Writing/Teaching Queens: A Conversation with Patricia Park and Bushra Rehman

Moderated by Nita Noveno (English, BMCC)

Beginning September 9, the NEH-funded Building Asian American Studies Project will launch a year long speaker series at BMCC. This series of talks is planned to cultivate discussion about teaching the vibrant array of academic and community-based scholarship, literary works, and other artistic/cultural productions that are emerging by and about Asian American communities in New York City. 

Patricia Park is the author of the debut novel Re Jane (Viking/Penguin, May 2015). She has written for the New York Times, Guardian, Salon, and others. Her work has been anthologized in Reader, I Married Him, edited by Tracy Chevalier; and Back to the Lake, edited by Thomas Cooley. She received fellowships from Fulbright, The Center for Fiction, and the Jerome Foundation. She received her BA from Swarthmore and MFA from Boston University. She is a native of New York City and a graduate of the Bronx H.S. of Science.

Bushra Rehman‘s first novel Corona, a dark comedy about being South Asian American, was noted by Poets & Writers among 2013’s Best Debut Fiction and featured in LA Review of Books as a work of radical South-Asian American Literature. She co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, one of Ms. Magazine’s “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time.” Rehman’s first Young Adult novel will be released by Tor/Macmillan in 2017. She has served as a teaching artist for Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Urban Word NYC, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She teaches in the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College and runs an independent writing workshop series: Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction.

Asian American Studies Project Background
The year-long Building Asian American Studies Project, made possible through almost $100,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), aims to expand the teaching of Asian American Studies in community college classrooms across humanities disciplines. The program began with a Summer Institute  that brought together 15 CUNY community college faculty participants to study and develop curricular materials for use in the classroom, and continues through this speaker series. More information about the project is available here:
https://buildingaas.commons.gc.cuny.edu/about/

Please email Soniya Munshi with any questions.

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