Arthur Leung, Associate Editor of Cha, helped select the poetry in the Ninth 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 Ninth 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]

Henrik Hoeg is the director and emcee of Peel Street Poetry, an advisor to the Hong Kong Literary Festival and AFTEC's poet-in-education for 2016. His first book Irreverent Poems for Pretentious People was an awardee in the Proverse Prize 2015 and published in April 2016. He recently emceed the 2016 TEDxWanChai event Crossroads, the biggest TEDx event in Hong Kong to date. By day he works at the Blurton Family Development Center as the head of the Literacy Department. He is working on his second collection of poetry, due out in 2017. Hoeg is one of the four judges of the Peel Street Poetry slam contest 2016. [Peel Street Poetry]

Nashua Gallagher is a Sri-Lankan born poet who lives, works, and writes in Hong Kong. She co-founded weekly open-mic sessions Peel Street Poetry in 2005 and has been an active participant in the Hong Kong literary scene from a young age. Her work has previously been featured in Not A Muse: A World Poetry Anthology (2009) and Outloud Too (2013). She is working on her first collection and regularly speaks at events promoting creative expression through the medium of spoken word. Gallagher is one of the four judges of the Peel Street Poetry slam contest 2016. [Peel Street Poetry]

Collier Nogues is the author of The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground, selected by Forrest Gander as the winner of the 2014 Drunken Boat Poetry Book Contest, and On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way, 2011). She teaches creative writing in the Chinese University of Hong Kong's MA Programme in Literary Studies, and is a PhD Fellow in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong, where she studies contemporary poetry's responses to US militarization. She also co-edits poetry for Juked and curates Hong Kong's English-language poetry craft talk series, Ragged Claws. In Spring 2016, she was Lingnan University's Writer in Residence. Nogues is one of the four judges of the Peel Street Poetry slam contest 2016. [Peel Street Poetry]

Nury Vittachi is a journalist and author based in Hong Kong. His columns are published daily, weekly in a variety of newspapers in Asia as well as on his website. He wrote the comedy-crime novel series The Feng Shui Detective, published in many languages around the world, as well as non-fiction works and novels for children. He is also noted for his role in founding the Asia Literary Review, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the Man Asian Literary Prize, and was the chairman of the judges of the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008. Vittachi is one of the four judges of the Peel Street Poetry slam contest 2016. [Peel Street Poetry]

Canadian poet Akin Jeje lives in Hong Kong. His works have been published and featured in Canada and Hong Kong. His poetry collection Smoked Pearl was a semi-finalist for the 2009 International Proverse Prize, and published by Proverse Hong Kong in 2010. Jeje's most recent publication was in issue 53 of New York's Linden Avenue Literary Journal in October 2016. He is a regular performer at Hong Kong's Poetry Outloud and previously the MC for Peel Street Poetry. He is also an advisor to the Hong Kong International Young Readers' Festival. [Peel Street Poetry]

 

Alec Schachner is an independent literary scholar and poetry translator based out of HCMC, Vietnam. His translations have appeared in Asymptote, various issues of Ajar online & print journals and Jerome Rothenberg's blog Poems and Poetics. The Purification Festival in April / lễ tẩy trần tháng tư was Schachner's first full book of contemporary Vietnamese poetry translations, with two more slated for publication next year. He is oft to be caught reading original and translated works around Hanoi and New York. He is also a multi-instrumental cross-genre musician and sound installation artist. [A-Festival]

Angus Gallagher was born and raised in the culturally diverse region of Aston, Birmingham by his Irish immigrant parents. After studying physics and maths, he moved to Hong Kong in 2005, where he now works as a science and mathematics tutor and a part-time kindergarten teacher. He met his wife (and now mother of his two lovely children) at Peel Street Poetry almost ten years ago and has been honing his performance skills there ever since. He has participated in each of Peel Street's previous slams, but this is the first time he reached the final. [Peel Street Poetry]

Anita Patel was born in Singapore and lives in Canberra, Australia. She has had work published in Canberra Times, Summer Conversations (Pandanus Books, ANU), Block 9, Burley Journal and by Wombat Books. Her children's poems were included in the anthology Pardon My Garden published by Harper Collins and she won the ACT Writers Centre Poetry Prize in 2004 for her poem "Women's Talk". Patel has performed her poetry at many events, including the Canberra Multicultural Festival and the Poetry on the Move Festival (University of Canberra). She was the feature poet for the Mother Tongue Showcase at Belconnen Arts Centre in June 2016. [Creative non-fiction]

B.B.P. Hosmillo is the author of Breed Me: a sentence without a subject / Phối giống tôi: một câu không chủ đề (Ajar Press, 2016) with Vietnamese translation by Hanoi-based poets Nhã Thuyên & Hải Yến. A Pushcart Prize & four-time Best of the Net nominee, his writing is anthologized in Bettering American Poetry (BlazeVOX, 2016) and forthcoming or has appeared in Apogee Journal, BOAAT Journal, Connotation Press, The Collapsar, Transnational Literature, and The Nottingham Review, among others. His interviews can be read in Misfits Magazine and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. He is the founding co-editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Literary Journal of Transgressive Art. Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it [Poetry] [Cha profile]

Bernice Chauly is a Malaysian writer, poet, educator and Director of the George Town Literary Festival. She is the author of five books of poetry and prose which include the award-winning memoir Growing Up With Ghosts (2011) and her critically acclaimed third collection of poems, Onkalo (2013). For over twenty years she worked as a multidisciplinary artist and is recognised as one of the most significant voices of her generation. She is an Honorary Fellow in Writing from the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP 2014) and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. Her upcoming novel will be published by Epigram Books in 2017. Visit her website for more information. (Photo credit: Daniel Adams) [Poetry | A-Festival]

Christopher Hill is a New Zealander who has spent the last decade teaching, writing and researching in Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia. He has a passion for the histories and cultures of Asia, which form the inspiration for his writing. He holds a PhD in Literature from the City University of Hong Kong, and his research focuses on music and literature in the contemporary novel. He currently works as a lecturer at the Communication and Language Centre at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. [Reviews]

Christopher Leibow is a poet, a visual artist and a Buddhist Practice Leader. He is an MFA graduate of Antioch and has been published in numerous journals and online, including Juked, Interim, Barrow Street and Cricket Online Review. His art has appeared in Lumina, 491 Magazine and has been previously featured at Cha and OF ZOOS. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee. Leibow currently lives in Salt Lake City, with wife Linnea, son Teague and son on the way, Ronen and of course their dog Penelope. Visit his website for more information. [Photography & art]

Colin Cheney is the author of Here Be Monsters (Georgia University Press, 2010), a National Poetry Series selection. His work has appeared in publications such as AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is an editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, and the creator and co-host of the podcast Poet in Bangkok. Visit his website for more information. [A-Festival]

Daniel Ho was born and raised in Australia. He has spent most of his life in Melbourne, and is in the middle of an Arts degree at the University of Melbourne. He is, however, currently completing a semester abroad in Germany, studying Comparative Literature at the Free University of Berlin. In future, he plans on either studying law, or recklessly indulging his linguistic interests abroad. [Creative non-fiction]

Denis Tsoi joined Peel Street Poetry in early 2015 and has a fondness for emotive imagery and on-going jokes about rhyming dinosaurs. When he isn't writing poems, he likes to ruin couples photos at tourist destinations. To eat, he writes in code alongside several tech space-wizards. [Peel Street Poetry]

Dina Lyube is a freelance writer currently living in Canada. She also teaches English as a second language, and has taught abroad in Japan, South Korea and China. Lyube loves to travel, and probably won't stay in one place for very long. Her short fiction and travel writing has appeared both online and in print. She is currently working on her first novel. [Creative non-fiction]

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]

Esumi Fujimoto graduated from New York University's College of Nursing and is now a registered nurse living in Brooklyn, New York. She currently practices in the labor and delivery department of a major New York City hospital and is pursuing a career in midwifery and reproductive health justice. When she is not helping babies come into the world, she enjoys exploring the nature of lived human experiences through writing. [Creative non-fiction]

Grace Chia is the author of two poetry collections, womango and Cordelia, a short story collection, Every Moving Thing That Lives Shall Be Food, a novel, The Wanderlusters, two nonfiction books and was the editor of the anthology, We R Family. Her work has been anthologised in Singapore and abroad, including the Anthology of English Writing in Southeast Asia, Singapore Literature in English, Mining for Meaning, Fish Eats Lion, A Luxury We Cannot Afford, From Walden To Woodlands, UnFree Verse, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Poetry.sg, HOW2, Blue Lyra Review, SingaporePoetry.com, Lyrikline, Stylus Poetry Journal, and has been translated for die horen (Germany), La Traductiere (France) and Knijzevne Novine (Serbia). The inaugural NAC-NTU Writer-in-Residence for 2011-2012, she has taught creative writing, mentored emerging writers and judged national poetry competitions. [Poetry]

Huiwen Shi is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong, working on poetry, particularly on elegy. Before joining HKU, she worked as a lecturer in English and Chinese language. She also writes reviews about Hong Kong theatre for publications such as ArtsLink, Artism, and Hong Kong Literature Monthly. [Reviews]

James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye. A graduate from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has taught poetry writing at Nebraska Wesleyan University, University of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago’s MFA Program in Poetry, and DePaul University. A former Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong, he is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. Shea will serve as one of the guest editors for Cha's "Writing Japan" Issue (June 2017) [A-Festival] [Cha profile]

Jan Filart is a graduate of Ateneo de Manila University and aspires to be a writer. Passionate about Asian literature, he writes his own book reviews in a personal literary blog, The Asian Reader. He has a particular interest in translated works from Korea and Japan. Just like most bibliophiles, he also happens to write about Formula One racing in his other personal blog. [Reviews]

JinJin Xu started writing to open up the liminal spaces within herself: freeing up half-remembered memories, reconciling her Chinese and English selves and allowing herself to exist in between languages, between the past and the present. She left her home, Shanghai, to study English and Art History at Amherst College, where she served as editor-in-chief of the College literary magazine and hosted a weekly poetry radio show. Her work has been published in The Common, Circus, AASIA and Amherst Soul. She is currently working on a collection of prose-poetry about mothers and daughters, exploring the act of remembrance and its effect on the female body. [Creative non-fiction]

Joshua Uyheng graduated with a degree in psychology from the Ateneo de Manila University and is currently completing a second degree in mathematics at the same university. His work has previously been featured in Plural, Kritika Kultura, transit, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. The poem "There Is Only Jingting Shan" is for Ama. [Poetry]

Born in Wampsville, New York, Kaitlin Rees (1985) has written one tiny book of poetry, Language Without Color (2014), self-published along with other poems and translations from the Vietnamese in Ajar Press. Her translations of Nhã Thuyên's poetry have been published in a collection of three Vietnamese poets compiled by Vagabond Press (2013), as well as a full-length collection words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (Vagabond Press, 2016). An on-going poetic artwork of compiling fragments of an infinite dictionary was exhibited at Zalaegerszeg, Hungary in 2015 and in the hutongs of Shanghai, China in 2016. [A-Festival 1 | 2] [Cha profile]

Raised in New England, Kaitlin Solimine has considered China a second home for almost two decades. While majoring in East Asian Studies at Harvard University, she was a Harvard-Yenching scholar and wrote and edited Let's Go: China (St. Martin's Press). In 2006-2007, she was a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Creative Arts Fellow in China. She was aslo the Donald E. Axinn Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2010) and graduated from the MFA program in writing at UC-San Diego (2011). An excerpt from her first novel, Empire of Glass, won the 2012 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program award judged by Colson Whitehead. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in National Geographic News, The Wall Street Journal, Guernica Magazine, Kartika Review, The Huffington Post, The World of Chinese Magazine, China Daily, and numerous anthologies. Solimine is co-founder of HIPPO Reads, a magazine and network connecting academic insights and scholars to the wider public. She recently returned from living in Singapore and resides in San Francisco. Her first novel, Empire of Glass, will be published in July 2017. Visit her website for more information. [Reviews] [Cha profile]

Kevin Tan Kwan Wei currently contributes articles to Your Commonwealth, a youth blog supported by The Commonwealth Youth Programme. He has served as a volunteer judge for The Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition, and is one of the inaugural participants of the Young Critics Mentorship Programme. He was recently awarded the Leading Change Journalism Bursary 2017 by the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust. [Reviews]

Kit Lea Cheang is a Singaporean undergraduate in Yale University, where she dabbles in creative nonfiction, fiction, journalism and playwriting. She writes to investigate the complexities of love, human relationships, and personal identity, and is currently spellbound by Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard. At Yale, Cheang performs with Jook Songs, a spoken word group, and writes for Yale Daily News. She is most inspired by long walks, good conversations, human oddities, city life, and scenic train rides. [Fiction]

Krishna Ramanujan is a fiction writer and science journalist. His fiction has appeared in St. Petersburg Review and Springhouse. Also, betweenstories.xyz is the new home for his fiction podcast, featuring original tales that explore themes of identity and loss of culture. He lives in Ithaca, New York. [Fiction]

Kyoko Yoshida has a collection of short stories Disorientalism from Vagabond Press in Sydney, and her short story is included in the inaugural issue of Singapore's Books Actually Gold Standard 2016 anthology. She was born and raised in Fukuoka, studied in Kyoto and Milwaukee, and after thirteen years of teaching English in Yokohama and Tokyo, now teaches American Literature at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. She was a fellow at University of Iowa and Brown University. She writes fiction in English, translates Japanese poetry and drama into English, and translates American fiction into Japanese. Her latest translations include Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King and Gozo Yoshimasu’s Alice Iris Red Horse. Yoshida will serve as one of the guest editors for Cha's "Writing Japan" Issue (June 2017) [Fiction] [Cha profile]

Born in 1978 in Khúc Lũy village of Quang Nam province, Lý Đợi currently lives with his wife and two daughters in Saigon, Vietnam. He holds a bachelor degree in literature and journalism (2001) and has published five poetry collections. In June 2005, he performed his poetry at the Goethe Institute in Hanoi with Bùi Chát and Khúc Duy but was met with resistance from the local authorities. In August 2007, he was the first artist from Vietnam to be invited to attend documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. In October 2007, he co-curated the exhibition We Each Put Forward a Proposal with Lê Quý Anh Hào in Saigon. Lý Đợi's poetry has been translated into English, French, Spanish, German, Romanian and Czech. In 2015, an English translation of a group of his poems entitled Poetics of Resistance by Kelly Morse and Nga L.H. Nguyen won the Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multi-Lingual Texts. In research, Lý Đợi has published three books on the subject of Saigon and completed two books on the Vietnamese art market (forthcoming). Active in the independent publishing scene, he is working at the Scrap Paper Publishing House  (of which Bùi Chát is the Editor in Chief), winner of the 2011 IPA Freedom to Publish Award. (Photo credit: Nguyen A) [A-Festival]

Marc Anthony is a writer in Taiwan where he teaches writing at National Taiwan University. When he is not writing manuals in sprung rhythms and editing scientific journal articles into mythopoetic narratives, he is writing short stories and poetry. He is honored to be a graduate of Vermont College in Montpellier, where he was mentored by Tom Absher, Ricky Gard Diamond and Margaret Blanchard. Prior to that, he spent several years in Paris exploring writing with his beloved writing coach, Kathleen Spivack, to whom he is eternally indebted. [Poetry]

Marie Yip Wai Shan is a Hong Kong-based photographer and a first-prize winner of South China Morning Post's Portraits of Women Competition (2011). She received an MA in English Studies from the University of Hong Kong and her photographic works have been published in Prairie Schooner. [Photography & Art] [Cha profile]

Maung Day, a Burmese poet, translator and artist, has published six books of poetry in Burmese, his mother tongue, and a chapbook in English. His poems have appeared in international magazines such as The Awl, The Wolf, Guernica, Shampoo, Bengal Lights and International Poetry Review. He has edited several Burmese literature and art magazines and is the translator of a number of books. He has also translated the works of Burmese poets such as Aung Cheimt, Khin Aung Aye, Moe Way, Yoe Myay, Dlugalay, Mae Ywayy and Cho Pain Naung. Aside from literature and poetry, he has also been active in the arts scene in Yangon, where he co-founded Beyond Pressure International Performance Art Festival. His artworks have been showcased in Poland, Germany, China, Hong Kong, Australia and Thailand. A book of his poems in Thai translation is forthcoming in February 2017. [A-Festival]

Monica Macansantos was born and raised in the Philippines, and earned her MFA in Fiction and Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Her creative non-fiction was recently recognised as Notable in The Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen, and her fiction recently made the Top 25 in Glimmer Train's Fiction Open. Her work has appeared in Day One, The Masters Review, Thin Noon, Longform Fiction, and TAYO, among other places, and her work has been recognised with residencies from Hedgebrook and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Visit her website for more information. [Poetry]

Nhã Thuyên writes, translates, edits books and sometimes organises literary events with friends. She has authored several books of poetry, short fiction and some tiny books for children. With Kaitlin Rees, she co-edits Ajar Press, a bilingual literary and art journal-press, an online and printed space for poetic exchange and together they co-organised A-Festival, the inaugural mini poetry festival in Hanoi in August 2016. Her most recent poetry book words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (từ thở, những người lạ) was published in Vietnamese (Nha Nam Press) and in English translation by Kaitlin Rees (Vagabond Press). (Portrait credit: Đinh Trường Chinh) [A-Festival 1 | 2] [Cha profile]

Pey Pey Oh is Malaysian, and a Third Culture person who now lives in the UK. She is in her last year of the MPhil in Creative Writing at University of South Wales and is published in various anthologies and magazines like Cha, Magma, Readings, and Domestic Cherry. She loves to wander around by herself as a streetphotographer, capturing a moment in visuals instead of words. She also blends potions when she is serene. [Poetry]

Quyen Nguyen studies literature and art history at Stanford University. Besides research and translation, she occasionally makes poems. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it +1 (650) 714-3616 die luft der freiheit weht [A-Festival]

Rakhshan Rizwan was born in Lahore, Pakistan and moved to Germany where she studied Literature and New Media. She is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her poems have appeared in Blue Lyra Review, Bird's Thumb, aaduna, The Missing Slate, Postcolonial Text and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Judith Khan Memorial Poetry Prize (2015). Her poetry pamphlet is forthcoming from The Emma Press in July 2017. [Poetry]

Regine Cabato works as a multi-platform journalist in Manila. She graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2016 with a degree in Communication and a minor in Creative Writing. Her poetry has been published in Kritika Kultura, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Cha. She hails from Zamboanga City. [Poetry]

Steph Carter is originally from Newcastle upon Tyne but has lived in Hong Kong for four years. A relative newcomer at the Peel Street Poetry group, they have since welcomed her like a family and encouraged her love of spoken word poetry. Her confessional style of poetry asks questions about identity, sexuality and mental health; her poems are often controversial, sometimes humorous and always heartfelt. When she isn’t writing, Carter is a primary school teacher and enjoys spending time with children because 'they aren’t adults yet'. [Peel Street Poetry]

Stephanie Han's Swimming in Hong Kong was the finalist for the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction as well as the Spokane Prize. She is City University of Hong Kong's first English literature PhD. She divides her time between Mui Wo, Lantau, Hong Kong and Honolulu, Hawaii, home of her family since 1904. Swimming in Hong Kong is available at www.willowspringsbooks.org for domestic US readers; worldwide through University of Washington Press, February 2017. Contact stephaniehan.com for more information and Hong Kong special delivery. [Excerpt]

Tegan Smyth has spent equal parts of her life in Hong Kong and Australia, where she was born. She is an aspiring writer and regular at Peel Street Poetry, writing about language, culture and identity politics, drawing from her experiences as a mixed-race woman. When not writing, she goes to her day job, organises community events (HK Community Connect) and watches way too much YouTube. [Peel Street Poetry]

Thanh Phùng is enamored with Jacques Rancière. As a lover of equality, she is conducting educational experiments on creativity, contemporary art, literature, and feminism. [A-Festival]

Vishal Nanda has dabbled in many professions over the years. He has won a Pacific Coffee gift card for his slam poetry, on the subjects of ocean and fatherhood, which he keeps unspent next to several other trinkets he has accumulated over the years. The poems themselves have been misplaced, as they were written on a scrap of paper at a bar. He has a BA in English and Related Literature and has spent a great deal of time writing poetry, song lyrics, jokes, speeches, bios, scripts, screen plays, plays, short stories, novels and the like, as he cannot quite help himself. Nanda can be found nervously performing spoken word most Wednesdays with the other Peel Street Poetry poets. You would like him, probably. [Peel Street Poetry]

William Phuan is the Managing Director and co-founder of The Select Centre, a Singapore-based arts non-for-profit organisation that aims to advance translation and intercultural communication. He was formerly the director of The Arts House at the Old Parliament, a multidisciplinary arts and cultural centre with a focus on literary arts. He was the Programme Director of the New York Asian American International Film for seven years. Phuan has close to 20 years of experience working in various sectors, including journalism, government policy, film curation, and the non-for-profit arts sector in both the US and Singapore. [A-Festival]