Josephine Park is a member of the faculty steering committee of the Asian American Studies Program, and she specializes in twentieth-century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on American Orientalism and Asian American literature. She is the author Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford 2008), which reads a modern history of American literary alliances with East Asia and was awarded the Literary Book Award by the Association for Asian American Studies, and Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (Oxford 2016), which examines Asian American subjectivities shaped by wartime alliances in Korea and Vietnam. She is the co-editor (with Paul Stasi) of Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity (Bloomsbury 2016). Her teaching interests include minority literature, American poetry, theories of race and subject formation, modernism, and cold war cultural studies.

The daughter of a refugee father from China and an immigrant mother from Jamaica, Jennifer Ho is the director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also holds an appointment as Professor of Ethnic Studies. She is the president of the Association for Asian American Studies (2020-2022) and the author of one co-edited (along with Jim Donahue and Shaun Morgan) collection of essays, Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (Ohio State University Press 2017) and three scholarly monographs, Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (Routledge 2005), Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press 2015), which won the South Atlantic Modern Language Association award for best monograph, and Understanding Gish Jen (University of South Carolina Press 2015). In addition to her academic work, Ho is active in community engagement around issues of race and intersectionality, leading workshops on anti-racism and how to talk about race in our current political climate. Most recently she developed a PowerPoint slide deck on anti-Asian racism & COVID-19, which CU Boulder turned into a website: https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2020/04/08/anti-asian-racism-and-covid-19 and co-developed a free, 3-week, self-paced anti-racism course on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/antiracism-1#syllabus

Jeff Yang writes frequently for CNN. He is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal Online and can be heard on radio as a contributor to shows such as PRI’s The Takeaway and WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. He is the author of I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action and editor of the graphic novel anthologies Secret Identities and Shattered.

Ms. Uddin brings more than a decade of experience working in the public sector, primarily in communications, education, and fundraising. She comes to AAWW from PEN America where she most recently served as Deputy Director of Development for Special Events, managing a high-level portfolio of events and cultivation activities. Prior to joining PEN America, Ms. Uddin helped oversee Executive Education as an Assistant Director with NYU’s Stern School of Business, developing and coordinating both degree and non-degree programming for cohorts of senior-level executives. She began her career with an eight-year stint at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where she helped create the infrastructure for the public programming calendar of events. She spent nearly three years managing an online Book Salon for Aslan Media, spotlighting writers and artists from the greater Middle East/South Asia region, and she regularly volunteers her time with a number of local Muslim organizations in New York City, including serving as Chairperson of the Columbia Muslim Alumni Association from 2011-2015. Ms. Uddin received her B.A. in political economics from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her M.A. in global history from NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science.

Helen Zia is a writer, community activist, and Fulbright Scholar. She spent 12 years researching and writing Last Boat out of Shanghai, visiting China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan on numerous occasions. A longtime journalist, she is also the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. She coauthored, with Wen Ho Lee, My Country Versus Me, which reveals what can happen to Chinese Americans who are falsely accused of being a spies for China.

The daughter of immigrants from China, Helen’s work on the 1980s Asian American landmark civil rights case of anti-Asian violence is featured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? and she was profiled in Bill Moyers’ PBS series, Becoming American: The Chinese Experience. In 2008 Helen was a Torchbearer in San Francisco for the Beijing Olympics amid great controversy; in 2010, she was a witness in the federal marriage equality case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Helen is a graduate of Princeton University’s first coeducational class and holds honorary doctorates from the University of San Francisco and the Law School of the City University of New York. Most recently, she served as the founding co-chair of the board of the Women’s Media Center and a director of Equality Now.

Fariha Khan is the Associate Director of the Asian American Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania where she also teaches courses on South Asians in the U.S, Asian American Communities, Asian American Food, as well as Muslim Identity in America. She received a Master’s degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Yale University and a PhD in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research focuses on South Asian American Muslims and the Asian American community. Actively involved in the Philadelphia community, Dr. Khan is Co-Chair of the Board of the Philadelphia Folklore Project and Vice Chair of the Board of the Samuel S. Fels Fund. She serves on the Board of the American Folklore Society and is a member of the James Brister Alumni Society. Dr. Khan was appointed in 2015 to the Pennsylvania Governor’s Advisory Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs and served until 2019.

Christine Bacareza Balance (Ph.D., Performance Studies, NYU) is Associate Professor of Performing & Media Arts and Asian American Studies. Her writings on former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, Asian American YouTube artists, Bruno Mars, Glee’s karaoke aesthetics, and spree killer Andrew Cunanan have been published in Women and Performance: a feminist journal, Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ), and Theatre Journal. Her first book, Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2016), examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino/Filipino American popular music compose Filipino identities, publics, and politics. Her current book project, Making Sense of Martial Law, analyzes how the former President Ferdinand Marcos and First Lady Imelda Marcos employed the sensorial and sensational, during their 21-year dictatorial rule, and how U.S.- and Philippines-based performances, events, and cultural objects critique the “Marcosian imaginary,” modeling new forms of cultural memory. In 2017, she was awarded a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Engaged Humanities grant for a multi-site, multi-program public partnership with Visual Communications (VC), a Los Angeles-based Asian American media arts organization, to digitally preserve archival materials and present public programs that document the history of Philippine martial law and its impact upon Los Angeles-based communities.

Catherine Ceniza Choy is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and an Associate Dean of the College of Letters & Science’s Undergraduate Studies Division. Her scholarly specialties include Asian American history, Filipino American studies, race, gender, and migration. She is the author of the book, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (2003), which explored how and why the Philippines became the leading exporter of professional nurses to the United States. Empire of Care received the 2003 American Journal of Nursing History and Public Policy Book Award and the 2005 Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award. Her second book, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (2013), unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia. She is the co-editor of the Brill book series Gendering the Trans-Pacific World. The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Catherine was born and raised in New York City. She received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA and her B.A. in History from Pomona College. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and their two children.

Anthony Ocampo, Ph.D., is an writer and sociologist from Los Angeles. He is the author of The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race, and is finishing his second book Brown and Gay in LA: Queer Sons of Immigrants Coming of Age. Dr. Ocampo has received writing fellowships from the Ford Foundation, VONA, and Jack Jones Literary Arts. He earned a BA in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and MA in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, and his MA and PhD in Sociology from UCLA. Dr. Ocampo is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at Cal Poly Pomona.

Born in the U.S to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan rejected her mother’s expectations that she become a doctor and concert pianist. She chose to write fiction instead. Her novels are The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement, all New York Times bestsellers. She is the author of two memoirs, The Opposite of Fate and Where the Past Begins, and two children’s books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat. Tan served as co-producer and co-screenwriter for the film adaptation of The Joy Luck Club and was creative consultant for Sagwa, the Emmy-nominated PBS television series for children. She wrote the libretto for the opera based on her novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter. With music composed by Stewart Wallace, the opera had its world premiere in 2008 at the San Francisco Opera. The 30th edition of The Joy Luck Club with a new forward by Amy Tan was released in Spring of 2019.