Join a conversation about Corky Lee’s Asian America, a retrospective of the photographer’s life’s work, featuring a selection of photographs from his vast collection, from his start in New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s to his coverage of diverse Asian American communities across the country until his untimely passing in 2021. Known throughout his lifetime as the “undisputed, unofficial Asian American photographer laureate,” the late photojournalist Corky Lee documented Asian American and Pacific Islander communities for fifty years, breaking the stereotype of Asian Americans as docile, passive, and, above all, foreign to this country.

Author, historian, and winner of the 2022 Bancroft Prize, Mae Ngai, will join Joanne Kwong CC ’97, and Ava Chin for a conversation moderated by Marie Myung-Ok Lee about Corky Lee and Asian American community in New York.

Local bookseller, Wordup, will also be onsite with copies of the book for purchase.

Please note: For members of the general public, RSVP is required for entry by October 21. Your registration will generate an email with a QR Code on or before 10/23/2024. Please bring this code, along with your ID, for admittance to the Columbia campus. It is recommended that you arrive early, as you will need to check-in with Public Safety at the Butler Library entrance upon arriving. 

Ava Chin is a 5th generation New Yorker and a descendant of Chinese railroad workers, is the author of Mott Street, a 2024 Best Nonfiction Book Award winner from the Chinese American Librarians Association, and Eating Wildly, winner of the 2015 M.F.K. Fisher Book Award for excellence in food writing. A Professor of Creative Nonfiction and head of the CUNY Graduate Center’s American Studies program, she is currently a visiting scholar at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.

Joanne Kwong (CC 97) is the president of Pearl River Mart, the iconic NYC Asian emporium established in 1971. Before leading Pearl River, she was an attorney, federal judicial clerk, adjunct law professor, and non-profit communications executive and serves on the boards of New York Public Radio, Light Up Chinatown, the Columbia College Alumni Association

Mae Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History. She is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora. The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021) won the Bancroft Prize; she is coeditor of Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice

Marie Myung-Ok Lee (moderator) teaches fiction in the School of the Arts and is Writer in Residence at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity (CSER) and is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop

This event is sponsored by Columbia University Libraries, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race, and the Department of English and Comparative Literature.