AA Bastian is an award-winning freelance journalist, scholar, and professional sign language interpreter. She publishes on East-West relations ranging from geopolitics, history, and memoir in popular and scholarly formats and has recorded a podcast episode. She also founded and currently runs an international sign language interpreting hub with her business partner in Pakistan. They focus on communication between cultures, marginalization, and accessibility in working with deaf people—Interpreting Sign: World.
Her publishing highlights include three popular articles at Foreign Policy Magazine: on threats to Okinawa, which led their main page for over 15 hours; China’s disinformation campaign against Taiwan, which the editors chose as one of their top five picks and then trended on LinkedIn; and on China’s threats against Taiwan, which led their main page for 20 hours.
The 75th Writers Digest Annual Writing Competition judges awarded her an honorable mention out of 19,000 entries in the Memoir category for her piece “Japanese Carp,” taking readers into her complicated childhood in Okinawa to assess the social impact of the American military presence there with larger questions of colonialism.
AA Bastian has also been peer reviewed and published for her historical research and writing. Her work on a new source for 19th century Asian history was published in the Journal of Burma Studies in 2017. She then contextualized another new Mormon source on the Empire Lines podcast in February 2022.
Sign language interpreting bring her into the lives, hopes, and dreams of people at all levels of society, from the homeless and mailroom workers to senior officials at high levels of power in Washington. Audrey also brings a lifetime of cross-cultural engagement to this narrative. She lived nine years abroad in Asia, Britain, and the Middle East; works globally in interpreting and writing; speaks four languages, including Mandarin, Arabic, and American Sign Language, and is regularly exposed to other spoken and signed languages and parts of the world.
AA Bastian also volunteers in the book world. She has chaired a major writers conference in Washington, D.C., the Washington Writers Conference. For the Washington Independent Review of Books she reviews books about Asian and Middle Eastern topics.
