“The Angela’s Ashes for Chinese Americans,” Miwa Messer, host, B&N’s Poured Over.

Join the American Studies Certificate Program and the Advanced Research Collaborative for this special lunch with Ava Chin—author, performer, and professor—as she performs and talks about her new in paperback book Mott Street (Penguin Books), about the impact of the country’s first immigration restrictions on four generations of her family in NYC’s Chinatown.

Ava Chin, a 5th generation New Yorker, is the author of Mott Street, a 2024 American Library Association Notable Book and a Best Book of 2023 by TIME, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Elle. Her first memoir Eating Wildly won the MFK Fisher Book Award for excellence in food writing. She is the recipient of awards from the NY Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Fulbright Program, NYFA, NY Institute for the Humanities, and the Asian American Writer’s Workshop. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times (“Urban Forager”), Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, SPIN, and VIBE. She is Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the College of Staten Island and the head of the CUNY Graduate Center’s American Studies Certificate Program.

Chin will be in conversation with Vivian Louie, Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, and Director of the Asian American Studies Center and Program at Hunter College.

Lunch will be served.

This event is co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program & Center at Hunter College, the Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI), the Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI), the Ph.D. Program in English at the Graduate Center, the Ph.D. Program in History at the Graduate Center, the M.A. program in Biography and Memoir at the Graduate Center, Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2), and the Center for the Humanities.

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