Michael Gray helped select the poetry. See his Cha profile.

Reid Mitchell helped select the prose. See his Cha profile.

Royston Tester helped select the prose. See his Cha profile.

                                                                                                                                                                         

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Born in Canada and bred in the US, Allen Forrest works in many mediums: oil painting, computer graphics, theatre, digital music, film, and video. Allen studied acting at Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles, digital media in art and design at Bellevue College (receiving degrees in Web Multimedia Authoring and Digital Video Production). He works in Vancouver, B.C. as a graphic artist and painter. Forrest's expressive drawing and painting style creates emotion on canvas. [Art]

Carolyn Lau is a respirateur. She has a whimsical tabby. [Review]

Cecilia Chan was born and raised in Hong Kong. She has completed BA in English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her poems were included in Fifty-fifty: New Hong Kong Anthology (2008) and Not A Muse: A World Poetry Anthology (2009). [Review]

Daryl Wei Jie Lim is first and foremost a Singaporean. He read history at the University of Oxford, and has a Master's in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge. His work has appeared in Ceriph, QLRS and Wallflowers. He is particularly interested in the literary uses of history. [Poetry]

Daryl Qilin Yam is an aspiring writer of prose and poetry currently reading English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. His work has been published in Esquire, Ceriph, Cha and elsewhere. He is currently working on his first title. Visit his website for more information. [Poetry] [Cha profile]

David McKirdy grew up in Hong Kong in the 1960s and he came to poetry late in life after completing a degree in the arts at HK Open University in 1997. His work has been published in numerous anthologies and he has two books of poetry, Accidental Occidental and Ancestral Worship. He has represented Hong Kong and has read his work in Cairo, Singapore, Rhode Island, Monterey, Shanghai, Hanoi and Manila and will be one of the participants in the Medellin International Festival of Poetry in Colombia 2014. He repairs classic cars for a living. [Poetry]

David W. Landrum teaches literature at Grand Valley State University. His poetry has appeared widely, most recently in Mojave Review, The Literary Bohemian, Windhover, and The Round Up. His most recent novella, The Prophetess, is available through Amazon. [Poetry]

Divya Adusumilli is from the beautiful city of Vizag in India. She has a BA in English Literature from India and a Masters degree in International Employment Relations from the LSE, London. She continues to pursue her passion for art work alongside writing, photography, blogging. Adusumilli is currently based in New Jersey, USA. Visit her website for more information. [Art]

Divya Rajan's publication credits include Jaggery, Four Quarters, Berfrois, Burnt Bridge, Missouri Review tumblr, and other journals and anthologies. She has served on the editorial boards of The Furnace Review, Best of the Net anthologies and Cha. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and the Best of the Net. She lives in Chicago. [Poetry] [Cha profile]

Drisana Misra teaches introductory English courses at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a Yale-China Teaching Fellow. She completed her BA at Yale University where she specialized in Japanese literature, although she is also interested in Latin American, Hong Kong, and South Asian post-colonial and transnational literature. She regularly contributes impressions from her travels to the Jetset Times. [Review]

Emma Zhang was born in Hebei Province, China. She is a recent graduate from the Contemporary English Studies Programme at Lingnan University, where she won the President’s Award in 2009. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is conducting research on the contemporary Chinese-American writer Ha Jin. She has lived in Hong Kong with her husband and two children for more than ten years. [Review]

Over the past few years, Franky Lau has changed the theme of his work from natural scenery to traditional culture, from Xinjiang to small villages in Guangdong. Hoping to capture Hong Kong's quickly disappearing traditions and past, Lau has also focused recently on photographing the city's historical objects and scenery. He has also begun collecting old Hong Kong images and photos, which he plans to post to Facebook as a means of preserving them for posterity. Franky hopes this project will allow old and young, foreigners and local Chinese alike to experience and remember Hong Kong's disappearing traditions. [Photography]

Grant Hamilton is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He writes on world literature and literary theory, and has a blog devoted to such things. His most recent scholarly work includes On Representation: Deleuze and Coetzee on the Colonized Subject (Rodopi, 2011) and Reading Marechera (James Currey, 2013). [Review]

Born on 19 June 1990 in Sopore, Insha Muzafar is from Indian occupied Kashmir. She graduated from University of Kashmir in 2011 and completed an MA degree in botany from the same university in 2013. Poetry is for her a medium to unravel the enigma of the different levels of the 'Self’: individual, social and political. Poetry is both an assertion of reality and a blatant denial of it. [Poetry]

Jonel Abellanosa resides in Cebu City, the Philippines. He graduated from the University of San Carlos, and a fellow of its annual Cornelio Faigao Memorial Writers' Workshop. His poetry appeared or will appear in numerous print and online journals including Windhover, Dark Matter, Anglican Theological Review, Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. His chapbook Pictures of the Floating World is forthcoming from Kind of a Hurricane Press. He is working on his first poetry collection, Multiverse. [Lost tea]

Joshua Burns's poems have appeared at Cha, Handsome, Housefire and The Bakery. A 2012 graduate of the College of William & Mary, Burns put his English major and Art History minor to good use. He began writing poetry with a strong emphasis on the art of ekphrastic creation. The ekphrastic allowed him to honour, in a strongly non-fictional sense, installation artists such as Huang Yong Ping. Not long after, Cha honoured some of this laundry with accolades (see September 2012 and December 2013 issues of the journal). As far as day jobs went, Burns took up substitute teaching at his primary school and in his off-hours kept hollowing out the “modern Chinese art expatriate” back catalog. [Poetry]

Kenneth Alewine is a doctoral student at the Institute for Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch. His research includes poetry and voice hearing, music and medicine, consciousness studies, illness narratives, and computer music. Recently Alewine gave presentations on consciousness, music and melancholia at the Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona, and at the Film Studies program at the University of Transylvania in Romania. His music has been accepted for performance at Music Tech Fest in London this autumn. His poems have appeared in Cha, UCity Review, Psychic Meatloaf, Epigraph, and elsewhere. [Poetry]

Mathew Joseph's poetry has appeared online at Eclectica.org. His poems have received prizes at the Unisun Reliance Poetry competition. An engineer by profession, he lives in Bangalore where he spends most of his time commuting to work. During the time that's left over he tries to read good poetry. [Poetry]

Michael O’Sullivan is from Ireland and he teaches literature in Chinese University 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. His most recent book is Weakness: A Literary and Philosophical History. (Photo credit: Dan Short) [Poetry] [Cha profile]

Michael Tsang received his BA in English and MPhil in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is now reading for 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. Tsang is a Staff Reviewer for Cha. [Reviews 1 | 2] [Cha profile]

Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, China. He moved to the United States when he was six, and received his MFA from Purdue. He won a 2010 AWP Intro Award in fiction, and his work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Day One, Drafthorse and Prick of the Spindle. His chapbook, A Minor Revolution, is available on Amazon, and his short story, "Cures and Superstitions," will be included in After Coetzee, a story anthology celebrating animals. Currently, he is at Florida State University, where he is a PhD candidate in fiction and working on a novel set during China’s Long March. [Fiction 1 | 2]

Qui-Phiet Tran is Professor Emeritus of English at Schreiner University, USA. He received a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 1977. His publications include a study of William Faulkner’s influence on modern French literature, essays on US literature and Vietnamese American literature, and translations of contemporary Vietnamese literature into English in various journals. Since his retirement in 2002 he has devoted himself to writing and studying Marcel Proust. He has recently completed his autobiographical novel entitled Pangs of Memory and Love based on his one-year appointment as a Fulbright scholar in Vietnam in 1999-2000. [Creative non-fiction]

Randy Kim's poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared in Stonecoast Review, The Glass Coin, and several other online journals. His work with playwriting has earned him a Creative Writing Award for Drama at Western Michigan University and a staged production. He currently resides in Kalamazoo where he serves as editor for both Wicwas Press and Creative Justice Press. [Poetry]

Sarah Bower is a novelist and short story writer usually based in Norwich but currently in Hong Kong as writer in residence in Lingnan University's English Department. Her first novel, The Needle in the Blood, was Susan Hill’s Book of the Year 2007 and was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second, originally published as The Book of Love, but re-titled for the US market as Sins of the House of Borgia, has been translated into nine languages and was an international bestseller. Her third novel, Erosion, was published in April this year. Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in various magazines, including Mslexia and Marie-Claire. Bower reviews regularly for the Historical Novels Review and Ink, Sweat and Tears and is currently writing a column about living and writing in Hong Kong for Words With Jam. Visit her website for more information. [Fiction | Review]

Shaily (or Smita) Sahay is a writer, poet and editor based in Mumbai. Her short stories, poetry and book reviews have appeared in Ripples, Pedestal Magazine, Celebrating India, Muse India, Cha, and elsewhere. A Computer Engineer by education, in another lifetime, she worked for Accenture as an SAP Consultant. She is currently co-editing, with Charles Fishman, Veils, Halos and Shackles: International Poetry on the Abuse and Oppression of Women, and working on her first book of fiction. She has read her poetry at 100-1000 Poets for Change in Mumbai and Pune and the Prakriti Poetry Festival in Chennai. She will be joining the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, class of 2015. [Interview]

Sharon Ho is currently a second-year English major at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She developed an interest for writing poetry in her creative writing class and has completed a number of poems. She also writes script and short stories in Chinese and English. [Interview]

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of The Fortunate Islands, seven chapbooks and the recent online collection Season of Change (Mudlark 46). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she has been a reviewer for Library Journal, the editor of Perihelion, and a longtime poetry instructor for UC Davis Continuing Education. She is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle, a contributing editor for Poetry Flash and a blogger for Coal Hill Review. Kelly-DeWitt is also an exhibiting visual artist. Visit her website for more information. [Poetry]

Timothy Kaiser, originally from Canada, has lived in Hong Kong for 20 years. His short stories and poems have been published in many international publications and are part of the secondary school English syllabus in Sweden, Denmark, and Hong Kong. A collection of his poems, Food Court, was published by Chameleon Press in 2004. He is the Principal of the Upper School at the Canadian International School of Hong Kong. [Poetry]

Tjoa Shze Hui is a Singaporean living in Oxford, where she reads History and English. Her writing has won several awards, and been featured in various collections including QLRS, Ceriph and The Mays. This year she was admitted to Ceriph's creative writing mentorship scheme under the Singapore National Arts Council, which will see her produce work in conjunction with POSKOD.sg. [Poetry]

Usha Akella's fourth book of poetry is due for publication from 2 Leaf Press. She immensely enjoys interviewing poets, scholars and artists. She has been invited to participate in a number of international poetry festivals and founded the Poetry Caravan to bring poetry readings and workshops to disadvantaged audiences in women's shelters, hospitals and senior homes. She teaches Creative Writing to kids and adults in Austin, Texas, USA. [Interview]

Zachary Eller lives in Japan, where he works as a teacher and freelance translator. Though he has since moved to Hokkaido, he until recently lived on the Izu Peninsula, the history and nature of which influenced some of his poetry. His hobbies include public baths and shochu appreciation. This is the first time his poetry has been published. [Poetry]