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Asian American Literature Association (AALA)
Artists/Authors
Every meeting, we discuss about a variety of works, but what about the artists/authors themselves? Click on your favorite artist/author to learn more about them!
Thi Bui
Thi Bui was born in Viêt Nam and came to the United States as a child with her family in 1978. They were part of the “boat people” wave of Southeast Asian refugees. She studied art and legal studies and thought about becoming a civil rights lawyer, but became a public school teacher instead. Bui lives in Berkeley, California, with her son, her husband, and her mother. The Best We Could Do is her debut graphic novel. Today, she is currently teaching as an Assistant Professor at California College of Arts in the MFA program in Comics.
Lisa Cacho
In her scholarship, Lisa Marie Cacho interrogates the ways in which human value is both ascribed and denied relationally along racial, gendered, sexual, national and spatial lines. Her book, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (NYU Press, 2012) won the American Studies Association’s 2013 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize honoring the most outstanding book published the previous year in American Studies. She is an editor, along with Susan Koshy, Jodi Byrd, and Brian Jefferson, of Colonial Racial Capitalism (Duke 2022). Cacho’s most recent publications can be found in The Boston Review, GLQ, Social Text and American Quarterly. Currently, she is writing a single-authored book examining police killings in the United States.
After receiving her Ph.D. in ethnic studies from the University of California at San Diego, Cacho taught several years for the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s Latina/Latino department, where she was a Conrad Humanities Scholar (a distinction bestowed upon outstanding scholars in the humanities). Additionally, she taught incarcerated men at the Danville Correctional Center under the Education Justice Project.
Within the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Cacho will be teaching interdisciplinary classes in her areas of expertise, which include Latinx studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, criminalization, immigration, women of color feminism, and queer of color critique.
After receiving her Ph.D. in ethnic studies from the University of California at San Diego, Cacho taught several years for the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s Latina/Latino department, where she was a Conrad Humanities Scholar (a distinction bestowed upon outstanding scholars in the humanities). Additionally, she taught incarcerated men at the Danville Correctional Center under the Education Justice Project.
Within the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Cacho will be teaching interdisciplinary classes in her areas of expertise, which include Latinx studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, criminalization, immigration, women of color feminism, and queer of color critique.
Franny Choi
Franny Choi is the author of several books, including The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco Books 2022), Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), and a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has received awards from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Princeton University’s Lewis Center. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is currently an Arthur Levitt, Jr. Artist-in-Residence at Williams College.
After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in Literary Arts and Ethnic Studies, Franny developed her writing practice in community with artists and activists in Providence, Rhode Island, where she was a Co-Director of the award-winning Providence Poetry Slam. In 2012, she joined with fellow artists Fatimah Asghar, Danez Smith, Jamila Woods, Nate Marshall, and Aaron Samuels to found the Dark Noise Collective. She continued her studies at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she received an MFA in Poetry and a postgraduate Zell Fellowship.
Soft Science was a Rumpus and Paris Review staff pick and received attention from outlets including NPR, the New York Times, and Lit Hub, which called it “profoundly intelligent work which makes you feel.” The speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons said it “offers fireworks enough for everyone, whether you’re excited about the queerness of cyborgs, the nature of consciousness, or the porous boundaries of contemporary lyric poetry.” Soft Science was named as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, a Massachusetts Book Award, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and a Believer Book Award.
In addition to outlets such as the Paris Review and the Atlantic, Franny’s work has also been featured in Ms. Magazine, NPR’s All Things Considered, PBS NewsHour’s Brief But Spectacular series, the Angry Asian Man blog, and The Abolitionist, a newspaper that distributes to over 7,000 incarcerated readers. In 2018, her poem “A Guide to Drag Kinging” was set to music by composer LJ White for the piece The Best Place for This; the same year, her poem “Frame” was included in an exhibition of ekphrastic art at the Cassilhaus Gallery in Durham, NC. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, and Turkish. In 2020, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts awarded Franny the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize.
A seasoned performer, Franny has been a finalist in competitions including the National Poetry Slam, the Individual World Poetry Slam, and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. She is a two-time winner of the Rustbelt Poetry Slam and has performed her work in schools, conferences, theaters, and bars across the country. As a teaching artist, Franny has taught students of all ages and levels of experience, both in formal classroom settings and through organizations like Project VOICE and InsideOut Literary Arts Project. A Kundiman Fellow and graduate of the VONA Workshop, she founded Brew & Forge, a project to amplify the collective power of writers to help build grassroots movements. As a curator, she has worked with organizations including Split This Rock and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center to highlight the voices of queer and trans poets of Asian/Pacific diasporas. For five seasons, she co-hosted the Poetry Foundation podcast VS alongside Danez Smith. She is currently an editor, along with Bao Phi, Terisa Siagatonu, and No’u Revilla, of a forthcoming anthology of AAPI poetry from Haymarket Books.
Franny has also authored two plays: Mask Dances, which was produced as part of the 2011 Writing is Live Festival in Providence, RI, and Family Style, which was given several staged readings in Chicago in 2017 and won a Hopwood Award for Drama at the University of Michigan. She was formerly the Senior Editor of News, Politics, and Social Justice at Hyphen Magazine and is currently a Poetry Editor at the Massachusetts Review. She is at work an essay collection exploring race, feminism, and robots forthcoming form Ecco Books. She lives in Western Massachusetts.
Franny is represented by Annie Hwang at Ayesha Pande Literary and by Leslie Shipman at the Shipman Agency for booking.
After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in Literary Arts and Ethnic Studies, Franny developed her writing practice in community with artists and activists in Providence, Rhode Island, where she was a Co-Director of the award-winning Providence Poetry Slam. In 2012, she joined with fellow artists Fatimah Asghar, Danez Smith, Jamila Woods, Nate Marshall, and Aaron Samuels to found the Dark Noise Collective. She continued her studies at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she received an MFA in Poetry and a postgraduate Zell Fellowship.
Soft Science was a Rumpus and Paris Review staff pick and received attention from outlets including NPR, the New York Times, and Lit Hub, which called it “profoundly intelligent work which makes you feel.” The speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons said it “offers fireworks enough for everyone, whether you’re excited about the queerness of cyborgs, the nature of consciousness, or the porous boundaries of contemporary lyric poetry.” Soft Science was named as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, a Massachusetts Book Award, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and a Believer Book Award.
In addition to outlets such as the Paris Review and the Atlantic, Franny’s work has also been featured in Ms. Magazine, NPR’s All Things Considered, PBS NewsHour’s Brief But Spectacular series, the Angry Asian Man blog, and The Abolitionist, a newspaper that distributes to over 7,000 incarcerated readers. In 2018, her poem “A Guide to Drag Kinging” was set to music by composer LJ White for the piece The Best Place for This; the same year, her poem “Frame” was included in an exhibition of ekphrastic art at the Cassilhaus Gallery in Durham, NC. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, and Turkish. In 2020, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts awarded Franny the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize.
A seasoned performer, Franny has been a finalist in competitions including the National Poetry Slam, the Individual World Poetry Slam, and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. She is a two-time winner of the Rustbelt Poetry Slam and has performed her work in schools, conferences, theaters, and bars across the country. As a teaching artist, Franny has taught students of all ages and levels of experience, both in formal classroom settings and through organizations like Project VOICE and InsideOut Literary Arts Project. A Kundiman Fellow and graduate of the VONA Workshop, she founded Brew & Forge, a project to amplify the collective power of writers to help build grassroots movements. As a curator, she has worked with organizations including Split This Rock and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center to highlight the voices of queer and trans poets of Asian/Pacific diasporas. For five seasons, she co-hosted the Poetry Foundation podcast VS alongside Danez Smith. She is currently an editor, along with Bao Phi, Terisa Siagatonu, and No’u Revilla, of a forthcoming anthology of AAPI poetry from Haymarket Books.
Franny has also authored two plays: Mask Dances, which was produced as part of the 2011 Writing is Live Festival in Providence, RI, and Family Style, which was given several staged readings in Chicago in 2017 and won a Hopwood Award for Drama at the University of Michigan. She was formerly the Senior Editor of News, Politics, and Social Justice at Hyphen Magazine and is currently a Poetry Editor at the Massachusetts Review. She is at work an essay collection exploring race, feminism, and robots forthcoming form Ecco Books. She lives in Western Massachusetts.
Franny is represented by Annie Hwang at Ayesha Pande Literary and by Leslie Shipman at the Shipman Agency for booking.
Catherine Cenzia Choy
Catherine Ceniza Choy is professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Before that, she was an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of the books Empire of Care and Global Families and the co-editor of the anthology Gendering the Trans-Pacific World. An engaged public scholar, she has been interviewed in many media outlets, including ABC 2020, The Atlantic, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, the New York Times, ProPublica, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time, and Vox. Connect with her on Twitter @CCenizaChoy.
Lee Isaac Chung
A son of Korean immigrants, Chung grew up on a small farm in rural Arkansas and then attended Yale University, majoring in Ecology. During his senior year, Chung dropped his plans for medical school and turned to filmmaking. He studied film at the University of Utah, earning his MFA in 2004.
Chung's first film, Munyurangabo, premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival to great acclaim. Variety called the film "an astonishing and thoroughly masterful debut;" American critic Roger Ebert called it "a beautiful and powerful film - a masterpiece." His second film, Lucky Life, was developed at the Cinefondation at the Cannes Film Festival and premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and 2010 Torino Film Festival.
Chung resides in Brooklyn, New York with his wife Valerie. In 2007, he partnered with local filmmakers in Rwanda to create Almond Tree Films Rwanda, a successful film production company and academy in Rwanda.
Chung's first film, Munyurangabo, premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival to great acclaim. Variety called the film "an astonishing and thoroughly masterful debut;" American critic Roger Ebert called it "a beautiful and powerful film - a masterpiece." His second film, Lucky Life, was developed at the Cinefondation at the Cannes Film Festival and premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and 2010 Torino Film Festival.
Chung resides in Brooklyn, New York with his wife Valerie. In 2007, he partnered with local filmmakers in Rwanda to create Almond Tree Films Rwanda, a successful film production company and academy in Rwanda.
Roderick A. Ferguson
Roderick A. Ferguson is professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University, 2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies (NYU, 2018). He is currently working on two monographs—The Arts of Black Studies and The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora.
Ferguson’s teaching interests include the politics of culture, women of color feminism, the study of race, critical university studies, queer social movements, and social theory.
Ferguson’s teaching interests include the politics of culture, women of color feminism, the study of race, critical university studies, queer social movements, and social theory.
Grace Kyungwon Hong
Grace Kyungwon Hong is Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA; she also holds a joint appointment in Gender Studies. She is also currently the Director of the Center for the Study of Women. Her research focuses on women of color feminism as an epistemological critique of, and alternative to, Western liberal humanism and racial capitalism, particularly as they manifest as contemporary neoliberalism.
She is the author of Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) which won the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies book prize, and The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Cultures of Immigrant Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She is the co-editor (with Roderick Ferguson) of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011). She is the co-editor (also with Roderick Ferguson) of the Difference Incorporated book series at the University of Minnesota Press.
She is the author of Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) which won the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies book prize, and The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Cultures of Immigrant Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She is the co-editor (with Roderick Ferguson) of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011). She is the co-editor (also with Roderick Ferguson) of the Difference Incorporated book series at the University of Minnesota Press.
Matt Huynh
Matt Huynh is an Emmy Award winning Vietnamese-Australian artist working in New York City. His bold brush and ink paintings are informed by calligraphic Eastern sumi-e ink traditions and Western comic books.
His illustrated essays, comics and animations interrogate the repercussions of war, with a focus on diasporic refugee narratives and the experiences of asylum seekers and migrant communities.
Huynh’s interactive comic The Boat was awarded a World Illustration Award and he was Eisner nominated for Cabramatta. His animated VR documentary, Reeducated, was honored with a SXSW’s Special Jury Award for Immersive Journalism and by The Venice Film Festival in its ‘Best of VR’ program. Huynh's comics, animation and illustrations have been exhibited by the MoMA, The Smithsonian and The Sydney Opera House.
When he not writing and painting with ink, he is making ink.
His illustrated essays, comics and animations interrogate the repercussions of war, with a focus on diasporic refugee narratives and the experiences of asylum seekers and migrant communities.
Huynh’s interactive comic The Boat was awarded a World Illustration Award and he was Eisner nominated for Cabramatta. His animated VR documentary, Reeducated, was honored with a SXSW’s Special Jury Award for Immersive Journalism and by The Venice Film Festival in its ‘Best of VR’ program. Huynh's comics, animation and illustrations have been exhibited by the MoMA, The Smithsonian and The Sydney Opera House.
When he not writing and painting with ink, he is making ink.
Helen H. Jun
Helen Heran Jun is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, as well as affiliate faculty in Asian American Studies. Her research on the 19th Century Black press and the anti-Chinese movement was published in American Quarterly (2006) and in Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke: 2011). Her book, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America (NYU: 2011), is a relational study of the differential locations that African Americans and Asian Americans have held with respect to the institution of U.S. citizenship. She teaches courses on Asian American and African American literature, neocolonialism and globalization, and the prison industrial complex.
An-My Lé
An-My Lê is an artist whose photographs of landscapes transformed by war or other forms of military activity blur the boundaries between fact and fiction and are rich with layers of meaning. A refugee from Vietnam and resident of the United States since 1975, much of Lê’s work is inspired by her own experience of war and dislocation. From black and white images of her native Vietnam taken on a return visit in 1994 to pictures of Vietnam War battle re-enactments in rural America, her photographs straddle the documentary and the conceptual, creating a neutral perspective that brings the essential ambiguity of the medium to the fore. In her series 29 Palms (2003–2004), Lê documents American soldiers training in a desert in Southern California before their deployment to Iraq. She focuses her camera alternately on young recruits and the harsh terrain in which they practice their drills, lending an obvious artificiality to the photographs that invites speculation about the romance and myth of contemporary warfare.
Erika Lee
Erika Lee is a Chinese American whose grandparents immigrated to the US. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is one of the leading Asian American historians who documents anti-Asian rhetoric within the history of the US and Asian communities’ vitality. She has won several awards for her publications and has created projects documenting asian immigrants’ and refugees’ stories: Immigrants in COVID America and #ImmigrationSyllabus.
Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lee is the recipient of the 2022 Manhae Grand Prize for Literature from South Korea, the 2022 Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the 2022 Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity and fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Lee is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College and serves as a trustee of PEN America and a director of the Authors Guild. She is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon and a nonfiction work, Name Recognition.
Carol Nguyen
Carol Nguyen is a Vietnamese Canadian filmmaker, born and raised in Toronto, now based in Montreal. Her films often explore the subjects of cultural identity, silence and memory. Her latest film “Nanitic” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2022, where it was awarded the IMDBPro Share Her Journey Award. Her previous film, “No Crying at the Dinner Table”, received the Jury Prize for Short Documentary at SXSW in 2020 and had its international premiere at IDFA 2019, where she was additionally invited as the Opening Night speaker. Carol is a 2021 Doc Accelerator Program Fellow and an IDFA Space Project 2022 participant for her project “The Visitors”. Today, Carol is writing and directing several projects, including two feature films as well as an animated short.
Michael Omi
UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies professor Michael Omi is perhaps best known for his treatise on race in America, first published in 1986 with co-author Howard Winant, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. A third edition of Racial Formation in the United States was published July 2014 and radically revises their initial theory of racial formation. The third edition updates their analysis of race with an acknowledgment to a changed political and social landscape, including the inauguration of America’s first black president, the fast journey towards a “majority minority” nation, a growing immigrant-rights movement, and the rise of race/class/gender ‘intersectionality’ theories.
Edward Said
Edward Said was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of more than twenty books. A leading literary critic, public intellectual, and passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, he was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and died in New York in 2003.
Dan Santant
Dan Santat is the Caldecott Medal–winning and New York Times–bestselling author and illustrator of The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend and the road trip/time travel adventure Are We There Yet? His artwork is also featured in numerous picture books, chapter books, and middle-grade novels, including Dav Pilkey's Ricky Ricotta series. Dan lives in Southern California with his wife, two kids, and many, many pets.
Domee Shi
Domee Shi Zhiyu was born in 1989 in Chongqing, China, before immigrating to Canada at the age of two with her parents. Shi studied animation at Sheridan College and has been a storyboard artist and director for Pixar since 2011. She has contributed to multiple films, including Inside Out (2015), Incredibles 2 (2018), and Toy Story 4 (2019). Shi directed the 2018 animated short film Bao, which was shown before Incredibles 2, becoming the first woman to direct a short film for Pixar. Bao won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 91st Academy Awards in 2019, and also earned nominations for the 43rd Annie Awards, the International Online Cinema Awards, and at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Peter Sohn
Peter Sohn joined Pixar Animation Studios in September 2000, and began working in both the art and story departments for the Academy Award®-winning "Finding Nemo." Sohn continued on to work on "The Incredibles" in the art, story, and animation departments. He focused on animating members of the Parr family and worked on many memorable scenes from the film. He also worked as a story artist on another Oscar® winner, the 2008 feature film, "WALL.E."
Sohn worked with producer Kevin Reher on the Pixar short "Partly Cloudy," which was also his directorial debut at Pixar. Sohn directed Disney.Pixar's original feature "The Good Dinosaur," which opened in theaters in 2015.
In addition to his contributions as a filmmaker, Sohn has lent his voice talents to Pixar's feature films. In "Ratatouille" he voiced the character of Emile, and in "Monsters University," he is the voice of Scott "Squishy" Squibbles.
Prior to Pixar, Sohn worked at Warner Bros. with "Ratatouille" director Brad Bird on "The Iron Giant," as well as at Disney TV. He grew up in New York and attended California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts). He currently lives in the Bay Area.
Sohn worked with producer Kevin Reher on the Pixar short "Partly Cloudy," which was also his directorial debut at Pixar. Sohn directed Disney.Pixar's original feature "The Good Dinosaur," which opened in theaters in 2015.
In addition to his contributions as a filmmaker, Sohn has lent his voice talents to Pixar's feature films. In "Ratatouille" he voiced the character of Emile, and in "Monsters University," he is the voice of Scott "Squishy" Squibbles.
Prior to Pixar, Sohn worked at Warner Bros. with "Ratatouille" director Brad Bird on "The Iron Giant," as well as at Disney TV. He grew up in New York and attended California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts). He currently lives in the Bay Area.
Celine Song
Celine Song (born 1988) is a South Korean-Canadian director, playwright, and screenwriter based in the United States. Among her plays are Endlings and The Seagull on The Sims 4. Her directorial film debut Past Lives was released at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
Howard Winant
Howard Winant is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also affiliated with the Black Studies, Chicana/o Studies, and Asian American Studies departments. He founded and directed the University of California Center for New Racial Studies. Winant's research and writing focuses on racial theory and social theory, and the comparative historical sociology, political sociology, and cultural sociology of race, both in the US and globally.
Michelle Zauner
Michelle Chongmi Zauner was born in Seoul, South Korea before her family moved to the United States just after she was born. Her mother was Korean and her father is a white American. She grew up in Eugene, Oregon. Zauner graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a degree in creative writing but had been pursuing a career in music since the age of 15. She is best known as the lead singer of alternative pop band Japanese Breakfast and as the author of her debut book, Crying in H Mart.
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