Tuesday, March 15  07pm
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
110-112 W 27th Street, Suite 600, New York, New York 10001

Join us for the New York book launch for Omar Musa’s Here Come The Dogs, with friends Mitchell Jackson and Rookie’s Estelle Tang. These two charismatic novelists write with kinetic lyricism about young men living at the edge of poverty, drugs, and systemic racism.

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.

Mitchell Jackson’s autobiographical novel The Residue Years (Bloomsbury 2014) follows the perspective of a young man trying to do right by his mother, who’s just been released from a drug treatment program, but he finds that selling crack might be the only way to do so. As Jesmyn Ward writes, “I know these characters well… I know the language they speak: voices redolent of struggle and the South displaced to our country’s far northwestern corner: Portland, Oregon. A wrenchingly beautiful debut by a writer to be reckoned with, The Residue Years marks the beginning of a most promising career.” The novel was a finalist for The Center For Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First novel prize, the PEN/ Hemingway award for first fiction, and The Hurston / Wright Legacy Award.

Moderated by Estelle Tang, a literary scout at KF Literary Scouting and contributor at Rookie, as well as to The New Yorker, Guardian, and Pitchfork.

For more information and tickets visit: https://www.eventbrite.com