Dear Members of ASAP,

 

We hope that this e-mail finds you in good health and spirits. It has been a difficult year, and we miss the life that we took for granted. Hopefully, 2021 will bring healing and peace of mind to our communities. We look forward to staying connected with you—our members—and to expanding our circle. During a period that has rocked the foundations of our existence, the arts continue to provide a lifeline. The work that we are collectively doing is a source of inspiration and hope.

 

We are writing to let you know that we are in the process of planning the 2021 conference, which will be virtual. We expect to hold the conference during the last week in October, so please mark your calendars. At the moment, we are in conversations with different platform providers to assess our options. Once we have a better sense of the precise dates, we will inform you and begin circulating the Call for Papers. Jeremy Rosen, who was planning our 2020 conference at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City when the pandemic hit, has graciously agreed to be our co-chair. The other co-chair is ASAP president Tatiana Flores.

 

In a year when we were forced to cancel our conference, the editors of ASAP/Journal and ASAP/J worked to keep our community engaged through the “Thinking With” series. We are grateful to Liz Ho, Jonathan Eburne, Abram (Abe) Foley, and Alexandra Kingston-Reese for heroically having conceived of and organized this program at a most challenging time. Abe stepped down from the post of editor of ASAP/J at the end of 2020, and he is succeeded by Alexandra, who is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of York and former reviews editor at the journal. Please join us in welcoming her to the position.

 

Another new team member is Julian Wong-Nelson, executive assistant to the president. Julian is a doctoral student in Art History at Rutgers University and was previously Manager of Academic Affairs at California College of the Arts. They are assisting with the technical end of conference planning, and we are grateful to count on their expertise.

 

As we continue to wait for circumstances to change, know that we are working on behalf of our members and our organization to continue to foreground the importance of the arts of the present in helping us make sense of the challenges of the current moment.

 

With our best wishes for your health and wellbeing,

 

Sincerely yours,

 

The ASAP Motherboard

 

Tatiana Flores, President

Karen Tongson, Vice President

Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, Second Vice President

Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Past President

Lauren Cramer, Member-at-Large

Joshua Javier Guzmán, Member-at-Large

Ken Allan, Secretary

Maria Bose, Treasurer

Kinohi Nishikawa, Communications Officer

Liz Ho, Editor-in-Chief, ASAP/Journal

Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Editor, ASAP/J