital, political, as well as aesthetically daring and beautiful.

Asian American Literature as History-Making

Another sign of the healthily unruly spirit of Asian American literature, including its visibility of Trans, nonbinary, and queer artists, is the festival’s fearless dialogue about the occupation of Palestine and the foregrounding of narratives of resistance.

One such event is the featured conversation between writer and festival participant Cathy Linh Che and poet Hasib Hourani, whose celebrated debut book of poetry, rock flight, is “a personal and historical narrative of Palestine’s occupation.”

Che and Hourani point to what they see as a resurgence of fearlessly political art.

“I’ve been seeing a revival of poetry with an objective, poetry with substance, a poetry being informed by history to imagine a better future,” Hourani tells Che in the recorded video made available through the festival on September 14^th.

This openness to politically relevant art inspires Hourani, who sees a renewed relevance for Asian American poetry today.

“It’s invigorating to see this kind of active poetry reenter the zeitgeist, because I think for a while poetry had been asleep at least in the public domain as this genre that exists on the peripheral to life,” Hourani adds hopefully.

Whither the Future of the Asian American Literature Festival?

As the moon set on the 2024 Asian American Literature Festival with a closing “Exhalation” broadcast over Zoom on Sunday, September 22, the organizing Collective is committed to moving forward together.

“It was an historic gathering that showed the power of community and care. In the end, a triumph,” Che told AsAmNews after hosting the “Moonset” closing event.

The AALF Collective plans to debrief, rest, and rejuvenate before getting back together to start planning for the next iteration, which will probably take a couple years to organize. In the meantime, as this year’s festival proves, there’s no shortage of ways and places to get involved and be inspired by the diversity and fearlessness of Asian American literature. 

AsAmNews asked Hawaii-based writer R. Zamora Linmark to reflect on the meaning of events like the Asian American Literature Festival.

“I think it’s great that more and more Asian American writers are telling their stories and that they’re getting published by small, mid-size, and commercial presses, or are self-publishing or uploading their stories, firsthand or hand-me-down,” Linmark said.

“But I think we’ve only just begun to unearth our stories, give voice and face and soul to those who were powerless or oppressed, and made to feel that their stories, and therefore, they, did not matter.”

Perhaps the most powerful take-away of this year’s community-driven festival is the knowledge that even the mighty Smithsonian couldn’t make the Asian American literary community feel that they did not matter.

A few ways we can matter right now:

• Show your support for independently organized events such as the Asian American Literature Festival by visiting the festival’s fundraising page.

• Visit Seattle-based Open Books: A Poem Emporium to participate in a grassroots fundraising effort to help provide humanitarian services for communities in Gaza.

• Support the vital work and voices of Indigenous writers at In-Na-Po, a national Indigenous poetry community.

*AsAmNews reached out to the Smithsonian APAC by email and telephone for a comment for this story but has not received a response by publication time.

AsAmNews is published by the non-profit, Asian American Media Inc. Please support our fundraisers.  Purchase your tickets to a Night of Hilarity- a fun conversation with comedienne Jiaoying Summers and ABC7/KABC anchor David Ono to be held October 9 in Los Angeles.

Then join us for a stimulating conference about issues that divide the Asian American communities. Our fundraiser Common Ground and the dinner after will be held October 26 at UC Berkeley.

AsAmNews is partially supported by the Stop the Hate grant administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs. To report a hate incident or hate crime and get support, go to CA vs Hate.

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