The Asian American Writers' Workshop (often abbreviated AAWW) is a nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 1991 to support Asian American writers, literature and community.^[1] The Workshop also offers the annual Asian American Literary Awards and sponsors Page Turner: The Asian American Literary Festival.

The Asian American Writers Workshop runs two fellowship programs for emerging Asian American writers.^[2] The Open City fellowship is focused on journalism in a New York neighborhood, whether in the form of narrative nonfiction, creative nonfiction, or memoir.^[3] The Margins Fellowship is for writers based in New York City, aged thirty and under, who work in the genres of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction.^[4] Notable Margins fellows include Yale Younger Poet Yanyi.

AAWW publishes two literary magazines, The Margins and Open City. The Margins, which proclaims itself as being "dedicated to the Asian American creative culture of tomorrow," publishes a variety of literature by Asian American writers including short fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and more. Open City, the more recent of the two publications, focuses on "telling the stories of the Asian and immigrant neighborhoods of [New York City]". Both magazines are published on their website.^[5]

In 2007, AAWW partnered with Hyphen Magazine to start a short story contest called the Hyphen Asian American Short Story Contest, the only national, pan-Asian American writing competition of its kind.^[6] Previous winners include Preeta Samarasan, Sunil Yapa, Shivani Manghnani, and Timothy Tau. Previous judges include Porochista Khakpour, Yiyun Li, Alexander Chee, Jaed Coffin, Brian Leung, Monique Truong and Monica Ferrell.

In response to the 2015 "yellowface poet" incident, the organization published a "white pen name" generator,^[7] which creates random white-sounding names "all the way back to Plymouth Rock." It was made in mockery of Michael Derrick Hudson, pushing back at the idea that writers of color might find greater success in the publishing industry if their names were whitewashed.