Mott Street: Performance + Talk By Ava Chin

Posted on September 18, 2024 by Sunny Chung

Date: 09/18/2024

Time: 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Location
Charles B. Wang Center Theatre

Description

As part of our celebration of AAPI heritages, Ava Chin—author, professor, and fifth-generation New Yorker—will discuss her award-winning book, Mott Street. Mott Street explores the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the United States’ first immigration restriction, on four generations of her family in New York City’s Chinatown. A former slam poet, Chin shares stories about the ghosts of Chinatown; addresses family members who entered the country when the odds were stacked against them; and reveals how confronting family secrets and doing a deep dive into archival research enabled her to write a compelling intergenerational narrative with implications for the entire nation.

The lecture is sponsored by the Charles B. Wang Center in partnership with the AAPI Heritages Committee, University Libraries DEIA Committee, and the Department of Asian & Asian American Studies.

Ava Chin is a professor of creative nonfiction and the head of the CUNY Graduate Center’s American Studies Certificate Program. She is the author of Mott Street, which won the Chinese American Librarians Association’s Best Nonfiction Book Award, was named a 2024 ALA Notable Book, and chosen as a Best Book of the Year 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 has received fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Fulbright Program, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York Institute for the Humanities, the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, and MacDowell. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, SPIN, and VIBE. Professor Chin earned a PhD from the University of Southern California, MA from Johns Hopkins, and BA from Queens College, and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU.