Ankur Agarwal helped select the poetry. See his Cha profile.

Mag Tan Yee Mei helped select the prose. See her Cha profile.

Arthur Leung was one of the two judges (along with Tammy Ho Lai-Ming) of the "Encountering" Poetry Contest. See his Cha profile.

Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Abigail Cheung is a first year Yale-China English Teaching Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She currently teaches courses in English and American Studies and volunteers with refugees in her spare time. Cheung graduated from Yale University in 2011 with degrees in Political Science and Ethnicity, Race and Migration. She is thrilled to be living and teaching in Hong Kong and honoured to be contributing to Cha. [Read]

Aditi Rao is a writer, educator, and activist. She has spent the last eight years traveling between India, Argentina, Mexico, and the United States; all the peoples and cultures she encountered on this journey have had a profound influence on her writing. She has published essays with InfochangeIndia and other online publications, poems in the Boiler Journal and Muse India, and has stories forthcoming in the Earth Charter's book Images of Connection and the Peace Portal's book People Building Peace 2.0. She is the winner of the 2011 Srinivas Rayaprol Prize for Poetry and she holds a Masters’ of Fine Arts in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a Bachelors' in Liberal Arts from Soka University of America. Rao currently resides in New Delhi, where she works as a consultant for non-profit organizations in the field of peace education, facilitates writing workshops, and carves out time for her twin passions of poetry and pottery. Visit her website for more information. [Read]

Alvin Pang (b. 1972, Singapore) is a poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and translator. His poetry has been translated into over fifteen languages, and he has appeared in major festivals and anthologies worldwide. He was named the 2005 Young Artist of the Year for Literature by Singapore's National Arts Council, and was conferred the Singapore Youth Award (Arts and Culture) in 2007. A Fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program (2002), his publications include City of Rain (Ethos: 2003), Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore (Autumn Hill: USA, 2009), and What Gives Us Our Names (Math Paper Press, 2011).  Two volumes of his selected poems are forthcoming in the UK (Arc Publications) and Croatia (Brutal) in 2012. [View]

Andrew Barker lives in Hong Kong. He is the author of Snowblind from my Protective Colouring (2009). He has degrees in English Literature, Anglo/Irish Literature and American Literature. He teaches at various universities and has recently completed a 450 page novel in verse set in Onegin Stanzas. [Read]

Arthur Leung holds an MFA in creative writing (with distinction) from the University of Hong Kong. His poems have been widely published in print magazines, anthologies and online journals. He is a regular performer of his poetry, having been featured in events like Hong Kong Literature Festival, Hong Kong International Literary Festival, and invited to give lecture demonstrations in schools. Leung serves as  an Associate Editor for Cha and is on the international editorial board of Yuan Yang. He was a winner of the 2008 Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. In 2009, Leung was commended by the Home Affairs Bureau of the Hong Kong SAR government for his outstanding artistic accomplishments. [Read] [Cha profile]

Chelsea Bainbridge-Donner is an American living in Hong Kong. Born on the East Coast, she moved across the United States to California in 1999. After finishing a degree in Public Policy and Law with a minor in Chinese, she moved to China in 2009, and then to Hong Kong in 2010. Despite her best efforts to become cynical, crotchety, and pessimistic, her personality remains stubbornly optimistic. She is currently working on a memoir about her time living and working in Asia. [Read]

Chris Galvin Nguyễn lives and writes in Canada and Việt Nam. When she’s not writing, taking pictures or editing, Chris teaches English and Vietnamese, and leads historical and cultural tours of Huế and the DMZ. Her writing and photography have appeared or are forthcoming in Pure Slush, Room, The Winnipeg Review, Đặc San Văn Lang Boston, Spezzatino, an assortment of Vietnamese travel magazines, and others. She is currently working on Breakfast under the Boddhi Tree, a collection of personal essays about life in Việt Nam. [Read]

David McKirdy is one of Hong Kong's best-known poets. He was born in Scotland, raised in Hong Kong and confused in England when he arrived there for the first time as a twenty-year-old. Once he returned to Hong Kong, he never left again. [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 lives on an organic produce farm outside Portland, Oregon. In 2011, she was awarded Judge's Prize for best performance at the first ever Shanghai Erotic Fiction Competition and her play Shanghai Cigarettes was performed by the Shanghai Repertory Theater. She founded the literary journal Unshod Quills and she was flown to Shanghai to stage a group performance of her novel A Brief History of Dan Orange of Shanghai for an audience of 250 at HAL Publishing's launch party for its second anthology, Middle Kingdom Underground, to which she contributed two stories. Visit her website for more information. [Read]

Dinah Roma Sianturi is an associate professor of literature at De La Salle University (Manila) and author of two award-winning collections of poetry, A Feast of Origins (2004) and Geographies of Light (2011). She is currently affiliated with the NUS Asia Research Institute to work on a book on colonial travel narratives. [Read]

An analytical philosopher and a regular contributor to The Statesman, Durjoy Ghosh's works have been published in the national dailies and academic journals of literature and philosophy. Some of his creative works can be found in Rock and Sling, Forge, Pegasus, Miranda Magazine and AGNI. The editors of Contemporary Short Stories in Indian English places Ghosh among the best young authors of India. [Read]

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]

Goh Cheng Fai Zach was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, where he lived all his life before moving to Penang to study English Language and Literature in Universiti Sains Malaysia, where he received his BA. He is currently an MPhil student at the School of English, The University of Hong Kong, where he spends his free time dabbling in creative writing for his private amusement. [Read]

Harshana Rambukwella is a Senior Lecturer at the Postgraduate Institute of English, The Open University of Sri Lanka and Honorary Assistant Professor at the School of English, University of Hong Kong. He completed his doctoral research at the School of English, University of Hong Kong on narratives of nationalism in Sri Lanka and their representation in historical and literary texts. He is also the General Editor of the Hong Kong English Literature Database. He has published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities, The Literary Encylopedia, The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction and the Routledge Handbook of World Englishes. His primary research interests are in postcolonial literatures and theory, representations of nationalism in the South Asian context and the role of historical narratives and historiography in community identity. [Read]

Born in Barcelona in 1959, José Manuel Sevilla has published several poetry books including From the Limits of Paradise (1991), Contiguous Traject (1993), Alicia in Ikea's Catalogue (2004) and Ashes of Auschwitz end Eighteen Dogs (2009, Angel Urrutia Award). He founded "Poets against Aids" in Spain and co-founded the theatre Group "Bonobos". He has also translated Peter Reading's C into Spanish. In Mexico Sevilla started the photograph collection Street Language, which was exhibited at the Fringe Club Hong Kong in 2004. His play The Bridge, first staged in 2000 in Barcelona, was adapted and directed by Adam Harris in the McAuley Theatre in Hong Kong in 2011 and he acted with Liz Merendino. Sevilla lives in Hong Kong with his wife Julie. [Read]

Joy Chan is a Hong Kong-based photographer. [View]

Judith Huang is a Singaporean writer, illustrator, translator and editor. She currently serves as an editor for Ethos Books. A recipient of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award (UK) in 2001, 2003 and 2004, her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies at home and abroad. She has also been invited to various reading series and conferences. Her essays have been published in China Daily and Lianhe Zaobao. A budding illustrator, she received the Sydney M. Williams Grant for the Visual Art (USA) in 2008. She is working on illustrations for an upcoming poetry book, as well as her first novel. She graduated with honors from Harvard University in 2010, where she was elected to the Signet Society of Arts and Letters for contributions to the arts. See her online portfolio. [Read]

Kathlene Postma's poetry, short fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary reviews, including Rattle, Hawaii Review, Passages North, Willow Springs, Los Angeles Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Natural Bridge, Green Mountains Review, and Fugue. An essay of hers was designated a "notable" for an issue of Best American Travel Writing. She has taught in Sichuan Province and Central Turkey. She edits the literary magazine Silk Road and teaches creative writing at Pacific University in Oregon. [Read]

Kimberley Mok is a writer, designer and illustrator based in Montreal, Canada. Her draw­ings are illus­tra­tive vignettes explor­ing the con­scious and uncon­scious rela­tion­ships we have with our built envi­ron­ment, in addition to bringing out whimsical worlds and patterns found in nature and the imagination. Born in Toronto, Canada to a family hailing from Hong Kong, Mok has a bachelor of architecture from Cornell University, and writes about green design and architecture for environmental blog TreeHugger, named one of TIME's top blogs in 2009. Her website can be found at Collective Psyche. [View]

Leanne Dunic is a graduate from Simon Fraser University’s The Writers' Studio. Her work has won several honours and been published in various anthologies and magazines. Storytellers like Osamu Tezuka and Harry Nilsson inspire her poetry and prose. In her spare time, Dunic plays gypsy jazz guitar with her husband. [Read]

Linda Whittenberg's poetry reaches from the rural Illinois of her childhood to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico, but poems are found everywhere. Recent poems have been inspired by travels in Ireland, place of her ancestry. Her third book, Somewhere in Ireland, was published by Black Swan Editions in 2011. She lives in Santa Fe, NM where she returned after retiring from Unitarian Universalist ministry. Besides early mornings spent at her desk writing, she enjoys quilting, knitting, gardening, dancing with her husband. They both enjoy their animal companions: a mule, a goat and two cattle dogs. Visit her website for more information. [Read]

Madeleine Marie Slavick has authored several books of poetry, prose and non-fiction, including Something Beautiful Might Happen, China Voices, delicate access, Round – Poems and Photographs of Asia and Fifty Stories, Fifty Images, a book on her twenty-five years in Hong Kong. As a photographer, she has exhibited internationally. Slavick has lived in North America, New Zealand and Hong Kong, and maintains the blog, Touching What I Love. Photo credit: Alexandra Lynch [Read]

Mani Rao is the author of eight books of poetry including Ghostmasters (Chameleon Press, 2010) and a translation of the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita (Autumn Hill 2010, Penguin 2011). Visit her website for more information. Photo credit: Tom Langdon [Read]

Marie Yip Wai Shan is a Hong Kong-based photographer and a first-prize winner in SCMP (South China Morning Post) Portraits of Women Competition (2011). She works in the University of Hong Kong as an administrator. Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it [View] [Cha profile]

Matthew R. Loney is a novelist, poet, short story and freelance writer based out of Toronto, Canada. As a graduate of the University of Toronto's M.A. in Creative Writing program (2009) and avid traveler, he has combined these passions into two novels and a collection of short fiction - That Savage Water - 14 inter-connected stories surrounding the events of the 2004 Asian tsunami. Loney's work has been published widely in North American literary journals. He has recently breached the subcontinent, publishing in Mumbai's Nether Magazine. Poetry publications include The Puritan Review, Ganymede, Ganymede Unfinished and Assaracus. Visit his website to read more of his work. [Read]

Meg Eden has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including Rock & Sling, The Science Creative Quarterly, anderbo, Gloom Cupboard, and Crucible. Her chapbook The Girl who Came Back was given first honorable mention of NFSPS’s University level Poetry award. Her collection Rotary Phones and Facebook is to be released in June 2012 by Dancing Girl Press. Visit her website for more information. [Read]

Michael O'Sullivan is from Ireland and he teaches literature in Hong Kong. He writes short stories, poems and essays and he has published a book on James Joyce and Marcel Proust and a book on Michel Henry. His essays appear in such journals as Mosaic and Parallax. [Read] [Cha profile]

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 at the University of Warwick a PhD degree, 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]

Nahyun Sohn lives in South Korea. [Read]

Pauline Burton teaches English in the Division of Language Studies, Community College of City University. Her PhD was on creativity in language teaching in Hong Kong. She is committed to the idea of using (and creating) poetry in the language classroom and has conducted poetry workshops with teachers and students in Hong Kong and Singapore.  Her poems have been published in local anthologies and in Dimsum, and she reads regularly at Hong Kong Poetry OutLoud. She was a co-presenter (with Dino Mahoney) of the long-running series on RTHK Radio 4, Poetry on Air, and has performed the role of the poet Anna Akhmatova in a short film directed by Mahoney, filmed on location in St Petersburg. [Read]

R. Joseph Capet is a poet, playwright, and essayist whose work, in English and Esperanto, has appeared in a variety of magazines, including decomP, Sennaciulo, The Montreal Review, and ITCH. He currently serves as poetry editor for P.Q. Leer in addition to teaching poetry at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, OR. [Read]

Ranjani Murali received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University, where she taught creative writing, English, and composition. Her poetry, nonfiction and translations have appeared in Pratilipi, Phoebe, elimae, Cricket Online Review, Kartika Review and elsewhere. She was the recipient of Vermont Studio Center's Kay Evans Poetry fellowship and a nonfiction fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She currently volunteer-tutors for an adult literacy program in Chicago and enjoys working with her Japanese students. [Read]

Ricky Garni lives and works in Carrboro, NC (USA). He is particularly fond of manhood for amateurs. Some of his poems appeared in Sixth Finch, Red Lightbulbs and Reprint Poetry. Visit his website for more information. [Read]
 

Royston Tester has been jury member for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize and first reader for the Writers' Union of Canada's Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers. He is a professor of creative writing at Mohawk College and is a regular writer-in-residence with Beijing's Red Gate Gallery. His second collection of stories, Fatty Goes To China (Tightrope Books) will be published later this year. Tester is an Associate Editor of Cha. [Read] [Cha profile]

Shivani Sivagurunathan is a Malaysian fiction writer and poet. Born in Kuala Lumpur and raised in Port. Dickson, she spent eight years in the UK where she studied Comparative Literature. Her creative work has been published in numerous international journals including Anon, Flash and Agenda. Her poetry chapbook, Chiaroscuro, was published by bedouin books in 2010 and her collection of short stories Wildlife on Coal Island  came out in August, 2011. (Two stories from Wildlife, "The Bat Whisperer" and "Catching Iguanas", were published in Cha.) She is currently working on a novel set on the fictional Malaysian island, Coal Island. She now lives in Malaysia and lectures at University Putra Malaysia. Visit her website for more information. [Read]

Vijit Gupta is a photographer based in Mumbai, India. He enslaved his eye to the lens barely two years ago but in his short tryst with the camera, he has had the distinct honour to work with and assist Martin Prihoda. While fashion photography tops his skill list, he also indulges in freelance projects, travel and passion photography (as he likes to call it). Visit his website for more information. [View]

Vineet Kaul is an aging face in the Cha audience. He had his first international publication in Cha in February 2011, since then he has published 50 more poems in all sorts of magazines and journals who have accused him of being various things including a 'Pushcart nominee', 'Best of the Net nominee', 'Golden Sparrow Poetry Prize 2011 Winner', 'Best Short Writing in the World in 2011 Finalist' and 'Poet of the Week'. Kaul, who writes by the pseudonym of Troubadour Kaul, is currently taking a break from magazine submissions to focus on his music, career and his first full-length collection of poetry titled Letters to Samārā (from which the three letters published in this issue are taken). The book deals with the themes that Kaul can't deal with; namely existence, love and identity. The epistolary poems are written from the headset of a wayfarer to a far away beloved. The work draws its allegories from the Bhagwad Gita, German philosophy and pop-culture precepts with an occasional foray into European mythology. He doesn't hope, unless the world ends, to see any significant improvement in his arranged-marriage-market ranking. Drop him a line if you please This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it [Read 1 2] [Cha's profile]

Born in Bikaner, on 18 August 1965 and educated in Kolkata and Baroda, Vinita Agrawal is an Indian English poet, feature writer and researcher currently living in Delhi. Her poetry has been published in eighteen print and online journals. Her recent publications were in The Taj Mahal Review and the debut issue of the Boston-based Constellations. Her poem has received a nomination for the Best of the Net Awards 2011 by Contemporary Literary Review of India. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it [Read] [Cha profile]

Wayne Sullins is a 52 year-old American writer. Since leaving Houston in 1980, he has travelled to a dozen countries, including Vietnam, where he now resides. His poems and stories have appeared in Bitter Oleander, Quick Fiction, Sentence, Kartika Review, and various other journals. He has also been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. [Read]

Wendy Xu is the author of the chapbook The Hero Poems, published by H_NGM_N BKS. Selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of the 2011 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Journal, CutBank, Diagram, Jellyfish, NOO Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Third Coast, MAKE, InDigest, and elsewhere. She co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry / iO Books, and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. Visit her website for more information. [Read] 

Brought up in Northern Ireland, William Peskett read natural sciences at Cambridge University. He has been a biology schoolteacher and a journalist and has worked in marketing, design management and corporate relations. Now retired, Peskett lives in Pattaya, Thailand. His love of writing began with poetry and Peskett published two volumes, The Nightowl's Dissection and Survivors – the first of which won an Eric Gregory Award. These were followed by two novels, Pond Life and Losing Yourself. Peskett’s adopted country of residence provides ample material for his observation: recent essays and short stories deal with issues in a distinctly Thai setting. Visit his website for more information. [Read]