Omar Musa Pt. 1: Here Come The Dogs Reading

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Named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year, Malaysian Australian poet/rapper Omar Musa is the author of Here Come The Dogs (The New Press 2016). A novel of freestyle rap battles, graffiti and basketball, Here Come The Dogs follows three young men—one Samoan, one Macedonian, one not sure—trying to make their mark as the country is swept by racial unrest. As Jane Yong Kim writes in The Los Angeles Times, Omar "writes using an urgent poetry-prose hybrid, scraping and folding his text into a searing coming-of-age story that tackles race and masculine identity, dislocation and disempowerment." The creator of three hip-hop albums and two poetry books, Omar Musa has won the Australian Poetry Slam and Indian Ocean Poetry Slam and opened for Gil Scott Heron and Dead Prez.

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AAWW is a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans–in other words, we’re the preeminent organization dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told.

We’re building the Asian literary culture of tomorrow through our curatorial platform, which includes our New York events series and our online editorial initiatives. In a time when China and India are on the rise, when immigration is a vital electoral issue, when the detention of Muslim Americans is a matter of common practice, we believe Asian American literature is vital to interpret our post-multicultural but not post-racial age. Our curatorial take is intellectual and alternative, pop cultural and highbrow, warm and artistically innovative, and vested in New York City communities.

Our curatorial platform is premised on the idea of a big-tent Asian American cultural pluralism. We’re interested in both the New York publishing industry and ethnic studies, the South Asian diasporic novel and the Asian American story of assimilation, high culture and pop culture, Lisa Lowe and Amar Chitra Katha, avant-garde poetry and spoken word, journalism and critical race theory, Midnight’s Children and Dictee. We are against both an exclusive literary culture that believes that race does not exist and Asian American narratives that lead to self-stereotyping and limit the menu of our identity. We are for inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Named one of the top five Asian American groups nationally, covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Poets & Writers, we are a safe community space and an anti-racist counterculture, incubating new ideas and interpretations of what it means to be both an American and a global citizen.