Shivani Manghnani wins AAWW/Hyphen contest

Shivani Manghnani

Celeste Ng

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Hyphen announced today that Shivani Manghnani’s “Playing the Sheik” has won their 2008 Short Story Contest. The story will appear this April in Hyphen’s Issue 17.

Among the finalists is FWR contributor Celeste Ng, for her story “Girls, At Play.” Congrats to Shivani, and to Celeste and the other finalists!

The AAWW is currently selling raffle tickets ($20 apiece) to raise money for the Workshop and support Asian American literature. The prize, should you wish to enter, is this rather fetching Vespa.

•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  

5 responses to “Shivani Manghnani wins AAWW/Hyphen contest”

1. 02.17.2009 @ 5:45 pm Neela says:

   Thanks for posting about this. Check out some demographic info and musing about the contest here.

2. 02.17.2009 @ 6:08 pm marissa says:

   congrats, celeste!

3. 02.18.2009 @ 11:20 am astameshkin says:

   Thanks, Neela, for the link; what a cool way to break things down…and I love the pie chart!

4. 02.19.2009 @ 12:00 pm Celeste says:

   Thanks, Neela, for your thoughtful post on the demographics of the contest. (I wrote this to you personally, but thought it might be worth reposting here.) Those questions–about ethnicity, and being identified as a “Asian American author”, and what it means for Asian American writers to write (or not write) about Asian characters–are always on my mind. I don’t have any answers either, of course! But I think about it quite often, both when I’m writing stories where the main characters are Asian and in stories where the ethnicity of the main character is Caucasian or unspecified. So I was fascinated to see what some other Asian writers have done, and to see that others are wrestling with these issues as well.

   I think this is an issue that writers of any minority group–religious, ethnic, and so on–face: must we write about our “own” group? Do we have a responsibility to write about our own group? And, on the flip side, if we write only about our “own” group, do we limit ourselves unnecessarily? Do we risk being dismissed by a larger audience?

5. 10.03.2011 @ 7:29 am navin sajnani says:

   congrats shivani……we r very proud of u

Comment