Conversation & Performance

Performance + Book Talk: Ava Chin “Mott Street”

Wed, May 1, 2024

12:30 PM–2:00 PM

This event will be in the Martin E. Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave, NYC. Please register below.

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 is a 5^th 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.

To attend this event, please RSVP here. Lunch will be served.