Robert E. Wood helped select the poetry. See his Cha profile.

Royston Tester, Regular Guest Editor of Cha, helped select the fiction and creative non-fiction. See his profile.

Akin Jeje was born in the United States of Nigerian to Kenyan parents in the early 1970s. Raised in diverse locations around the world from Nigeria and the United States to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Jeje now lives and works in Hong Kong. Educated in Canada, Jeje has been an active poet and spoken-word performer – in Canada since the early 1990s, and in Hong Kong since 2006 – Jeje's works have been published and featured in both Canada and Hong Kong, including publications such as Canada's Carousel and Filling Station and Hong Kong's Fifty-Fifty anthology. His poetry collection, Smoked Pearl: Poems of Hong Kong and Beyond was published on 23 November 2010. Jeje was most recently featured in the collective work A poem for Jack Layton, by 14 Canadian poets, published in the August 26, 2011 edition of Canada's Globe and Mail. [Read 1 2]

Alice Tsay is currently studying English literature at Oxford University. A native of California, she has taught English in Hong Kong and Taiwan and holds a degree in Music and English from Amherst College. She is a Staff Reviewer for Cha. [Read] [Cha's profile]

Alzo David-West was born in Nigeria, raised in a Nigerian-Slovakian American family and relocated to New York City when he was eleven. He began writing fiction when he was thirteen. Originally aspiring to be a visual artist, he later earned an English BA magna cum laude from Chowan University and an English MA from East Carolina University in North Carolina and is now completing his doctoral dissertation in communication/media philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. While living in South Korea for four years, he became the newsbriefs editor for North Korean Review. He teaches in Japan. [Read]

Anuradha Vijayakrishnan is an Indian writer living in the UAE. Her work has appeared recently in 91st Meridian, Soundzine, The Conversation Papers, Muse India and The best of Everyday Poets. She was longlisted for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize for fiction and won a special mention in the 2008 All India Harper Collins Poetry Competition. She is an alumna of the Western Michigan University's 2010 Prague Summer Program. Her work won Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations in 2010. [Read]

Ayurzana Gun-Aajav is a graduate of the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow and IWP of the University of Iowa, USA. He has published seven books of poetry, two collections of short stories, several non-fiction books, and four novels. In 2002, he was awarded the National Literary Award Altan Od [Golden Feather] for Durlalgui yrtontsiin blues ['The Blues of a World Without Love'], in 2003 for the novel Ilbe zereglee ['The Magic Mirage'] and again in 2010 for the novel Boegiin domog ['Legend of Shaman']. [Read]

Berit Ellingsen was born in South-Korea, grew up in Norway and has lived in Portugal, Sweden and the US. Her stories have appeared in various online literary journals and print anthologies, most recently or forthcoming in Pure Slush, SmokeLong Quarterly, Metazen and decomP magazinE. Ellingsen's debut novel, The Empty City, is inspired by the philosophy of nonduality. Visit her website for more information. [Read]

Bernard Henrie day trades from Los Angeles where he can turn you on to the best peach cobbler in southern California. Publication credits include Apple Valley Review, Boston Literary Magazine, The Cortland Review and Soundzine. His work has earned three Pushcart nominations. Mark Doty selected his poem as second best for the year in the recent Interboard Poetry Competition (IBPC). [Read]

Born and raised in Bloomington, Minnesota, Chris Santiago received degrees in creative writing and music performance from Oberlin College. He has worked as an English teacher in Akita, Japan; a Japanese teacher in Long Beach, California; and as an editor for McGraw-Hill. Currently a Provost’s Ph.D. Fellow at USC, he teaches writing and lives with his wife and son in Pasadena. He has poems in Canteen and FIELD. [Read]

Christopher Barnes's first collection of poems Lovebites is published by Chanticleer Press. He is a participant in the group Stemistry which writes on the subjec of stem cell research and he recently read at Poetry Scotland's Callander Poetry weekend. [Read & View]

Christopher (Kit) Kelen is an Associate Professor at the University of Macau in south China, where he has taught Literature and Creative Writing for the last seven years. The most recent of Kelen's eight volumes of poetry Dredging the Delta was published by Cinnamon Press in the U.K. [Read]

David W. Landrum lives and writes in Western Michigan, USA. His poetry, fiction, and academic writing have appeared widely in such journals as Umbrella Journal, Dark Sky Magazine, 34th Parallel, Orbis and Voices Israel. He edits the online poetry journal, Lucid Rhythms. [Read]

Dena Rash Guzman is a Las Vegas-born author and visual artist living on a farm near Portland, Oregon. Her photography, poetry and fiction have appeared in various American and China based journals and anthologies. Her play "Shanghai Cigarettes" was performed by Shanghai Repertory Theater in 2011. A book of her short stories is forthcoming from Shanghai's HAL Publishing in 2012. Guzman is editor and founder of the international arts and literary journal Unshod Quills. On November 25, 2011, HAL will include her work in its second anthology, Middle Kingdom Underground, available worldwide online and in bookstores. [Read & View]

DeWitt Clinton is the author of two books of historical poetry, and six chapbooks. His poems and essays have recently appeared in Storytelling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry (Lynn Rienner Publishers), And What Rough Beast: Poems at the End of the Century (Ashland Poetry Press) and Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry (Oxford University Press). He has a new article on ancient Buddhist and Jewish texts in the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue. He is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and lives with his wife, Jacqueline, and Zac the Cat in Milwaukee. [Read]

Douglas Kerr is Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Wilfred Owen's Voices, George Orwell, and Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing among other things. [Read]

Born and bred in Hong Kong, Eva Leung received a BA with a double major in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong, and an MPhil in English Literature from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She currently teaches English language and Literature in English at the HKU SPACE Po Leung Kuk Community College and the HKU SPACE Community College respectively. She enjoys writing both short stories and poems; and apart from reading and writing, she has a wide range of interests, including learning foreign languages, singing, playing the piano, horseback riding, as well as playing jigsaw puzzles. [Read]

Fong Hoe Fang graduated from the University of Singapore in 1979. He spent 10 years as an administrative officer with the Singapore Airport Terminal Services (SATS) at the Singapore airport. In 1988, bored with the routine life of a well-paid, well-fed administrative officer, he left to start Pagesetters Services. For the last 23 years, he led Pagesetters in advertising and communication design work. In 1997 he started the Ethos Books imprint for Pagesetters to give voice to emerging writers and to help foster a lively literary environment. Today, Fong continues his quest to help writers tell compelling social stories. He hopes also to be able to ride a bike again – an activity forbidden by the family since he got married. [Read]

Genevieve Yim was born in Germany and raised in the United States where during childhood she began writing stories and poems. As an undergraduate she studied French, focusing on surrealist literature. She has been living and writing in Seoul for over four years, with her husband who is South Korean. Currently she is studying fiction at City University of Hong Kong's low-residency MFA program. [Read]

Geoffrey Miller is a lecturer of composition at Qatar University in Doha, Qatar. His photography has appeared or is scheduled to appear in Stepping Stone Magazine (US), Kartika Review (US), Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore (Singapore) and Crimson River Magazine (US). [View]

Glen Jennings was born in Melbourne and studied in Australia and China. His articles and reviews have appeared in a number of journals and magazines including Arena Magazine, Mattoid, Steep Stairs Review, The Australian Journal of Politics and History and The China Journal. He teaches Literature and is Associate Dean (Academic Operations) in foundation studies at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne. [Read]

J.p. Lawrence is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He served in southern Iraq from 2009 to 2010 as a military journalist with the 34th Red Bull Infantry Division. His deployment consisted of traveling to a strange new place, meeting strange new people, and gaining an understanding. He wrote more than 100 pieces there. Today, he studies writing and anthropology at Bard College in New York, and he hopes throughout the rest of his life to continue experiencing new places, and to have an understanding, at some level, of the people there. [Read]

John David Harding lives in Baton Rouge, LA, where he holds a postdoctoral fellowship teaching composition and creative writing at Louisiana State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Smoking Gluegun, The Pinch, Dig Magazine, and BAP Quarterly. [Read]

John McKernan – who grew up in Omaha Nebraska – is now a retired comma herder after teaching a long time at Marshall University. He lives – mostly – in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a collection of selected poems, Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review and many other magazines. [Read]

Judith Toler has been an editor, an English professor in Upstate New York, a political activist and a faculty union organizer. Currently retired and living in New Mexico, she now divides her time between working with grieving children, making art and writing poetry. In November 2011, she had a solo exhibit in Santa Fe, and her poems have won a New Mexico Discovery Award as well as awards from Passager and The Santa Fe Reporter. Most recently, her work has appeared in Lilliput, New Mexico Poetry Review, Santa Fe Poetry Broadside and in two anthologies, Adobe Walls and Mona Poetica. Toler has just completed her first book of poems, In the Shine of Broken Things. [Read]

Kenneth Alewine is a member of the PhD programme at the Institute for Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. Alewine received his BA n English from Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri and a MS in Interdisciplinary Studies from Texas A & M – Texarkana and recently received his second Master's degree (M.A. in Humanities) from the University of Houston - Clear Lake. Alewine's interests include art and medicine, phenomenological narratives of illness, poetry, religion and healing. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Quarterly, UCity Review and AURA Literary Arts Review. [Read]

Burbank Born, Phoenix raised and Honolulu wanderer of jungles and shorelines, Louis Marvin uses the names of his Copper angel Louis and his Aluminum angel Marvin as his pen name. They are his grandfathers, who he has always tried to keep alive as his Blue Collar Angels and inspirations. Marvin spends his time with his Chinese girls on the beautiful island of Oahu, trying to instill a mix of academics, arts and athletics into his daughter. This is how he loves and lives too. Visit his website for more information. [Read]

Marshall Moore is the author of several books and the founder of the independent publishing company Typhoon Media Ltd. He has written two novels (The Concrete Sky and An Ideal for Living) and two short story collections (Black Shapes in a Darkened Room and The Infernal Republic). His fifth book, a novel titled Bitter Orange, is in the production pipeline and should be released sometime in 2013. A native of the American South, he lives and works in Hong Kong, and -- in addition to being the publisher and benevolent despot at Signal 8 Press and BookCyclone -- is on the faculty at Savannah College of Art and Design. Visit his website for more information. [Read]

Mary Lo was born and raised in Hong Kong. She is working as a lecturer at HKUSPACE Community College after she obtained both her BA and M.Phil in English Literature from the University of Hong Kong. Seeing the possibility of losing her artistic talent in her busy life of teaching and researching, Lo continues the experimentation of her latest artistic expressions in her participation in YMCA community service. Over the 2011 summer, she has initiated a fund-raising project in which she drew on recycle bags. The proceeds of this ongoing project goes to the affected areas in Sichuan after the 512 earthquake. [View]

 

Matthew Davies is an MFA graduate of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program and currently a graduate student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. At 23, Davies, a Peace Corps participant, moved to the Mongolian countryside to teach English. He has published a non-fiction book about his experience in Mongolia titled When Things Get Dark (Macmillian). A chapter of this book won the 2005 Atlantic Monthly prize in nonfiction and another chapter was a "notable essay" in the 2006 Best American Travel Writing series. Davies lives in Washington, D.C. [Read]

Matthew Wong is currently a 2nd year MFA student at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His primary medium as an artist is photography, although he is also a poet, painter and critical essayist. In 2011, he has been selected to represent the Hong Kong pavilion Frogtopia Hongkornucopia at the 54th Venice Biennale as an intern. October 2011 marks the opening of his debut solo exhibition, Fidelity, which consists of photographic and mixed media works on paper and is to be unveiled at the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre. [View]

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is an acting instructor of poetry at the University of Washington, where she received her MFA in 2011. She is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize and the MacLeod-Grobe Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Asian American Literary Review, The Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies, Leland Quarterly, and the series Niseis of Faith. She is currently the associate editor of Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry. [Read]

Michael Tsang received his B.A. in English and M.Phil in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is now reading a PhD degree at the University of Warwick, specializing in postcolonial English literature in Hong Kong. Language and literature are part of his life. He likes to write stories and poems in his spare time, and is devoted to language learning. His ultimate goal is to learn Tibetan and Finnish. [Read 1 2]

Mike Ladd was born in 1959, in Berkeley California, to Australian parents. He lives and writes in Adelaide, South Australia. He has worked in radio for thirty years and currently produces Poetica, a program dedicated to Australian and international poetry, broadcast each week on ABC Radio National. Ladd has published six collections of poetry; the most recent is Transit from Five Islands Press. Since the nineteen eighties he's been experimenting with poetry on screen and as audio. He travels widely, and "Angkor Three", published in Issue #15 of Cha, was written after a visit to Cambodia while Ladd was undertaking a writer's residency at Rimbun Dahan in Malaysia. [Read]

Nicholas Wong is the author of Cities of Sameness (Desperanto, 2012). Recent poems can be found in Drunken Boat, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Nano Fiction, Platte Valley Review, The Portland Revie and REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters. He reads poetry for Drunken Boat and teaches in the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Visit his website for more information. [Read] [Cha's profile]

Born in London, Pete Spurrier arrived in Hong Kong in 1993 after a two-year journey along the Silk Road. He runs Blacksmith Books, a publishing house which focuses on Asian-themed titles. For other publishers he has written the best-selling Serious Hiker's Guide to Hong Kong and other guidebooks. [Read]

Peter Gordon is publisher at Chameleon Press and editor of the Asian Review of Books. He had also set up the Man Asian Literary Prize and has been active in Asia's book and literary scene since 2000. [Read]

Raman Krishnan worked as a construction engineer in Kuala Lumpur for 25 years before setting up Silverfish Books, an independent bookseller and publisher in the city, in 1999. [Read]

Rheea Mukherjee received her MFA in creative writing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ultra Violet, Southern Humanities Review, Foreign Flavors Anthology, and Jet Wings. Her previous fiction has been a Top 25 Finalist in Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. She co-founded and edits Urban Confustions, a literary magazine that features the work of women from cities around the world. She lives and writes in Bangalore, India. [Read] [Cha profile]

Robert Masterson is an award-winning writer, editor and teacher and the author of Garnish Trouble (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Artificial Rats & Electric Cats (Camber Press, 2008) and Trial by Water (Dog Running Wild Press, 1982). His creative work has appeared in numerous publications and on numerous websites throughout the world. Masterson's teaching has taken him to the People's Republic of China and penal institutions. He received the 1987 Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of New Mexico and the first Ted Berrigan Scholarship from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993. An English professor at the City University of New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College campus, Masterson holds both a BA and an MA (with distinction) in English Literature from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; an MFA from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics; and an academic certificate from Shaanxi Normal University in the People's Republic of China. [Read]

Roger Camp's photographs have been published in over 100 magazines including Darkroom Photography, American Photo, Popular Photography and Graphis. He is the author of three books, Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002), 500 Flowers (Dewi Lewis Media, 2005) and Heat (Charta/DAP, 2008). He has taught photography and/or literature at Eastern Illinois University, the University of  Iowa, Columbus College of Art & Design and the Cite Internationale Universitaire de Paris and is the recipient of the Lecia Medal of Excellence in documentary photography. [View]

Sabrina Merolla is a Sinologist and photographer. She has been researching and teaching between Naples and Shanghai and her researches focus on the multiple identities of contemporary China and their relationship with the memory of the past. While living in China, she 'rediscovered the light', preferring the rough mood of grainy black&white street photography, but never disdaining the digital media. Merolla collaborates with rock bands and web-zines in Italy and China. In May 2010 her exhibition "ROADS" was shown in Rome and Naples (PAN-Palace of the Arts of Naples) and at the Italian Consulate of Italy in Guangzhou (China). She lives in Beijing. Visit her photography website for more information. Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it [View]

Samuel Arizpe is a Catholic cleric ministering in the Diocese of Brownsville, the southernmost part of Texas that borders Mexico. He is currently working on his M.F.A. in creative writing with a concentration in poetry. He is often surprised by where a poem takes him and believes that poetry -- reading, writing, and sharing it -- is at its roots the raising of consciousness, the practice of compassionate awareness. [Read]

Sharon Hashimoto is a writing instructor at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Washington. A life-long resident of Seattle, she enjoys the landscapes and history particular to that area. Her fiction has appeared in North American Review, The Rambler, and Crab Orchard Review. New stories are forthcoming in Tampa Review  and Shenandoah. Her first book of poems, The Crane Wife, was co-winner of the Nicholas Roerich prize and published in 2003 by Story Line Press. [Read]

Shivani Sivagurunathan is a Malaysian writer who lectures at University Putra Malaysia. Her creative work has been published in numerous international magazines and journals. Her poetry chapbook, Chiaroscuro, published by Bedouin Books, came out in August 2010. Her short story "The Bat Whisperer" was published in the February 2011 issue of Cha. Both "Catching Iguanas" and "The Bat Whisperer" are from her short story collection, Wildlife on Coal Island, which came out in August 2011. More information about the book can be found on her website. Sivagurunathan is currently working on a novel set in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. [Read]

Sonia Saikaley lives in Ottawa, Canada and has previously taught English in Japan. She graduated from the Humber School for Writers and has had her fiction and poetry published in Still Point Arts Quarterly, Stepaway Magazine, The Caterpillar Chronicles, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Things Japanese: A Collection of Short Stories, the anthology Lavandería - A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Word, and other publications. Her novella The Lebanese Dishwasher is co-winner of the 2012 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest and will be published by Quattro Books in 2012. [Read]

Tristan Coleshaw developed an interest in the languages, literature and cultures of Asia while travelling in the region and as a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. An emerging writer, his work is concerned with the poetics of place, loss and queer narratives, with other interests including food and travel writing, LGBT rights and human rights in South East Asia. Coleshaw lives in England on the Jurassic Coast with his partner, and as well as working on his first collection of poetry is developing his first book, an autobiographical account of homophobic abuse in Western Australia. [Read]

After wartime and immediate post-war service in the British Navy, Verner Bickley served in the Colonial Education Service in Singapore and then in Burma, Indonesia and Japan as a British Council Officer. For ten years, he was Director of the Culture (and Language) Learning Institute at the East-West Center in Hawaii before joining the Hong Kong Government in 1983 as Director of its Institute of Language in Education (1983-1992). He has had extensive radio and television experience with the former BBC Far Eastern Station in Singapore; the NHK in Japan and radio and TV stations elsewhere. In Singapore, he acted in over thirty “Sunday Night Theatre” productions and wrote and “anchored” a weekly television programme for the NHK in Tokyo. In Hong Kong, he played cameo roles in three Chinese language films, Bodyguard from Beijing (Jet Li), Thunderbolt (Jackie Chan) and City of Glass (Leon Lai) and appeared in the crowd surrounding Jeremy Irons and Gong Li in The Chinese Box. Bickley has adjudicated at Speech, Drama and Debating competitions in several countries - many times in mainland China. His publications include Cultural Relations in the Global Community (with John Philip); Searching for Frederick; Language and the Young Learner in Hong Kong; Decoding the Olympics (five books), and Forward to Beijing. His autobiography, Footfalls Echo in the Memory, was published in London and New York in February 2010. [Read]

Viona is a translator, teacher, and independent researcher in Romanticism. She is currently working on her first anthology and pursuing painting as a hobby. [Read]

W.F. Lantry, a native of San Diego, received his Maîtrise from L’Université de Nice and PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. In 2010 he won the Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (in Israel), the Crucible Poetry Prize, the CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize and the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in Aesthetica, The Tower Journal and The Wallace Stevens Journal. His recently published chapbook, The Language of Birds (Finishing Line Press), is a lyric retelling of Attar's The Conference of the Birds. He currently works in Washington, DC, and is a contributing editor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry and Kindred Prose. Visit his website for more information. [Read] [Cha's profile]

William (Billy) Noseworthy's main research interests include narratives of translation, transformation, and translocation. Currently a third year graduate student in the History Department at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, Noseworthy works in Vietnamese and French as second languages. This past year he was published on Inrasara.com, Explorations (A graduate student journal from the University of Hawaii) and presented his work at several graduate student conferences before returning to Vietnam this past summer for research and study. The trip resulted in a number of materials that he will present this upcoming academic cycle. Habitually, Noseworthy plays guitar and has composed more than 30 songs on three albums (Available on Reverbnation.com: see "Huzzah for the Shopkeep!") and has written poetry in English, French, with sprinklings of Vietnamese and Eastern Cham Language (Available on his Facebook Page). His current linguistic interest is Eastern Cham written in Akhar Thrah script. [Read]