News
Dear friends,
I am happy to announce the Winter 2026 courses at Asian American Literary Archive, Reading the Romance in Asian American Literature with Kathleen Escharcha and Asian American Studies for Right Now: The Great Teach-in, with Poems with lawrence-minh bùi davis and Mimi Khúc.
Reading the Asian American Romance
Instructor(s): Kathleen Escarcha
Term: Winter 2026
Dates: February 3, 2026–February 26, 2026 (8 sessions)
Times: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8:30–9:30 P.M. ET / 5:30-6:30 P.M. PT (1 hour twice a week)
Enrollment: 15 students
Enrollment Closes: February 2, 2026, 11:59 P.M. ET
While many classes on romance fiction begin with British Romanticism, this course turns to twentieth-century and contemporary Asian American and transpacific texts to foreground a different set of concerns: restrictive immigration and anti-miscegenation laws, Orientalism, queerness, and imperialism. We will examine how race, migration, and empire shape the (im)possibility of love, marriage, and family formation for Asian and Asian American communities. Pairing literary fiction and film with cultural history and critical theory, we will explore how writers use romance to interrogate compulsory heterosexuality, immigration policy, and nation-building. Readings span North America, the Philippines, Japan, and Trinidad, situating Asian American literature within global circuits of empire and migration while rethinking what and whom the romance genre has historically excluded.
Asian American Studies for Right Now: The Great Teach-in, with Poems
Instructor(s): lawrence-minh bùi davis and (proudly lazy TA) Mimi Khúc
Term: Winter 2026
Dates: January 15, 2026–March 19, 2026 (10 sessions)
Times: Thursdays, 7:30–8:45 P.M. ET / 4:30-5:45 P.M. PT (1 hour 15 minutes once a week)
Enrollment: 100 students
Enrollment Closes: January 14, 2026, 11:59 P.M. ET
An Asian American studies teach-in for the crumbling sinkhole of 2026 America. With poems. Join lifelong Asian Americanist scholars learning with and from students new to the field alongside leading Asian American poets and writers. Together we’ll weigh the possibilities–and responsibilities–of Asian American studies and Asian American arts right now. With sessions on genocide in Gaza; the sweeping purges of all things DEI and QTNB; the abyss of the Asian American mental health crisis; the radical potentials of friendship and grief. Throughout will be a commitment to DIY access culture and disability justice we'll wear like garbage bags into a monsoon. Course texts will include “hijacked” poems by George Abraham; a class-sourced FAQ on dealing with EYE-CE; an “intimate lecture” by newly minted US Poet Laureate Arthur Sze; queer eco-justice stickers and film shorts by Jess X. Snow; the spring 2024 student encampments as epic poems. Course learning objectives will include fun, vulnerability, trust-building, lip-biting hope, and–cue grandiose music–the groaning sounds of doors opening inside us.
Asian American Studies for Right Now was first taught by Ida Yalzadeh in the summer of 2024, teaching foundations of Asian American studies while also directly addressing topics such as anti-Blackness and Palestine. When I asked lawrence to propose a course for this Winter 2026 session, his idea for The Great Teach-In seemed directly aligned with the ethos of Ida's initial course.
Back then, when the goal was just to get Asian American studies to the public, the course seemed out-of-the-box, but now, as critical race theory is being targeted in the academy and books continue to be censored, it seems more to me as the beginning of something new. I aim to continue Ida's idea at the Asian American Literary Archive as the cornerstone of our educational offering: a foundations in Asian American Studies course that is also an un-institutional space of experimentation and connection that addresses the history we are living right now.
To that end, Asian American Studies for Right Now: The Great Teach-In, with Poems, will follow a different format than our usual seminars. The course will be delivered by lawrence and Mimi with a variety of guests, and serves to be as much an educational space as an activating space—for archives and beyond.
The Archive is also moving beyond classes. Last month, we launched Box 68, an archive of interviews with movers and thinkers in Asian American literature. Over the next few months, look out for new interviews with poet Nellie Wong, scholar Keva X. Bui, and preservationist Sine Hwang Jensen.
I am grateful to be in community with you all.
Best,
Yanyi
Director, Asian American Literary Archive
Dear Archive community,
Since its inception, I have intended the Archive to function as a crossroads for scholars, artists, and preservationists to meet and collaborate. To that end, I'm pleased to announce the inaugural paired course in Asian American studies that does just that: Reading the Asian American West with scholar Surabhi Balachander and writer Nina McConigley.
Pairing these two on the Asian American West was an obvious one: I've had the pleasure of getting to know Nina as a fellow faculty member at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and I've long been an admirer of Surabhi's public humanities work through her Bookstagram. It was actually delightful to learn that they're already friends.
Surabhi Balachander grew up in Indiana, was a longtime staff member at Stanford University's Bill Lane Center for the American West, and now teaches at Oregon State University. Surabhi’s research and teaching interests bridge comparative ethnic studies and the environmental humanities in 20th and 21st century American literature. Her current book project seeks to define rural identity in American literature from 1920-2020, the U.S.'s first century as a majority-urban nation, and shows that rural America, in contrast to popular stereotypes, is best understood as multiethnic and cosmopolitan.
Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians won the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. She was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. The Denver Center for Performing Arts commissioned her play based on Cowboys and East Indians, which will have its world premiere in 2026. She teaches at Colorado State University, and her novel and essay collection are forthcoming in 2026.
This course samples literature in a variety of genres (short story, children's literature, poetry, memoir, graphic novel) that explores Asian American experiences across the American West. We'll consider ways Asian American authors have engaged with the rich histories and diverse geographies of the region, as well as dominant imaginaries of it (the Wild West or the rugged frontier). Authors may include Hisaye Yamamoto, Paisley Rekdal, Oliver de la Paz, Mira Jacob, and Linda Sue Park. Expect a small amount of reading in preparation for each session. During class, we'll discuss our chosen texts and the larger contexts they bring up, as well as engage in a related creative writing experiment together.
I have been consistently inspired by not only the instructors but the students who show up to Archive classes. You are artists, activists, engineers, directors, and, most of all, readers. Stay tuned for more announcements as I fill out the Summer 2025 and Winter 2026 course terms, and more!
Warm wishes,
Yanyi
Director, Asian American Literary Archive
