Accent Sisters is a New York publisher, bookstore, event space, and online network dedicated to fostering Chinese and Asian diaspora creative writing and culture. It is a strong facilitator and participant in the Chinese cultural scene organically growing throughout cities around the world that is changing the meaning of being “Chinese.”
Founder Li Jiaoyang, a poet and visual artist, told me that she and her co-founders “wanted to build a community space to help writers like us, because we found what we like to write is not always what Westerners want to see.” She was a creative writing student at NYU, and “feeling very lonely” as the only Chinese student in her program when she met a friend in a similar position at the New School. Together they launched an interview series featuring Chinese writers who work in their second language. They called it Accent Sisters.
Then the pandemic hit, and they got a grant from the British Council to produce a series of more than 30 online workshops centered on interdisciplinary poetry, gathering participants from the U.K., the U.S., and China. Li met her second cofounder in 2022 at a visual art show at Latitude Gallery in New York, an art gallery “dedicated to showcasing cutting-edge work . . . by emerging Asian diaspora artists.” They began chatting and realized that while they could name a number of galleries showing Chinese art, they knew of no bookstores dedicated to work by Chinese writers.
Today, Accent Sisters operates out of a seventh-floor space at 89 Fifth Avenue, sharing the floor with Fou Gallery and a tea house. The bookstore sells a collection of handpicked artists’ books, zines, and independently published titles that reflect the founders’ own reading interests. “We just sell the books we like to read,” Li says, and the books they publish themselves.
The space also hosts monthly art exhibitions featuring primarily female Asian artists, alongside screenings, concerts, book launches, craft workshops, and poetry readings. Accent Sisters events include inventive reinterpretations of Chinese social phenomena. One is a series of “dialect corners”—an inversion of the “English corners” common throughout China. Instead of Chinese people practicing English, participants gather to learn regional Chinese dialects like Sichuanese, Shanghainese, and Fuzhounese, and try cuisine from each region. The space has also hosted a “matchmaking corner” event mimicking the parent-run dating markets in Shanghai parks—except participants’ friends cross-dressed and pretended to be their parents, making posters to “sell” them. No men attended: “25 beautiful girls showed up and they were all lesbian and trans couples,” said Li, “and that’s beautiful.”
Accent Sisters remains a labor of love. The outfit operates without investors or grants, sustained by the founders’ own resources. But there seems to be a growing demand. Li marvels at how New York’s Chinese cultural scene has exploded: “Every day, every week there are so many events I can go to. Sometimes I even feel a little overwhelmed—in a good way.”