Asian American Writers Workshop

Asian American Writers' Workshop

Asian American Writers' Workshop logo
Formation	1991
Type	not-for-profit
Purpose	Asian American literature
Headquarters	New York City
Region served	United States
Executive Director	Ken Chen
Website	http://www.aaww.org

The Asian American Writers' Workshop is a nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 1991 to support writers, literature and community. The Workshop also offers the annual Asian American Literary Awards and sponsors Page Turner: The Asian American Literary Festival.

In 2007, The Asian American Writers' Workshop partnered with Hyphen Magazine to start a short story contest called the Hyphen Asian American Short Story Contest, the only national, pan-Asian American writing competition of its kind Previous winners include Preeta Samarasan, Sunil Yapa, Shivani Manghnani, and Timothy Tau. Previous judges include Porochista Khakpour, Yiyun Li, Alexander Chee, Jaed Coffin, Brian Leung, Monique Truong and Monica Ferrell.

In response to the 2015 "yellowface poet" incident, the organization published a "white pen name" generator, which creates random white-sounding names "all the way back to Plymouth Rock." It was made in mockery of Michael Derrick Hudson, pushing back at the idea that writers of color might find greater success in the publishing industry if their names were whitewashed.