This August, the Asian American Literary Festival was to take place in Washington, DC.. The event had already garnered substantial investments and expectations from both national and international groups and states. Thus there was considerable shock and outrage when Acting Director Yao-Fen You abruptly cancelled the entire festival, without a word of explanation.
The Washington Post and other sources have hinted that it might be because of potentially controversial content. The Post wrote: “According to emails shared with The Post, You notified Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis, the festival’s director since its founding in 2017 and a curator at the Smithsonian that “due to the current political climate,” Smithsonian leadership had requested that all upcoming exhibitions and multiday programs be reviewed under a policy known as Smithsonian Directive 603, which is meant to help identify any potentially sensitive or controversial content and prepare for potential responses from the public.”
On today’s show we speak with Ching-In Chen, a poet who was curating a festival event featuring books by trans and nonbinary writers, and Kate Hao, a program coordinator on contract with the Smithsonian for the festival, about the controversy, and about the issues it raises about art for the community vs. art that must conform to state institutional preferences and politics. We discuss why this festival is absolutely essential for the present day, where we have Asian Americans being used to help dismantle affirmative action, and where we see persistent and deadly acts of anti-Asian violence.
We also hear about possible plans to go forward without the Smithsonian, and ways we can help support the artists and organizers.
Acting Director You declined to comment for this show.
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project as well as a Kelsey Street Press collective member. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as Writer in Residence at Hugo House. www.chinginchen.com
Kate Hao is a poet and fiction writer, a cultural worker, a shy Leo, an ex-pianist, a soup enthusiast, an aspiring morning person. She grew up in the suburbs of northern Virginia and currently calls Providence, Rhode Island home.
