Asian-American Writers Workshop: Dust Child Book Tour

New Design High School, one of the institutions located at Seward Park Campus, hosted a stop on the launch tour of Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai. Due to an accident during setup the 300-seat auditorium was unusable for the event, pushing the location up into the library proper. While this caused a bit of same-day panic, I'm extremely grateful for the experience I received from assisting in set-up, execution, and tear-down of the event. 

Over the course of the few hours between students' last lunch period and the beginning of the event, the head librarian, another intern, and myself were able to transform the library space from a comfortable hang-out spot for students into an effective speaking hall, complete with areas for tabling from some local partners. These partners consisted of Yu & Me Books, a local independent bookseller, as well as representatives from a nearby branch of the NYPL. In addition to these community partners and the speakers themselves, we managed to arrange the library in a way to accommodate roughly 100 attendees of the book launch.

The talk itself was an absolute joy to attend - I have a few friends in the writing world, and I love attending readings. Quế Mai was a delightful and insightful speaker, and it was enriching to hear about her writing process and personal journey. More holistically, it was incredible to see the synergy between so many different organizations, and I felt lucky to help facilitate the event they all had mutual stakes in. While the head librarian's organizational efforts happened before my field work began, I feel that I learned a great deal in simply seeing how the missions of different institutions can overlap, and how programming and events can be organized around those shared dedications. I'll be continuing to ask the head librarian about the process of hosting events like these, and I can't wait to get started in my own hosting efforts.