About

WHAT IS LONELY COMMA?
Lonely Comma is a blog/site focusing on Asian American writers.



WHY THIS SITE?

When you Google "Asian American writers," you get the Asian American Writers' Workshop up top followed by lists of Asian American writers at infoplease.com and Wikipedia. The infoplease.com list consists of twenty four people, including authors, writers, playwrights, poets, critics, and essayists.  So the second hit when anyone looks for Asian American writers presents them with a whopping twenty plus names.

Wikipedia's American writers of Asian descent category does a much better job, with links to nearly a hundred writers' individual wiki pages and seven subcategories consisting of Asian American literature, writers of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, Japanese descent, and finally American dramatists and playwrights of Asian descent.

There's also quite a long list of Asian American writers on Wikipedia, perhaps numbering two hundred plus.  So who made it onto the list and who is an Asian American writer anyway?

"In the fields of Ethnic Studies and Literary Scholarship, the term Asian American is a bit vague. In practice, it usually includes writers from East Asia and South Asia, but not from West Asia (Middle Easterners). At the same time, it often includes Asian Canadian writers, such as Joy Kogawa and Michael Ondaatje. Occasionally, it refers to Asian authors who have written about their experiences in the Americas. Technically, it could include hispanophone Asian authors as well."

I'll save you the trouble, "hispanophone" means Spanish language speakers as well as the Spanish-speaking world.

While clearly Wikipedia isn't the definitive (or even right) answer to "who is an Asian American writer," the quoted paragraph is what most people Googling around will see. But there's a whole lot more Asian American writers out there and heck, I don't think writers from the Middle East should be excluded by definition, should they? So here's to broadening that definition and working to highlight writers and their works.




CAN I WRITE or POST FOR LC?
Yes, please.  Guest stuff, permanent partnership, original articles, unoriginal articles, we'll take it all. Just contact me.


ARE THERE ANY POLICIES or GUIDELINES?
Working on those and only if necessary.
At this point, anything Asian American writer related that catches my eye, anything that's submitted, or anything that seems like should thematically fit I'm gonna throw up on the site.


SOMETHING IS WRONG, VERY WRONG
If someone wants something taken down, be it a link, an entire post, proprietary information, gossip, innuendo, or secrets, just say the word.

WHY "LONELY COMMA"?

Because thinking up a name that hasn't been taken was harder than I thought. It evokes writing and emptiness. Plus it's not hard to say or spell. Trust me, it was the best name by far.

WHO ARE YOU?

I'm a Chinese-American writer and can be found at jonyang.org.

Updated 7.28.2010