NEA Big Read: Family Day Celebrating Interior Chinatown and AAPI Heritage Month

Featuring

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  Annie Chen

  Annie Chen

  Annie Chen is a vocalist, composer, and bandleader from Beijing, based in New York since 2013. Her distinctive style draws on a rich continuum of musical traditions from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. As a bandleader, Chen has performed extensively in prestigious New York City venues including the Blue Note, Cornelia St. Cafe, Flushing Town Hall, and Club Bonafide. In China, she has performed at festivals including Shanghai International Jazz Festival and Beijing Nine-Gates Jazz Festival, as well as venues such as Blue Note Beijing, Guangzhou Xinghai Concert Hall, JZ Shanghai, and JZ Hangzhou, where she has been featured as artist-in-residence in 2015, 2016, and 2018. Her 2018 octet recording Secret Treetop was praised by Downbeat as “[a] clear-eyed fusion of East and West with an avant-garde twist,” and was nominated for a CMIC Best Vocal Jazz Album award in China, analogous to a Grammy in the U.S. The album is a follow-up to 2014’s Pisces the Dreamer, which a features a deft traversal of Chinese, Middle-Eastern, Eastern European, and Afro-American musical landscapes.

  Chen studied classical piano beginning at age four at China’s Central Conservatory of Music, graduating in 2008. In 2015 she earned a Masters in Jazz Performance from Queens College, studying with Charenée Wade, Antonio Hart, David Berkman, and Michael Philip Mossman.

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  Ava Chin

  Ava Chin

  Ava Chin is the author of Eating Wildly, winner of the Les Dames d’Escoffier International M.F.K. Fisher Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, and Saveur. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Institute for the Humanities, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She is an associate professor of creative nonfiction at the City University of New York.

  Photo Credit: Tommy Kha

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  Wayne Ho

  Wayne Ho

  Wayne Ho is the President and CEO of the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC), the nation’s largest Asian American social services agency. With a mission to promote the social and economic empowerment of Chinese American, immigrant, and low-income communities, CPC serves over 60,000 community members in the areas of education, family support, and community and economic empowerment at 35 locations throughout New York City. Since the pandemic started, CPC has led a recovery platform for Asian American neighborhoods, spoken out against the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, advocated for hazard pay and PPE for essential workers in the human services sector, distributed over $1.25 million and nearly 100,000 meals to community members, and been quoted in over 150 news stories. Previously, Wayne served as Chief Strategy and Program Officer for the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA), an association of 200 community and faith-based member agencies aiming to promote upward mobility of underserved New Yorkers, from 2013-2017, and was the Executive Director of the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families (CACF), the nation’s only pan-Asian children’s advocacy organization, from 2004-2013. Wayne has been recognized by City and State in the inaugural Asian Power 100 in 2020, in the inaugural Nonprofit Power 50 in 2018, and as a 40 Under 40 New York City Rising Star in 2014. He was one of 10 leaders invited to meet with President Obama during the White House’s Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month Celebration in 2011. Wayne serves on numerous boards, including Coro New York Leadership Center and NYC Employment & Training Coalition, and is appointed to several New York City and State advisory boards. Wayne received his Bachelor of Arts from UC Berkeley and his Master in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

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  Grace Lin

  Grace Lin

  Before Grace Lin was an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author/illustrator of picturebooks, early readers and middle grade novels, she was the only Asian girl (except for her sisters) going to her elementary school in Upstate New York. That experience, good and bad, has influenced her books—including her Newbery Honor Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, her Geisel Honor Ling & Ting, her National Book Finalist When the Sea Turned Silver and her Caldecott Honor A Big Mooncake for Little Star. But, it also causes Grace to persevere for diversity as an occasional New England Public Radio commentator and when she gave her TEDx talk “The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf,” as well as her PBSNewHour video essay “What to do when you realize classic books from your childhood are racist?.” She continued this mission with a hundred episodes of the podcast kidlitwomen* and now currently hosts two other podcasts: Book Friends Forever and Kids Ask Authors. In 2016, Grace’s art was displayed at the White House and Grace, herself, was recognized by President Obama’s office as a Champion of Change for Asian American and Pacific Islander Art and Storytelling. In 2022, Grace was awarded the Children’s Literature Legacy Award from the American Library Association.

  Photo Credit: Danielle Tait

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  Charles Yu

  Charles Yu

  Charles Yu is the author of four books, including his latest, Interior Chinatown, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Le Prix Médicis étranger, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. He has received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, been nominated for two Writers Guild of America awards for his work on the HBO series Westworld, and has also written for shows on FX, AMC, Facebook Watch, and Adult Swim. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a number of publications including the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, the Atlantic, Wired, Time and Ploughshares.

  Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he has also sponsored the Betty L. and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prizes for Students.  You can find him on Twitter @charles_yu.

  Photo Credit: Tina Chiou