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Guest Editors and Contest Judges |
 Arthur Leung, Associate Editor of Cha, helped select the poetry in the Eighth Anniversary Issue of the journal. He holds an MFA in creative writing (with distinction) from the University of Hong Kong and he is a regular performer of his poetry, having been featured in the Hong Kong Literature Festival, Hong Kong International Literary Festival and invited to give talks, demonstrations and workshops in various schools. He has also been invited to participate in "Art Talents Pop Up! Poemography Exp." as a contributing poet, in "Shall We Jam - A Recital of Leung Ping Kwan's Poetry in Song, Dance & Music" as a performing artist, in the opening ceremony of "LitStream" as a guest poet and in Hong Kong Baptist University's International Writers Workshop as a local writer. Leung was a winner of the 2008 Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition, and was commended by the Home Affairs Bureau of the Hong Kong SAR government for his outstanding artistic accomplishments. [ Cha profile]  Royston Tester, Associate Editor of Cha, helped select the prose in the Eighth Anniversary Issue of the journal. He is the author of three short fiction collections, You Turn Your Back (2014), Fatty Goes to China (2012), and Summat Else (2004). Two stories, "Seriously" and "Face", were shortlisted for the 2006 CBC Literary Awards. 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. In Canada, he has taught ESL at McMaster University, and fiction-writing at the Humber School for Writers, Toronto. In China, he has been a frequent writer-in-residence at the Red Gate Gallery, Beijing. [ Cha profile]  Jason Eng Hun Lee, a regular contributor to Cha, was one of the two judges (along with Tammy Ho Lai-Ming) of the "Hong Kong" Poetry Contest. Born in the UK in 1984, Lee has published poems and reviews in the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. He was nominated by Cha for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the Hong Kong University Prize (2010) and runner-up for the Melita Hume Prize (2012). He has a PhD in English Literature and currently lectures at Hong Kong Baptist University. [ "Hong Kong" Poetry Contest] [ Cha profile]  Henrik Hoeg is the Current Emcee and lead organizer of Peel Street Poetry. He has been emceeing the event for almost two years, a time in which it has grown astronomically. He is currently in the final stages of editing his upcoming book Irreverent Poems for Pretentious People. Hoeg is one of the four judges of the Peel Street Poetry slam contest 2015. [ Peel Street Poetry]  Nashua Gallagher is one of the founding members of Peel Street Poetry. The little weekly gathering she set in motion has struggled, survived and flourished countless times over its 10 year history. She is also herself an excellent poet of course. She is still one of a primary organizers of Peel Street Poetry and doubtless the organization would not exist at all were it not for her efforts. Gallagher is one of the four judges of the Peel Street Poetry slam contest 2015. [ Peel Street Poetry]  Tijana Zderic worked with Peel Street Poetry during the wildly successful Other Hundred event earlier in the year. She is a project manager at the GIFT Institute and is working on the next iteration of the Other Hundred project, which will focus on educators. Zderic is one of the four judges of the Peel Street Poetry slam contest 2015. [ Peel Street Poetry]  Tom Grundy attended Peel Street in its early days, however he is much more renowned as the force behind his blog Hong Wrong and Hong Kong Free Press, an independent free online newspaper which was crowd-funded and opened its doors in 2015. Grundy is one of the four judges of the Peel Street Poetry slam contest 2015. [ Peel Street Poetry]
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 Austin Long hails from Pinole, California, a small suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area and recently graduated with a double major in Chemistry and Political Science from Yale University. He currently teaches introductory English for English majors at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Long is interested in the intersections of ethnic studies and social welfare, as well as energy and community organising. He is excited to have this opportunity to explore his interests in social justice, public service, and education while in Hong Kong. [ Reviews] |
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 A Southeast Asianist queer poet, B.B.P. Hosmillo teaches English in the Philippines. His poetry has appeared in Kritika Kultura, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Ilanot Review, amongst other places. His honors include Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, and research fellowships/scholarships from the Japan Foundation, National University of Singapore, and the Republic of Indonesia. Author of The Essential Ruin (forthcoming), Hosmillo will act as the guest poetry editor for the June 2016 of Cha. [ Poetry] [ Cha profile] |
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 Bashir Sakhawarz is an award-winning poet and novelist. His first poetry collection in 1978 won the first prize for New Poetry from the Afghan Writers' Association. Sakhawarz has published seven books in Persian and English. His latest novel, Maargir, The Snake Charmer was entered for the Man Asian Literary Prize by the publisher and was long-listed for India's 2013 Economist Crossword Book Award. His other works have been published in: Proceeding of the Ninth Conference of the European Society for Central Asia, Images of Afghanistan and Language for a New Century. In June 2015 he won the first prize for fiction from Geneva Writers Group. [ Fiction] |
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 Blair Reeve is a New Zealander living in Hong Kong. He holds an MFA in writing from the City University of Hong Kong and teaches creative writing at Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a performance poet and has travelled widely performing his poetry since the mid-90s. His style is rhythmic, experimental and comical. His children's book, Hogart the Hedgehog Turns Nink, was launched in Hong Kong in November 2015. [ Peel Street Poetry] |
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 Boris But is a 19-year-old freshman at McGill University, where he will be majoring in English Literature and International Development, gorging on poutine and swing-singing jazz. He is also the founder of OutSpoken, a slam poetry group for high schoolers and he has recently débuted his poetry collection, “Tedium”. The Hong Kong native has taken up a part-time editorial position writing travel guides and food reviews for Crave Magazine, where he conjures up egg-cellent puns for article headlines. A lover of esoteric music and sports, Boris, as always the master multitasker, can be seen bopping to Bollywood dubstep whilst fencing epée. [ "Hong Kong" Poetry Contest] |
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 Charlotte San Juan currently resides in Shanghai, China where she works for a Sino-US joint venture university. She is one of four authors contributing to Diesel: The Anthology of the San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, with other of her works appearing in The Fem Literary Magazine, Verdad, Wherewithal, Silver Birch Press and velvet-tail to name a few. She enjoys photographing and writing about the working lives of women, composing music, and making grilled cheese sandwiches. [ Poetry] |
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 Chris Song has published two collections of poetry and more than twenty books of poetry translation. He was poet in residence at Bundanon NSW Australia in 2010-2011, and won the "Extraordinary Mention" of the 2013 Nosside International Poetry Prize (Italy). Song is involved in various poetry projects; he is executive director of the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, editor-in-chief of the Sound & Rhyme Poetry Magazine and associate series-editor of the Association of Stories in Macao. [ Photography] |
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 Christian Jil Benitez is currently finishing his degree in Filipino Literature at the Ateneo de Manila University. His poetry has received recognition in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and Maningning Miclat Poetry Awards, and published in Heights and High Chair, among others. His chapbook, from Rhetoric (transit, 2015), was released this year. He lives in Rizal. Visit his website for more information. [ Poetry] |
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 Denis Tsoi moved to the hustling and bustling homeland of his parents after spending 22 years in the UK, where he enjoyed an annual 45 minutes of sunshine in his hometown of Glasgow. He joined the Peel Street Poetry family in early 2015 and has a fondness for emotive imagery and on-going jokes about rhyming dinosaurs. When Denis isn't writing poems, he writes in code alongside several tech space-wizards. [ Peel Street Poetry] |
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 Dragoș Ilca is a graduate student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Coming from Romania and taking a detour through Amsterdam, he ended up in Hong Kong researching on world literature. He worked as a part-time freelance writer and has several published stories and poems in magazines no one will ever read. Still, he thinks literary greatness is just around the corner. [ Reviews | Responses] |
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 Flora Mak is a PhD student doing English literary studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her main research interests are English Romantic poetry and the concept of impersonality. In leisure time, she likes reading and watching Chinese, Japanese and Korean books and movies. She also likes doing voluntary work and find it fascinating to recognize traits of fictive characters in the many different souls that she encounters. [ Reviews] |
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 James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye. Star in the Eye was selected for the Fence Modern Poets Series and included in the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets series. A former Fulbright scholar in Hong Kong, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. [ Poetry] [ Cha profile] |
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 Janice Ko Luo's poems have recently appeared in The Wide Shore, The Baltimore Review, and Ricepaper Magazine, among others. She is a Kundiman fellow and a former Poetry Editor of the literary and art journal Lunch Ticket. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University in Los Angeles. Ko Luo currently resides in New York City. [ "Hong Kong" Poetry Contest] |
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 Jason S Polley teaches Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. His areas of interest include poststructuralism and postmodernism. [ Poetry] [ Cha profile] |
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 Jennifer Feeley holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University and has worked at the University of Iowa as an Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. Her work has been published in journals and anthologies such as FIELD, Epiphany, Tinfish, Taipei Chinese PEN, and Chinese Writers on Writing. She is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poems of Xi Xi (Zephyr Press & MCCM Creations) and co-editor of Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema (University of Minnesota Press), as well as the recipient of a Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry and Translation Fellowship. [ Poetry] |
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 Keisha Le'Maya Siriboe is a passionate educator, researcher, and founder of the social enterprise Stories of Us. Born and raised in the United States, she obtained a BA in Cultural Studies from the University of Nebraska. Then moved to China where she received a MA in Comparative Education from Beijing Normal University. Keisha is currently a PhD candidate within the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. Keisha is the first in her family to graduate from college and her poetry is inspired by the rich experiences life has, and continues to, bestow upon her. [ Peel Street Poetry] |
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 Kerri Lu came to Hong Kong in 2014 as a Chinese-Canadian and pseudo-American via four years at Yale University, where she majored in English. Currently, she teaches in the English Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as part of the Yale-China Teaching Fellowship programme. She is passionate about cross-cultural conversations and is excited to write for Cha. [Reviews 1 | 2] |
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 L 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 graduated last May from Yale University with a degree in East Asian Studies and is interested in Asian American history and literature. [ Reviews] |
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 Lily C. Fen holds an MA in English Language Studies from the University of the Philippines. Her previous works have been published by Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, New Asian Writing, VIEW Travel & Lifestyle, and Asian Dragon, among other Asian publications. Her mission is to contribute to the growing canon of Asian writing in English, in order to teach readers about the world of South East Asia. She lived in Prague for a few years, where she began writing a collection of Asian-themed short stories that she hopes will one day be a published book. She now resides in Zurich. [ Fiction] |
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 Mantz Yorke lives in Manchester, England. Trained as a scientist and educator, he has been both teacher and researcher. His poems have appeared in Butcher's Dog, Dactyl, Lunar Poetry, Popshot, Prole, Revival and The Brain of Forgetting Magazine, and in various e-magazines and anthologies published in the UK, Ireland and the US. He contributes to poetry gatherings in the north-west of England. [ "Hong Kong" Poetry Contest] |
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 Matthew James Friday is a professional writer and graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmith College, London. He has had poems accepted for publication in the following magazines and literary journals: A Handful of Stones, Bolts of Silk, Cadenza, Carillon, Earth Love, Erbacce, Envoi, Finger Dance Festival, Gloom Cupboard, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The New Writer, Of Nepalese Clay, Pens on Fire, Pulsar Poetry Magazine and Red Ink. Friday has also received a special mention in Poetry News, won Third Prize in Writing Magazine’s Valentine Day competition and short-listed for Gloom Cupboard’s Chapbook Contest. Visit his website for more information. [ Poetry] |
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 May Huang is an 18 year old freshman at the University of Chicago, where she intends to major in English literature and continue to pursue creative writing. She won a Hong Kong Young Writers' Award for poetry in 2013 and her poems have been published in Cha and The Feminine Inquiry. She enjoys writing book reviews on her blog, defending Taiwanese independence and practicing her violin. [ "Hong Kong" Poetry Contest] |
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 Born and raised in Hong Kong, Megan Hills is a freelance writer and recent graduate of the University of Warwick's BA English and Creative Writing programme. Her poetry has been published in Write Bloody's We Will Be Shelter anthology (edited by Andrea Gibson) and she has contributed to numerous lifestyle verticals including The Culture Trip, SOY Journal and Sassy Hong Kong. She also blogs about travel and culture over at Give Me Chills and can normally be found cuddling her elderly puppy at home. [ Peel Street Poetry] |
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 Michael Carlo C. Villas teaches writing and literature at the Department of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences at Visayas State University in Baybay City, Leyte, where he lives. He has been published in the Philippines Freepress, Corpus, Asia Literary Review, Humanities Diliman, Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry edited by Joel Toledo and Khavn de la Cruz and Sa Atong Dila: Introduction to Visayan Literature edited by Merlie Alunan. He co-edited with Charo Nabong-Cabardo and Phil Harold L. Mercurio Mga Retrato han Akon Bungto at iba pang akda ni Iluminado Lucente (Pictures of My Town and other writings by Iluminado Lucente) published by the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino Language). [ Poetry] |
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 Michael Tsang is a native of Hong Kong, and holds a PhD from the University of Warwick, researching on Hong Kong English writing. His broader research interests are on postcolonial and world literature with an Asian focus. He writes stories and poems in his spare time, and is always interested in learning new languages. Michael is a Staff Reviewer for Cha. Visit his Warwick profile for more. [ Poetry] [Reviews 1 | 2] [ Cha Profile] |
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 Nicky Harman translates fiction, and occasionally non-fiction and poetry, from Chinese. In addition to translating, she writes occasional blogs, mentors new translators, teaches summer schools, and reviews translated books for Tribune Magazine. With three others, she runs the READ PAPER REPUBLIC short story project, on the Chinese translation website Paper Republic and is currently working with the Writing Chinese project 2014-2016 at Leeds University. She won First Prize in the 2013 China International Translation Contest, Chinese-to-English section, with Jia Pingwa's Backflow River. She tweets, with Helen Wang, @cfbcuk (China Fiction Book Club). [ Essay] |
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 Piera Chen is a travel writer based in Hong Kong but scattered over China, North America, and various exotic destinations, real or imagined. She has authored over a dozen books for Lonely Planet. Chen has a BA in liberal arts from Pomona College, majoring in literature, and an MA in literary and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. She believes that if writing is the most disembodied of the arts, travel writing and poetry are the genres that make it less disembodied. And this is why she is passionate about both. [ "Hong Kong" Poetry Contest] |
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 Reid Mitchell is Consulting Editor of Cha and former Poetry Editor of Asia Literary Review. He has also published poems in Softblow, Eastlit, and other journals, as well as collaborating with the poet Tammy Ho Lai-Ming. A New Orleanian, he currently teaches in China. [ Poetry] [ Cha profile] |
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 Rey Escobar is a Philippine born poet whose work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Kritika Kultura, Mascara Literary Review, Field of Mirrors, Columbia Literary Journal, Tea Party Magazine, Maganda Magazine, and Red Shoes Review. You can hear his latest recorded reading here. [ Poetry] |
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 A designer, animator and visual artist for over 20 years, Rose Draper's professional work has been exhibited nationally and internationally via public broadcast, cinema, and digital platforms. Draper's personal works mix photography, design and video, and are in collections in Germany, Dom. Rep., Mexico and Australia. [ Essay] |
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 Sanchita Chatterjee is a photographer and writer based in New Delhi, India. Until recently she was working as a corporate economist in Mumbai (and continues to retain a strong interest in the subject). She is also involved in non-profit management of a primary school from Kolkata. Visit her website for more inforation. [ Photography] |
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 Shiqin Chen is mostly drawn to artistic works that concern human emotions. Her major interests include Romantic poetry and children's literature. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on the elegiac poetry of Charlotte Smith, investigating her position in the history of elegy as well as in the Romantic literature. [ Reviews] |
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 An ardent bibliophile and cinephile, Suzanne Lai sees the world in vivid colours. With a concentration in Comparative Literature, she straddles both Chinese and English narratives with untethered imagination. Hoarding a vast collection of novels and vinyl records, Suzanne lives dangerously under a wavering tower of words and rhythm. [ Photography] |
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 Tegan Smyth was born in a land famed for Steve Irwin and kangaroos but has spent almost half her life in the high octane madness of Hong Kong. By day, she slaves behind a desk in the middle of town. By night, she is not a caped crusader but a wannabe writer. Her favourite writing subjects are politics, language and cultural identity. [ Poetry] |
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 After spending two and a half years in Wuhan, Travis Lee returned to the States, where he works in meteorology. His fiction has appeared in Independent Ink Magazine and The Colored Lens, and he is currently looking for a publisher for his new novel, The Pale Ancient & the House of Mirrors, about an amateur foreign journalist who investigates a cult in a small Hubei province town. [ Lost Teas] |
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 William B. Noseworthy is a graduate student in the Department of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been researching in the field of Diaspora History and Literature since he was an undergraduate at Oberlin College (2003-2007). In 2006 he took his first trip to Vietnam and has been working in the field of Southeast Asian Studies ever since. He has completed research in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and, most recently, Laos, Malaysia and Bali (Indonesia). He has also been an English teacher (in Vietnam and Brooklyn, NY) and spent a good amount of time hitchhiking, playing guitar in coffee shops for bus money and 'riding greyhounds' (2006-2009). At UW-Madison Noseworthy has taught courses on History of the Vietnam Wars, P erceptions of China, Religions in a Global Perspective, and Introduction to Buddhism. He has published a handful of articles and book chapters in Vietnamese and English on Asian Studies oriented topics, including a recent article on 'Mother Goddess Worship' in Suwannabhumi: Multidisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. [ Reviews] |
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