Asian American Writers Workshop | New Work by Queer Lebanese Writers with Andrea Abi-Karam, Jennifer Camper, Rami Karim @AAWWNYC | Uploaded June 2019 | Updated October 2024, 21 hours ago.
Join us for a special event featuring queer Lebanese writers Andrea Abi-Karam and Jennifer Camper. Selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Kelsey Street Prize, Abi-Karam’s new poetry book EXTRATRANSMISSION is a critique of nationalism, patriarchy, and gender embedded in an explosive trauma narrative. The creator of the biennial Queers & Comics Conference, Jennifer Camper is the author of Rude Girls and Dangerous Women, a collection of her cartoons, and subGURLZ, a graphic novella following the adventures of three women living in abandoned subway tunnels. They’ll speak with poet Rami Karim, a former AAWW Margins Fellow.
Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions, 2016), attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for forthcoming publication with Les Figues. They toured with Sister Spit March 2018 & are hype to live in New York. EXTRATRANSMISSION [Kelsey Street Press, 2019] is their first book. As Etel Adnan writes: “As the war machine creates new casualties and new ways to produce them, Andrea Abi-Karam creates a new language and a new form to express their desire to shake the American public out of its lethargy…. In these days of indifference to naked reality, Andrea dares be a writer of humanism, they dare to remind us that each one of us is somehow responsible for everything that is done in our name.”
Jennifer Camper is a cartoonist and graphic artist living in New York City. Her art examines life from a perspective that is irreverent, female, queer, and mongrel (Lebanese American). Her work often explores gender, race, class, and politics, as well as sexuality, mermaids, and robots. She’s also a cartoon editor, a teacher, and the creator of the biennial Queers & Comics Conference. Her books include Rude Girls and Dangerous Women, a collection of her cartoons, and subGURLZ, a graphic novella following the adventures of three women living in abandoned subway tunnels. She also edited two Juicy Mother comics anthologies. Her cartoons and illustrations have appeared in numerous publications, and have been exhibited internationally.
Rami Karim uses ordinary language against consumerist legibility. He is the author of smile & nod (wendy’s subway, 2018) and crybaby (nightboat, 2021), and his work has appeared at MOMA PS1, Pioneer Works, the Poetry Project, Tagvverk and Press Press. He is a former AAWW Margins Fellow.
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aaww.org
facebook.com/AsianAmericanWritersWorkshop
twitter.com/aaww
AAWW is a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans–in other words, we’re the preeminent organization dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told.
We’re building the Asian literary culture of tomorrow through our curatorial platform, which includes our New York events series and our online editorial initiatives. In a time when China and India are on the rise, when immigration is a vital electoral issue, when the detention of Muslim Americans is a matter of common practice, we believe Asian American literature is vital to interpret our post-multicultural but not post-racial age. Our curatorial take is intellectual and alternative, pop cultural and highbrow, warm and artistically innovative, and vested in New York City communities.
Our curatorial platform is premised on the idea of a big-tent Asian American cultural pluralism. We’re interested in both the New York publishing industry and ethnic studies, the South Asian diasporic novel and the Asian American story of assimilation, high culture and pop culture, Lisa Lowe and Amar Chitra Katha, avant-garde poetry and spoken word, journalism and critical race theory, Midnight’s Children and Dictee. We are against both an exclusive literary culture that believes that race does not exist and Asian American narratives that lead to self-stereotyping and limit the menu of our identity. We are for inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Named one of the top five Asian American groups nationally, covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Poets & Writers, we are a safe community space and an anti-racist counterculture, incubating new ideas and interpretations of what it means to be both an American and a global citizen.
Join us for a special event featuring queer Lebanese writers Andrea Abi-Karam and Jennifer Camper. Selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Kelsey Street Prize, Abi-Karam’s new poetry book EXTRATRANSMISSION is a critique of nationalism, patriarchy, and gender embedded in an explosive trauma narrative. The creator of the biennial Queers & Comics Conference, Jennifer Camper is the author of Rude Girls and Dangerous Women, a collection of her cartoons, and subGURLZ, a graphic novella following the adventures of three women living in abandoned subway tunnels. They’ll speak with poet Rami Karim, a former AAWW Margins Fellow.
Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions, 2016), attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for forthcoming publication with Les Figues. They toured with Sister Spit March 2018 & are hype to live in New York. EXTRATRANSMISSION [Kelsey Street Press, 2019] is their first book. As Etel Adnan writes: “As the war machine creates new casualties and new ways to produce them, Andrea Abi-Karam creates a new language and a new form to express their desire to shake the American public out of its lethargy…. In these days of indifference to naked reality, Andrea dares be a writer of humanism, they dare to remind us that each one of us is somehow responsible for everything that is done in our name.”
Jennifer Camper is a cartoonist and graphic artist living in New York City. Her art examines life from a perspective that is irreverent, female, queer, and mongrel (Lebanese American). Her work often explores gender, race, class, and politics, as well as sexuality, mermaids, and robots. She’s also a cartoon editor, a teacher, and the creator of the biennial Queers & Comics Conference. Her books include Rude Girls and Dangerous Women, a collection of her cartoons, and subGURLZ, a graphic novella following the adventures of three women living in abandoned subway tunnels. She also edited two Juicy Mother comics anthologies. Her cartoons and illustrations have appeared in numerous publications, and have been exhibited internationally.
Rami Karim uses ordinary language against consumerist legibility. He is the author of smile & nod (wendy’s subway, 2018) and crybaby (nightboat, 2021), and his work has appeared at MOMA PS1, Pioneer Works, the Poetry Project, Tagvverk and Press Press. He is a former AAWW Margins Fellow.
--
aaww.org
facebook.com/AsianAmericanWritersWorkshop
twitter.com/aaww
AAWW is a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans–in other words, we’re the preeminent organization dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told.
We’re building the Asian literary culture of tomorrow through our curatorial platform, which includes our New York events series and our online editorial initiatives. In a time when China and India are on the rise, when immigration is a vital electoral issue, when the detention of Muslim Americans is a matter of common practice, we believe Asian American literature is vital to interpret our post-multicultural but not post-racial age. Our curatorial take is intellectual and alternative, pop cultural and highbrow, warm and artistically innovative, and vested in New York City communities.
Our curatorial platform is premised on the idea of a big-tent Asian American cultural pluralism. We’re interested in both the New York publishing industry and ethnic studies, the South Asian diasporic novel and the Asian American story of assimilation, high culture and pop culture, Lisa Lowe and Amar Chitra Katha, avant-garde poetry and spoken word, journalism and critical race theory, Midnight’s Children and Dictee. We are against both an exclusive literary culture that believes that race does not exist and Asian American narratives that lead to self-stereotyping and limit the menu of our identity. We are for inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Named one of the top five Asian American groups nationally, covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Poets & Writers, we are a safe community space and an anti-racist counterculture, incubating new ideas and interpretations of what it means to be both an American and a global citizen.
