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Guest Editors and Contest Judge |
 Dorothy Chan was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Plume and Spillway. In 2012, The Writing Disorder nominated her poem "Ikebukuro Train Rides" for a Pushcart. Chan helped select the poetry in the March 2015 Issue of Cha. [ Cha profile]  Born in California in 1956, David Raphael Israel was educated at a Quaker school. He's written poetry from a young age. After studying classical Chinese at UC Berkeley, he dabbled in arts journalism, focusing on music. He wrote and edited at EAR Magazine (NYC), then moved to Washington, DC. Shifting to India in 2007, he lived at Dhrupad Sansthan (a Bhopal music school). Returning to California in 2009, he serves as Communications Director for the Avatar Meher Baba Center, in Los Angeles, where he produces the "Concerts at Meherabode" series. His English ghazals have appeared in anthologies and he is currently studying sarangi. Israel helped select the prose in the March 2015 issue of Cha. [ Cha profile]  Vinita Agrawal was one of the two judges (along with Tammy Ho Lai-Ming) of "The Other Side" Poetry Contest. Author of Words Not Spoken, Agrawal is a Mumbai based, award winning poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in Constellations, Cyclamen And Swords, The Fox Chase Review, Pea River Journal, Open Road Review, Stockholm Literary Review, Poetry Pacific, among others. She was nominated for the Best of the Net Awards 2011, awarded first prize in the Wordweavers Contest 2014, commendation prize in the All India Poetry Competition 2014 and won the 2014 Hour of Writes Contest thrice. Her poems have found a place in several international anthologies. Her current manuscript of poems has been accepted by the Finishing Line Press, Kentucky, USA and is due to be published in 2015. She has an M.A. in political science with a gold medal. Visit her website for more information. [ Cha profile]
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 Aditi Rao is a writer, educator, and dreamer. Winner of the Srinivas Rayaprol Prize for Poetry, the Toto Funds the Arts Creative Writing Award, and several other honours, Rao's poetry has been published in journals around the world. Her first book, The Fingers Remember, was released by Yoda Press in 2014. Rao also runs Tasawwur, an arts-for-social-change program for teenagers, along with teaching creative and research writing workshops. When she is not writing or teaching, she works in clay, plays with her pets, and journals in three languages. She calls New Delhi home but lives everywhere she can. Visit her website for more information. [ The Other Side] |
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 Alice Tsay currently resides in Michigan. A native of California, she has taught English in Hong Kong and Taiwan and holds degrees from Amherst College and Oxford University. She is a staff reviewer for Cha. [ Reviews] [ Cha profile] |
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 Arian Tejano holds a degree in Creative Writing from the University of the Philippines Mindanao, works as an e-commerce marketing analyst, and is now starting the play version of his poem "When A Ladyboy Loves A Foreign Man". Tejano prefers to be addressed in the male pronoun as a writer, although he considers himself a gender-fluid and a ladyboy at heart. [ The Other Side] |
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 Arielle Stambler moved from the U.S. to Hong Kong last July after graduating from Yale University with a BA in English. She teaches introductory communications courses for English majors at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as part of the two-year Yale-China Teaching Fellowship. She did her senior thesis research on Derek Walcott's Omeros and is interested in Caribbean, postcolonial, and Southeast/East Asian literatures. [ Reviews] |
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 Arup K Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of English at University of Delhi. He is a PhD scholar at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. (The submitted doctoral dissertation was titled Hillmaking: Architecture and Literature from the Doon Valley). He is the founder/editor of Coldnoon: Travel Poetics ( International Journal of Travel Writing) Print and Online. He is recipient of the Charles Wallace fellowship, 2014-15, to the UK. [ The Other Side] |
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 B.B.P. Hosmillo is a Southeast Asianist queer poet. He received graduate research fellowships and scholarships from the Japan Foundation, Asia Research Institute-National University of Singapore, and the Republic of Indonesia. Anthologized in Under the Storm: An Anthology of Philippine Contemporary Poetry (2011), his recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Ilanot Review: An Israeli Journal of Creative Writing in English, Kritika Kultura, SOFTBLOW, Mascara, Ellipsis, Kenning Journal, and many others. Currently, he is finishing a poetry collection entitled The Essential Ruin. Contact:
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[ The Other Side] [ Cha profile] |
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 Brian Ng, a poet from Hong Kong, is an undergraduate at the University of Chicago where he has published or forthcoming pieces on the Asia Literary Review, Epithet, Sliced Bread, and the South China Morning Post. He has studied poetry under Rosanna Warren, Leila Wilson, and Susan Wheeler. He is working on various projects, including a play on security breaches. [ The Other Side] |
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 Carissa Ma, 20, is irrevocably in love with how words roll off the tongue, enter the page, and burst into life. She is an aspiring writer currently majoring in English at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. [ The Other Side] |
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Charles Hayes is an American who lives part time in the Philippines and part time in Seattle with his wife. Born and raised in the Appalachians, his writing interest centers on the stripped down stories of those recognized as on the fringe of their culture. Asian culture, its unique facets, and its intersection with general American culture is of particular interest. As are the mountain cultures of Appalachia. Many of his stories, to one degree or another, are autobiographical. [ Fiction] |
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 Chloe Li is a part-time lecturer of English Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD in English Literary Studies from the same university in 2011. Her recent research focuses on the works of the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas and also the theories of children's literature. She devotes her time to reading, teaching, writing and taking care of her two young daughters. [ Reviews] |
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 Christopher Hill is a New Zealander who has spent the last decade teaching, writing and researching in Hong Kong and Indonesia. He has a passion for the histories and cultures of Asia, which form the inspiration for his poetry writing, creative non-fiction and short stories. He holds a masters degree in communication studies from Auckland University of Technology and is a PhD candidate at City University of Hong Kong; his current research focuses on music figures in the contemporary novel. [ Creative non-fiction] |
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 Deborah Guzzi is a healing facilitator specializing in Japanese Shiatsu and Reiki. She writes for Massage and Aromatherapy Magazines. She travels the world to expand her knowledge of healing and seeking writing inspiration. She has walked the Great Wall of China, seen Nepal (during the civil war), Japan, Egypt (two weeks before 'The Arab Spring'), Peru, and France during December's terrorist attacks. Her poetry appears in magazines: here/there:poetry in the UK, Existere — Journal of Arts and Literature in Canada, Tincture in Australia, Cha in Hong Kong, Vine Leaves Literary Journal in Greece, and Travel by the Book, Liquid Imagination, Illumen, and others in the USA. [ Poetry] |
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 Edgar Yuanbo Mao received his BA in English Language and Literature from Peking University, China, and his MPhil in English (Literary Studies) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is currently a DPhil candidate in English literature (1500-1800) in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. His doctoral research focuses on the literary and historical contexts of the Rose playhouse on the Bankside, London (1587- c.1606). His wider research interests include cultural and literary theory, early modern English drama, theatre history, and the multiple facets of the intellectual history as well as the rich material culture of the early modern period. [ Photography] |
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 Elen Turner is a writer and editor currently based in Western New York. She has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from the Australian National University. Her thesis looked at the contemporary Indian feminist publishing industry. She is an academic editor, an Assistant Editor at Kathmandu-based Himal Southasian magazine, and Assistant Managing Editor of Kitaab. Her writing on South Asian literature and gender has been published widely, and she writes about her travels and travel literature at Wilderness, metropolis. [ Reviews] |
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 Emily Chow graduated from Hong Kong Baptist University where she majored in comparative literature. After completing her MA and MPhil in English (Literary Studies) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, she continues her study at the same university and is now a PhD candidate. Her research interests include African literature, post-colonial literature, and world literature. She is now conducting research on the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera. [ Reviews] |
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 Fatima Lim-Wilson, originally from the Philippines, is the author of two award winning collections of poetry, Wandering Roots and Crossing the Snow Bridge. Her poems have also won the prestigious Pushcart Prize, Seattle Arts Commission Grant, Ohio State University Journal Award, and the Colorado State Authors Award. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Denver. She currently works as an online Literature professor at three American universities and as an educational consultant for a global firm in Seattle, WA, where she lives with her husband and three sons. [ Fiction] |
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 Henry Wei Leung is the author of a chapbook, Paradise Hunger, which won the 2012 Swan Scythe Press Poetry Prize. He earned his degrees from Stanford and the Helen Zell Writers' Program, and has been awarded Kundiman, Soros, and Fulbright Fellowships. He is finishing up a year of research on the literatures and protests in Hong Kong, and will be continuing this research at the University of Hawaii at Manoa toward the completion of a PhD. [ Fiction] |
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 Jennifer Feeley has published translations of poetry and prose from Chinese into English in various journals and anthologies, including FIELD, Epiphany, Tinfish, Taipei Chinese PEN, and Chinese Writers on Writing, among others. Her translated collection of Xi Xi’s poetry, Not Written Words ( Zephyr Press), and her co-edited volume, Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema (University of Minnesota Press), are forthcoming in 2015. [ Poetry] |
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 John Fredricks is a freelance photographer currently based in the Los Angeles area. Lord willing, he hopes to impact his generation through a visual medium, and put the spotlight on subjects around the world. He is available for projects in any location, and looks forward to getting his boots dirty in the storytelling process. Visit his website for more information. [ Photography] |
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 Joshua Burns's style, yet to be cartographed, is a mix of formal practice and spontaneity like Calypso lyrics. He has not outgrown the writing workshop. Working within a form whether as lax as ekphrasis or calcified as the canzone is his modus operandi. So where does the East come in? No haikus yet. For Burns, Asia is like an ideogram made up of ideograms and he plays Pound giving them stories. Cha, the house of leaves kanji, has been an important collector of his art about art. [ Poetry] |
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 Ken Jackson is a retired lawyer. He grew up in Alabama in the 1960s. After taking English literature and law degrees there, he worked in New York for a few years before he moved to Hong Kong. For 20 years in Hong Kong, he worked and traveled throughout Asia. Outside his legal work, he also wrote travel and history articles, and some poetry. He has had more than 50 articles published in Asia, the United States and England. He now lives in San Diego, California, and usually visits Asia every year. He still writes, studies Spanish and wanders around Mexico and the American Southwest. [ The Other Side] |
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 Kyra Ballesteros is a graduate student finishing her MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. She is Managing Editor of a local publishing house based in Pasay City. She lives in Taytay. [ Fiction] |
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 Lachlan Brown's poems have appeared in journals including Heat, Southerly, Antipodes, Cordite and Mascara. He has been shortlisted for the Blake Poetry Prize and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His first book of poetry, Limited Cities (2012), was highly commended for the Mary Gilmore Award. Brown teaches literature at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia. He has received a Marten Travelling Bequest for poetry and an Australia Council Emerging Writers' grant for poetry. His current project involves exploring his Asian-Australian heritage, his grandmother's hoarding, and the state of China in the Asian Century. [ The Other Side] |
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 Lian-Hee Wee is a tragic anti-hero. Tragic because he continues, for instance, in his aspirations to musicianship after having been repeatedly proven to have a poor sense of pitch or rhythm, or to be wise despite substantial evidence of incorrigible folly. Though a distracted linguist by day, Wee volunteers his services to stray animals when they would let him but otherwise tries to be a carpenter, calligrapher, cook, connoisseur and comic. He can do a coronal-labial trill. [ Poetry] |
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 Louise Ho was born and bred in Hong Kong. She was an Associate Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where she lectured on creative writing, Shakespeare and English Poetry from the Renaissance to the Modernist Period. Not prolific, Ho has been writing English poetry for more than thirty years. Previous collections include Local Habitation (1994) and Incense Tree: Collected Poems (2009). [ Poetry] |
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 Martin Kovan studied poetics with the Beat poet Gary Snyder, and has since then been published in Australia, India, France, the U.S., SE Asia and the Czech Republic. He is also a scholar of Buddhist ethics and has lived for long periods in India and the South Asian region. [ Poetry] |
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 Michael Gray won a 2012 AWP Intro Journals Project Award and the 2013 Hot Street Emerging Writer's Contest, was nominated for Best New Poets 2014, and named a finalist in The Lit Pub's 1st Annual Poetry Contest and the SpringGun Press 2014 Open Reading Period. His translations of Yau Ching appear in Shadow Beings ( XXX Zines, 2014). Other work appears or will appear in Poetry East West, Puerto del Sol, Hot Street, Rock & Sling, Fence, LONTAR, and elsewhere. [ Poetry] [ Cha profile] |
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 In between occasional bouts of travel, Stephen Cloud resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. His role model for both poetry and travel is the Japanese master, BashÅ. Some of his recent work has appeared in Shenandoah, New Madrid, Tar River Poetry, and High Desert Journal. [ Poetry] |
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 Xi Xi (b. 1938), pseudonym of Cheung Yin, is among the first generation of writers to have grown up in Hong Kong and is considered one of the territory’s most beloved and prolific authors. She began writing in the late 1950s and has published two poetry volumes, Stone Chimes (1982) and The Collected Poems of Xi Xi: 1959-1999 (2000), along with numerous novels and collections of short stories and essays. After winning Taiwan’s prestigious United Daily fiction prize in 1983, her fame catapulted throughout Greater China, where she has continued to cultivate an enthusiastic readership. Her career is the subject of Fruit Chan's recent documentary film My City. (Photograph of Xi Xi courtesy of Ho Fuk Yan.) [ Poetry] |
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Eddie Tay is author of three collections of poetry, Remnants, A Lover's Soliloquy and 
Ting Wei Tai was born in China and grew up in Singapore. He graduated from Raffles Institution and will begin his undergraduate studies at Yale University in August 2015. His poems have previously been featured in