Introducing Box 68: Interviews with Poet Victoria Chang and Scholar Rajorshi Das
Since 2022, the Asian American Literary Archive has been offering courses in Asian American studies and literature to the public. What started as an experiment and proof-of-concept has leapt into ongoing opportunities for working adults to access not only information but expertise around Asian American issues and art. I look forward to announcing an exciting slate of offerings for Winter 2026 in the next few weeks.
However, the intention was never to stop at courses. This is an archive, after all. Naively, I first thought that I could scan some ephemera, put it up on a website, and call it a day. Copyright issues came up immediately and I had to give up the idea of scanning and sharing (and yes, if you’re an archivist who wants to give me advice on all this, I would love to chat).
With the same naïveté, I pivoted those grand plans to a literary journal instead. On this end, the limitations of time, money, and, in the case of out-of-print works, copyright, came into play. I wanted to pay the contributors and the staff even at nominal fees. Given these limitations, after discussing it with assistant editor Winona Guo, it just didn’t align yet to build a magazine that had no budget.
When I was recovering from top surgery, I read interviews with artists voraciously in The Paris Review. I was hungry for artists’ intentions behind their own work; tidbits of who they were as people and also how they found a way to write in their moments in history. Outside of the literary world, I read interviews with academics to better understand their theories and, again, to understand who they were as people, not just theorists. Soon, interviews came up as a possible genre aligned with the Archive’s purpose as a community gateway to Asian American literature.
Introducing Box 68: Interviews in Asian American studies and literature
Box 68 is so named for the year in which the term “Asian American” was coined, the activist movements it came out of, and the boxes of materials one requests from archival collections.
In its first iteration, as a newsletter and archive of interviews with scholars, preservationists, Box 68 will be delivered as special editions of the Asian American Literary Archive newsletter, which you are already subscribed to if you received this directly.
To that end, I am excited to announce that you can read the inaugural interviews right now!
I’m always searching for something, for something larger where there’s no answer, no solution. No one’s even going to talk back to me. There’s no response. It’s literally the void. But I am searching. It’s metaphysical, philosophical, it’s something bigger.
—Poet Victoria Chang on With My Back to the World
I didn't notice the usage of the phrase until you pointed that out. I was thinking about how some of this work, labor intensive work, whether it's from activists on ground or activist storytellers—has a method of messiness. All of that is happening simultaneously, at the same time, because often when we are trying to understand politics—and I mean the ideological work that we do, inside or outside the university—we often are unable to reconcile with contradictions. Certain people think as if politics needs to be pure. Just because one person is supporting one cause, they also have to support, you know, the other X, Y, Z.
—Scholar Rajorshi Das on Messy and Queer Storytelling
Over the fall/winter season, we be publishing the rest of our initial interviews with archivist and librarian Sine Hwang Jensen, scholar Keva X. Bui, and poet Nellie Wong.
Like with all new things at Asian American Literary Archive, Box 68 is an experiment I intend to grow for sustainable longevity. This marks the first leap for the Archive beyond courses since its inception, and I’m really excited to see what possibilities and connections can come from it in the years ahead.
In solidarity,
Yanyi
Director, Asian American Literary Archive