Jason S Polley helped select the poetry in the March 2016 issue of Cha. He completed his PhD in English Literature, specialising in 20th-century Irish fiction and postmodern American fiction and culture. His monograph examines what he calls "everyday justice" in contemporary American literature. He's currently completing a book project on ekphrasis and encyclopedism in Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves. Polley teaches Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University and his areas of interest include poststructuralism and postmodernism. [Cha profile]

Andrea (Ondi) Lingenfelter is a poet, translator, and scholar of Chinese literature. Her translations include The Kite Family (Muse, 2015), a collection of surrealistic short fiction by Hong Kong writer Hon Lai Chu, The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming (Zephyr, 2011), for which she won a 2012 Northern California Book Award, and the novels Farewell My Concubine (Wm. Morrow and Co., 1993) and Candy (Back Bay Books, 2003). Her translations of poetry by modern and contemporary Chinese-language writers have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Granta, Chinese Literature Today, Pathlight, Zoland Poetry Annual, Mantis, Frontier Taiwan, Push Open the Window, and Chicago Review. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. [Poetry]

Ariel Francisco is a Dominican-Guatemalan-American poet born in the Bronx and raised in Miami. He is currently completing his MFA at Florida International University where he is also the assistant editor of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The National Poetry Review, Portland Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Washington Square, and elsewhere, and his chapbook Before Snowfall, After Rain is forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press. [Poetry]

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]

Chak is a diehard artist. He found the study and practice of art so rewarding that after graduation from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1981), he applied for the Japanese Government Monbusho Scholarship and went to Tokyo National University of Fine Arts. After a two-year Masters Program, he travelled to Indiana Ball State University, then Queens College CUNY. With the award of the Queens College Foundation Fund, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 1988, which led to a full fellowship at the Studio School NYC. His schooling ended with an honour – the acceptance of the National Artist Program of the MOMA/PS1 Museum NYC. Presently he teaches #Chin2341 at the University of Hong Kong and contributes to the Hong Kong Economic Journal. [Photography & Art]

Collier Nogues is the author of The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground, selected by Forrest Gander as winner of the 2014 Drunken Boat Poetry Book Contest, and On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way, 2011). Her English/Chinese digital interactive collaboration with poets Mei Kwan Ng and Jhave Johnston will launch in April 2016. She lives in Hong Kong, where she is Lingnan University's 2016 Writer-in- Residence and a PhD Fellow at the University of Hong Kong. She also curates Hong Kong's English-language poetry craft talk series, Ragged Claws, and edits poetry for Juked. Visit her website for more information. [Reviews]

David Farrah is Professor of English at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies in Japan. He has lectured and given poetry readings in Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, and the United States. His poems and essays have appeared in various journals, including Asiatic, Denver Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, The Ohio Review, and Poetry Ireland Review. His books Small Sounds in the Brush (poetry and short tales), The Poems of Nunobiki Falls (translations), Parity's Ground (poetry) and Borrowed Landscapes (poetry) were all published by Shinbisha of Tokyo. [Poetry]

DeWitt Clinton has presented talks on his adaptations of Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese at the Midwest Modern Language Association and the Popular Culture Association conferences, and some of his adaptations have appeared in earlier issues of Cha, qarrtsiluni, Verse Wisconsin, Verse-Virtual, and The Missing Slate. A poem written as an homage to Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" appears in a recent issue of of Negative Capability. [Poetry]

Douglas Penick's work is concerned with cultural loss and continuity. He has written novels on the 3rd Ming Emperor's re-creation of an Empire (Journey of the North Star) and about searching for enlightened society amid social collapse (Dreamers and Their Shadows). He wrote libretti for King Gesar (Sony CD) and Ashoka's Dream (Santa Fe Opera) and three book-length episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. Shorter works have appeared in Cahiers de L'Herne, AGNI, Chicago Quarterly, New England Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, Tricycle, and other places. This April, Wakefield Press will publish his and Charles Ré's translation of Pascal Quignard's A Terrace In Rome. Visit his website for more information. [Fiction]

Elisa Jay recently moved to LA from Chicago, where she received a degree in English Literature. The move to the mountains and ocean has revived her happy love of words. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Word Riot, 100 Word Story and *82 Review. Follow her on Instagram @e_letters. [Creative non-fiction]

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. He has two new books coming out this year: a book on literary criticism, titled The World of Failing Machines: Speculative Realism and Literature (Zero Books, 2016) and a co-edited collection of new essays on the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, titled A Companion to Mia Couto (James Currey, 2016). [Reviews]

Jason Wee is an artist and a writer. He founded and runs Grey Projects, an art space, library and residency. He is an editor for Softblow and he was a 2013-14 artist-in-residence in Gyeonggi Creation Center, and the 2014-2015 writer-in-residence at the National University of Singapore. His performance script Tongues, co-written with Sean Tobin, is a commissioned work of the Singapore Fringe Festival 2012. His poetry volume The Monsters Between Us has been named by TODAY newspaper as one of the top art picks of 2013. [Poetry]

Jhilam Chattaraj is currently working as an Assistant Professor at R.B.V.R.R Women's College, Department of English, Hyderabad. She loves to explore the world through literature, culture, music and photography, especially bird photography. Her areas of interests in literary research includes Diaspora Studies (MPhil) and Popular Indian Culture (PhD). Her academic and creative writings have been published in journals like Muse India, Indian Book Chronicle, Langlit, East Lit, Indialogue Foundation, Women's Web, Birds.com, and Indian Bird Photographers. [Interview]

Jia Dong is in her third year majoring in English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her love of fine arts started when she was first able to seize a pencil about twenty years ago. For her, the pleasure of creation begins the moment she picks up a pastel or brush and sits at the table. She particularly enjoys the solitude of working without interruption for several hours, as she finds that solitude enriches the fading time during which she has the space to be alone with her own thoughts. To produce a piece of work by interacting with tangible materials makes her feel more attached to the world, as if this is the most effective way to stand still in a physical world in which so many things have been reduced to digital symbols. With her colour-stained hands, she prospers in her sphere of time. [Photograhy & Art]

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God's One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe, 2002) and What the Sea Earns for a Living (Quaci Press, 2014). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. She earned an MFA from Brown University and PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Lee is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle. (Photo by Michelle Chung) [Poetry]

Karen Ma is a Beijing-based Chinese-American writer who holds an MA from the University of Washington in Chinese Language and Literature. She is the author of Excess Baggage (China Books, 2013), a semi-autobiographical novel based loosely on her family's experience in the 1990s as Chinese immigrants living in Japan. She writes frequently about Chinese literature for international publications, including The International Herald Tribune, The Japan Times, Kyoto Journal and South China Morning Post. She also has a keen interest in Chinese film and teaches a course on Chinese culture and film at The Beijing Center of Chinese Studies. Visit her website for more information. [Reviews]

Kate Rogers's latest poetry collection, Foreign Skin, debuted in Toronto with Aeolus House Press in July 2015. She is co-editor of the OutLoud Too anthology (MCCM, 2014), and the world poetry anthology, Not a Muse: the Inner Lives of Women (Haven, 2009). Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming in The Guardian, Eastlit, Asia Literary Review, Cha, Morel, The Goose, Mind Shadows (anthology of The Ontario Poetry Society), Kyoto Journal, ASIATIC: the Journal of the Islamic University of Malaysia, Orbis, Contemporary Verse II and the Red Claw Press anthologies Seek it and Crave it. [Poetry] [Cha profile]

Kathy Wong obtained her BA and MPhil in English Literature from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Currently a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California, her research interest is in the areas of transnational Chinese cinema and literature. [Reviews]

Kerong Chen was born and raised in Leshan, Sichuan, a small city surrounded by rivers. She is currently an English major at Pennsylvania State University. She has been writing fiction and poetry in English for three years. Cha is the first journal to publish her creative writing. [Poetry]

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]

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]

Lucas Klein is a father, writer, translator, and editor whose work has appeared in Jacket, Rain Taxi, CLEAR, World Literature Today, and PMLA, and from Fordham, Black Widow, and New Directions. Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong, his translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize. He is translating Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin. Visit his website for more information. [Poetry | Reviews] [Cha profile]

Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna's Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015. Visit her website for more information. [Poetry]

Mang Ke 芒克 (b. 1950, penname of Jiang Shiwei 姜世伟) began writing poetry as a sent-down youth in Baiyangdian, rural Hebei province, during the Cultural Revolution. As co-founder of the PRC's first unofficial literary journal Jintian (Today) in 1978, he is one of the progenitors of what would later be called Obscure or "Misty" Poetry, with spare, impressionistic poems that were among the first to break free of the imposed discourse of Maoism towards an image-based literary style that left space for both expression and interpretation. He currently makes his living as an abstract painter and lives in Songzhuang, an artists' colony on the outskirts of Beijing. [Poetry]

Mantz Yorke lives in Manchester, England. His poems have appeared in Butcher's Dog, Cha, Dactyl, Dawntreader, Lunar Poetry, New Madrid Journal, Popshot, Prole, Revival, The Brain of Forgetting and The Stony Thursday Book magazines, in e-magazines and in anthologies in the UK, Ireland and the US. [Poetry]

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]

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. [Reviews] [Cha Profile]

Born and raised in Japan, Miho Kinnas lives in Hilton Head Island on the South Carolina coast of the United States by way of an extended sojourn in Hong Kong and Shanghai. She holds an MFA in poetry from City University of Hong Kong. Her book of poems, Today, Fish Only (Math Paper Press), was published in November 2015. [Poetry]

Born, raised and educated in but hopefully not confined to Hong Kong, Raphael Chim is a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, majoring in English with a focus on literature. He spends his time gazing at walls and making up far-fetched interpretations out of the molds and cracks. [Fiction]

International travel is Shara K. Johnson's passion, to learn about the people and landscapes that make up this grand planet. She shares many of her experiences on her travel blog. There you can read more about the disappearing villages in the Loess Plateau region through several essays she wrote about a traditional village she studied in Shaanxi Province, China. Her travel photography has been featured in galleries and juried exhibitions along the Front Range of Colorado and in several online journals. You can view more of her work at her photography website. [Photography & Art]

Shuli de la Fuente-Lau was born in a kampung at the edge of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia but grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She teaches at an international school by day and is a writer in the in-between times. Most recently, her writing has appeared in Turks Head Review and Eastlit. She was also a writer for the VOICES writing program for the George Town Literary Festival in Malaysia. Her writing is ignited by small, ordinary moments and the hazy parts of a person's history. She currently lives in Penang, Malaysia with her husband and their two cats. [Poetry]

Tshiung Han See is a writer and editor based in Kuala Lumpur. He edits and publishes the literary zine New Village. [Reviews]

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, Perceptions 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]