In the 21st Century, creative writers in the United States are facing unprecedented challenges to their discipline, craft, and survival. In 2025 alone, writers have witnessed large cuts in government funding for universities and humanities departments, the suspension of the NEA Fellowship for Creative Writers, and a number of class-action lawsuits against Artificial Intelligence companies, such as Bartz vs. Anthropic, in which A.I. companies are accused of illegally downloading 7.5 million literary and scholarly books and 81 million research papers to train their Large Language Model systems.[1] In this era of late capitalism, how can writers find viable ways to maintain and grow in their craft, seek the education in the humanities they desire, and create sustainable careers and communities in creative writing? As a multi-genre writer who is deeply inspired by world literature and transnationalism, Dr. Rita Banerjee will discuss her journey as a writer and literary citizen, and will share resources on how creative writers can create sustainable, nurturing, and viable careers, writing practices, and literary communities despite the pressures of American capitalism.
About the Author:
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. She is editor of the forthcoming anthology Disobedient Futures (University Press of Kentucky) in which writers imagine what the future cultures of the United States and the world could look like if folks disobeyed gender, tribal, and class paradigms, and explored disobedient forms of environmentalism and borders. She is also the author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats and Cracklers at Night, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and is co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, tribalism, and intimacy in the United States and in France. Her work appears in Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition,Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She serves as Senior Editor of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, which she co-founded at Harvard in 2008. She received a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the book’s opening chapters “Birth of Cool,” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays, and another chapter, “The Female Gaze,” was a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays.
[1] Reisner, Alex. “The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated Book Problem.” The Atlantic. Online. March 20, 2025.
On September 18, 6:30 pm EDT, Shanta Lee and Philip Brady, the editors of Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition, will be celebrating the launch of their new anthology with a reading featuring their Sign & Breath Authors. Featured authors will include Tim Seibles, Rita Banerjee, Diana Whitney, Ru Freeman, Diane Raptosh, Philip Metres, Haleh Gafori, Claire Bateman, Carolyn Finney, and Bruce Smith. Please register on Zoom to attend the reading at 6:30 pm EDT.
Rita Banerjee will be reading from her flash essay “The Spirit Door” during the Sign & Breath Reading Launch.
Featuring a range of contemporary artists, many of whom work across different mediums and genres, Sign & Breath introduces the reader to one page that sings in any genre – prose, fiction, poetry, spoken word, hybrid forms, and song – across diverse traditions. Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, and modalities, this book features poetry as a faculty that thrums in all written and spoken art. Readers are introduced to a text followed by a discussion with the author about creating the piece, ties to creative lineage, and the definition of voice through their practice. This anthology contributes to the dialogue among genres which will reframe understanding of poetry as an aesthetic experience of language. With one page that sings in any genre, Sign & Breath presents a new, inclusive perspective on poetry while two questions remain: Do we have a clearer understanding of what defines poetry? Do we have a clearer understanding of voice?
Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition debuted on August 26, 2025. You can order Sign & Breath here and read Rita Banerjee’s personal flash essay “The Spirit Door” and interview, which are featured in the anthology.
Poet Michael Mercurio hosts and curates “What the Universe Is,” a poetry reading series featuring poets and writers Rita Banerjee and Amanda Shaw reading at 7:30 pm EST on Tuesday, February 11, 2025. Register for the reading on Zoom and join the reading live at: bit.ly/WTUIFeb2025! And here’s more information about the reading & writers below:
Make some time for poetry during this shortest of months. Come hear two exceptional poets read for you on Zoom, so you don’t have to leave the house in these cold & dark days. Let these poets bring you light & warmth!
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is author of Disobedient Futures,CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, Echo in Four Beats, “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night, and co-writer of the documentary Burning Down the Louvre. Her work appears in Academy of American Poets,Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She serves as Senior Editor of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She received a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the book’s opening chapters “Birth of Cool,” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays, and another chapter, “The Female Gaze,” was a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays.
Amanda Shaw is the author of It Will Have Been So Beautiful (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024). Based in Washington, DC, she is a teacher and editor at the World Bank and other international organizations. Her poems have appeared in LEON Literary Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, and Lily Poetry Review, which she recently joined as the reviews editor. Over the last 25 years, she has taught students of all ages and backgrounds in New York, Boston, Detroit, and Rome, Italy.
It’s very easy to register at bit.ly/WTUIFeb2025 — make sure you don’t miss out!
TheMFA Program for Writersrecently celebrated its annual winter residency this past January. The residency featured inspiring lectures and classes from both faculty and graduating students. And writers and readers can access the wonderful craft discussions and lectures from the MFA Program for Writers faculty online here. All MFA Store proceeds directly support graduate student scholarships in the MFA Program for Writers.
Rita Banerjee’s Opening Lecture, “The Poetry and Power of Witness” asks, “How do we as writers process the various kinds of social trauma that inform and affect our daily lives?” In Against Forgetting, Carolyn Forché argues against an easy descent into forgetfulness or a culture of oblivion as espoused a constant carousel of rotating news headlines. She instead introduces the notion of “poem as trace, poem as evidence” and how the work of a writer can serve as a witness to and record of history. And in her introduction to Playing in the dark, Toni Morrison writes that, “Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer’s notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning and response-ability.” Some authors, studied in this talk, who wrestle with both their response and responsibility as witness to their particular social and historical moment, include Carolyn Forché, Solmaz Sharif, Fatimah Ashgar, Paul Celan, George Abraham, Noor Hindi, Jo Ann Beard, Yoko Tawada, Julio Cortázar, Agyeya, James Baldwin, Carvell Wallace, and Carl Phillips.
The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers store features a rich archive of faculty lectures and craft discussions from January 1992 – January 2025, and can be accessed here: https://www.wwcmfa.org/store/
In 1970, when Shawn Wong was 19 and a student at the University of California at Berkeley, he had to go hunting for Asian American literature on the street.
An English professor told him no such literature existed. But Wong and his friends and fellow writers, Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin and Lawson Fusao Inada, knew that wasn’t true. They had connected over a shared quest to discover Asian American literature. Their dogged search through Bay Area thrift stores and a handful of literary anthologies led them to 14 writers whose work had been largely ignored by mainstream publishers.
As the young editors continued to refine their list of work by overlooked authors, they decided to create an anthology. Chan brought their fledgling manuscript into the Asian American literature class he was teaching at San Francisco State University, while Wong—who would later join the faculty at the UW—used the material in a class he was teaching at Mills College in nearby Oakland. Eventually, the first-time editors published that group of 14 authors, which included UW alumnus John Okada, ’47, ’51, as well as now well-known wordsmiths Toshio Mori, Oscar Peñaranda and Diana Chang. Their radical undertaking culminated in “Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers.”
This year, “Aiiieeeee!” turns 50. First published by the Howard University Press in 1974, the book was republished in 2019 by the University of Washington Press. The new edition holds a foreword by Tara Fickle, associate professor of Asian American studies at Northwestern University, who offers the current generation of readers context about the era and people involved in bringing the book to life. Fickle studied Wong’s correspondence with the writers and his fellow editors. She also looked at the production notes for the book to understand how the collection evolved through the editorial process and what the stakes were for the editors. Fickle’s research into Wong’s archives unearthed the editors’ own reflections on their project. In a letter to Wong, for example, Inada envisioned the anthology’s success. “Our place in history will have the secure feel of real beginnings. After a while, people will refer to us as the fathers … the cornerstones of our culture.”
Inada’s words held true. “Aiiieeeee!” became a foundational text in Asian American Literature, and its editors were credited for both rescuing stories out of time and opening readers to a diversity of voices and experiences from the Asian American community. The anthology’s 14 pieces range from the 1940s to the 1970s, ending in a time when activists and scholars were challenging stereotypical representations and expectations of the Asian American voice and experience to highlight neglected perspectives and more freshly define the culture.
Author and activist Ishmael Reed helped the four writers and would-be editors find their way to the Howard University Press. The Howard editors “were the first to realize the legitimacy of Asian American literature,” Wong says. “It was one of the first 10 books on their list. And it was the only one that wasn’t an African American title.”
Reed dubbed Wong and his friends the “Four Horsemen of Asian-American Literature” and encouraged their efforts to provoke, develop and define an Asian American literary canon. Right away, the book garnered positive reviews in Rolling Stone and The New York Times and advanced Wong and his collaborators along their paths as writers and literary activists.
Today, the UW is steeped in the legacy of their groundbreaking work. A wealth of modern Asian American literary voices includes UW alumni and scholars who studied Asian American literature, English literature and ethnic cultural studies.
Wong joined the UW faculty in 1984, after teaching at Mills College, UC Santa Cruz and San Francisco State. He is currently a professor in the English department and has served as chair of English, director of the Creative Writing Program, director of the University Honors Program and faculty in Cinema & Media Studies.
“The UW has always been a place where you can reinvent yourself,” says Wong. “It’s large enough that I could try different things and bring my perspective to lots of different fields.”
Alongside Wong’s legacy, the University of Washington Press has its own long history of engaging contemporary scholars in republishing and recontextualizing Asian American classics for new generations of readers. It also has a long-standing commitment to supporting Asian American scholarship dating to the early 1970s when editor-in-chief Naomi Pascale saw an opportunity to position the press at the forefront of the discipline. In 1973, the press republished Filipino novelist Carlos Bulosan’s “America Is in the Heart.” Over her decades-long career at the UW Press, Pascale acquired many other titles in this area, including Jade Snow Wong’s “Fifth Chinese Daughter” and Janice Mirikitani’s “Awake in the River and Shedding Silence.”
When Nicole Mitchell became publisher of the press in 2012, she led the redesign and refresh of its Asian American classics series and invited contemporary writers and scholars to develop introductions for these new editions. The UW Press also has published titles from UW faculty across disciplines. “Becoming Nisei,” by professors Lisa Hoffman in the School of Urban Studies and Mary Hanneman, ’91, of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, looks at Japanese Americans in Tacoma before World War II. Professor Stephen Sumida’s “And the View from the Shore” explores the literary traditions of Hawai’i. The press also has supported prominent Northwest-based Asian American writers including Frank Abe, Peter Bacho, ’74, and Cindy Domingo.
In 2020, Shawn Wong established the Shawn Wong Book Fund at the UW Press to recover forgotten titles, like Louis Chu’s “Eat a Bowl of Tea,” and bring them back into print for the wider public. The newest title in Wong’s series is Willyce Kim’s “Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid”—the first Asian American lesbian novel.
Rising scholars and talented writers are drawn to the UW’s English Ph.D. program. Poet and writer E.J. Koh, ’23, won the Washington State Book Award for her memoir, “The Magical Language of Others.” Her novel, “The Liberators,” was released last fall. At the UW, Koh studied Korean American literature, history and film. Rita Banerjee’s, ’06, recent contemplation on female cool, “The Female Gaze,” was featured in “The Best American Essays” last year. And in her new memoir, “Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City,” Jane Wong, ’16, writes of finding in the literature of other Asian American artists ways to tell her own story… Today is a new day for underrepresented voices, and Asian American literature is flourishing with fresh new voices… Today is a new day for underrepresented voices, and Asian American literature is flourishing with fresh new voices.
In honor of AANHPI month, University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce’s recently honored the legacy and impact Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities at the University of Washington in her Presidential Blog. President Cauce writes:
Connections to our Asian American (AA) and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) communities run deep at the University of Washington and across the Pacific Northwest. This year’s theme, “Advancing Leaders through Innovation,” offers a terrific lens through which to celebrate the significant role these diverse communities have had in the shaping of America, each through their own language, heritage and culture…
We also celebrate artists like UW Bothell artist-in-residence Anida Yoeu Ali, whose current debut solo show “Hybrid Skin, Mythical Presence” marks Seattle Asian Art Museum’s first exhibition by a Cambodian American artist. And the work of Native Hawaiian astrophysicist Brittany Kamai, cofounder of the Society of Indigenous Physicists (SIP), whose UW course, Pacific Indigenous Astrophysics, focuses uniquely on Indigenous navigation and is available to all UW students.
UW alumni include many talented creators from the AANHPI diaspora, as well, including Washington State Book Award winner E.J. Koh (’23) and Rita Banerjee (’06), whose essay “The Female Gaze,” explores the concept of keeping one’s cool as a woman of color.
This month of awareness is also a time to re-affirm our commitment to fighting anti-Asian racism and take collective responsibility in battling all forms of hatred, bigotry and discrimination here on campus and beyond. Let’s celebrate AA and NHPI communities and contributions — in May and throughout the year — for how they contribute to the University’s uniquely diverse and beautifully rich tapestry of cultures and identities.
Rita Banerjee’s essay in three parts, “The Female Gaze,” is an excerpt from her memoir and manifesto on how young women of color keep their cool against social, sexual, and economic pressure.
In her essay exploring the female gaze, female agency, and female cool, Banerjee asks: What if women, especially women of color, were the progenitors of cool? That is, did women have to cultivate their own cool—their own sense of style, creative expression, and coldness—in order to survive patriarchy across millennia across cultures? If the male gaze aims subordinate and colonize, what does the female gaze, tempered by cool, desire? What does the female gaze cherish or hold dear? If a woman were fully aware of her gaze, would she use it to objectify and colonize, or could her gaze destabilize and decolonize?
Rita Banerjee will be be featured on WGDR Radio’s “Bon Mot” program at 5 pm EST on Sunday, August 20, 2023. The radio program will air on 91.1 and 91.7 FM Vermont, and can be found in archive here. The show is hosted by Rick Argan and Banerjee will be be reading from her poetry collection Echo in Four Beats and her new memoir manuscript on female cool. The show will also feature readings from Hunger Mountain, Issue 25: Art Saves, which was edited and curated by Erin Stalcup and features poetry, fiction, nonfiction, graphic literature, and hybrid work from the first 25 years of Hunger Mountain literary magazine. The reading also features faculty and students reading from Hunger Mountain: Art Saves from the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at VCFA in Spring 2021. You can listen to the broadcast here.
During the the Tongass Mist Writing Retreat (April 12-16, 2023) in Sitka, Alaska, Visiting Rita Banerjee sat down with Brooke Shafer, one of the hosts of “The Library Show” on Raven Radio (KCAW, 104.7 FM Sitka, Alaska). Brooke Shafer asked Rita Banerjee about her favorite books, current reads, what drew her to writing, what it’s like to teach creative writing, and the memoir and manifesto on female cool that she currently working on. Banerjee also got a chance to read from “Cool as Kin,” a new chapter from her memoir on-air.
KCAW Raven Radio will be airing Brooke Shafer’s interview and conversation with Rita Banerjee on Sunday, May 7, 10:30 am Alaska Time (2:30 pm EDT, 11:30 am PDT). And you can listen to “The Library Show” broadcast live (or download it) on May 7 on Raven Radio at:
Adverse Abstraction will be featuring poets and writers Rita Banerjee, Bonnie Jill Emanuel, and Virginia Vasquez during their next monthly reading at Otto’s Shrunken Head on Friday, May 20 at 6 pm Eastern. The Adverse Abstraction monthly artist series is curated in New York City by writers Kristine Esser Slentz and Matthew Gahler, and you can read more about the featured authors below.
Featured Authors:
Rita Banerjee is author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, Echo in Four Beats, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University Brooklyn. Her work appears in Hunger Mountain, Isele, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays.
Bonnie Jill Emanuel’s poems appear or will appear in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Passages North, The Night Heron Barks, SWWIM, The Laurel Review, Indolent Books Online, Ruminate, Love’s Executive Order, Midwest Review, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. She earned a Creative Writing MFA at The City College of New York in 2020, where she was awarded the Jerome Lowell DeJur Prize in Creative Writing for her full-length thesis manuscript, and the Stark Poetry Prize in Memory of Raymond Patterson for a series of poems she wrote about Detroit. She holds a BA in Creative Writing & Foreign Languages from University of Michigan’s Residential College. Born in Detroit, she now lives in New York.
Virginia Vasquez is a cross-genre writer, multidisciplinary artist, and educator. She taught creative writing at the City College of New York, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing with a focus on experimental and hybrid poetics. In her artist statement, she explains: “As a multiracial Caribeña, I honor my racial identities, ancestry, and lineage. In my work, I evoke ancestral spirits to give voice to those forgotten and unheard, to bring the ancestors into presence — exalt their pain and sacrifice, resistance and power. My writing is ritualistic, taking on various forms and shapes to challenge perceptions, perspectives, and assumptions about history, identity, and self.” Virginia is also a certified Mental Health First Aid instructor, and has worked in mental health settings for over 6 years. She taught various workshops on mental health at 1199SEIU, and currently facilitates trainings’ for the Mentorship Training Program for Registered Apprenticeship in Healthcare at H-CAP, Inc.
Rita Banerjee 