Sam Byfield helped select the poetry. See his Cha profile.

E.K. Entrada helped select the prose. See her Cha profile.

Nick Admussen is a Ph.D. candidate in modern Chinese literature at Princeton University, currently researching contemporary Chinese prose poetry. His own poetry has appeared in Boston Review and Kenyon Review Online, and his first chapbook, Movie Plots, is forthcoming as an Epiphany Editions Book Kit. [Read]

Martin Alexander is a prize-winning writer whose poetry, short stories and travel writing have been widely published. He is Poetry Editor of the Asia Literary Review, a member of the HK Writers' Circle and an organiser of Hong Kong's poetry group, OutLoud. In March 2004 he published a collection of his poems, Clearing Ground (Chameleon Press), and in 1999 he won the South China Morning Post Short Story Competition. In 2009 he was awarded the Orient-Occident International Grand Prix for Poetry and was a finalist in the Bradt / Independent on Sunday Travel Writing Competition. He has been a featured writer at festivals in Hong Kong, China, Egypt, Singapore and Romania. [Read]

Desh Balasubramaniam was born in Sri Lanka and raised in both the war torn Northern & Eastern provinces. At the age of thirteen, he fled to New Zealand with his family on humanitarian asylum. He has spent considerable lengths of time travelling on shoestring budgets through a number of countries often travelling by hitchhiking and working various jobs. He is the founding director of Ondru–rising movement of Arts & Literature. His work has appeared in Overland, Going Down Swinging, the Lumière Reader, Mascara Literary Review, Blackmail Press, QLRS and various other publications. [Read]

James Bent is a British born, Singapore based Learning and Design Consultant who recently started the blog Outré Singapore. The blog, which he runs in his lunchtimes, after work and in the weekends, focuses on bringing together a collection of Singapore street portraits. No doubt, The Sartorialist by Scott Schuman is the greatest influence on this—it started out as a writing project for which Bent used The Sartorialist's photos as character studies, but now all he wants to do is take great photographs of people from the street, showing their style on any given day. Outré Singapore is starting to build a solid name for itself having been featured on Vogue France's website, Glamour Paris' website and with interest growing from local and regional magazines. [View]

Keith Brabender has a Bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati and a Masters degree in English from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He works as an English instructor (off and on) and a real estate title examiner. He currently lives with his wife and son in Indiana. His most recent publication was in The Pedestal Magazine. [Read]

Nabina Das lives two lives, shuttling between USA and India. Her first novel Footprints in the Bajra is available from Cedar Books, India, while her poetry and short stories have been published in a variety of literary journals and anthologies in North America, India and Australia. Selected as an Associate Fellow for the prestigious Sarai-CSDS Fellowship 2010 (New Delhi India), Das has won prizes in the poetry contests organized by Prakriti Foundation (Chennai, India) in 2009, and by HarperCollins-India and Open Space in 2008 (India). Das is also a 2007 Joan Jakobson fiction scholar from Wesleyan Writers' Conference, and a 2007 Julio Lobo fiction scholar from Lesley Writers' Conference. A journalist and media person in India and the US for about 10 years in all, Das blogs at http://fleuve-souterrain.blogspot.com/ when not writing. Formally trained in Indian classical music, she has performed in radio and TV programs and acted in street theater productions in India. A bilingual with a Linguistics Masters, Das writes in three languages and is an editor with the literary journal Danse Macabre (USA). Currently she is working on her poetry manuscript tentatively titled Narrative Limits. [Read]

Isadora Filkoviæ is a Brazilian nomad who, at the age of 22, left a premature career in Advertising to pursue a simpler way of living on the other side of the Earth. She currently lives in Australia, working on a masters in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. As a photographer, she feels naturally drawn to nature, sunlight, playfulness and beautiful colours. 'Photography is based on the idea of capturing light from the environment and I like experimenting with that concept in my work. To photograph is to fill a blank space with light, darkness and all the shades of grey or colour in between; the rest is an exercise for the imagination. It is to turn the ephemeral into eternity and to simply fathom that is already extraordinary. Visit Filkovic's blog Fantastique Mémoires from the Outer Space and her Flickr. [View]

Gwen Florio's fiction has appeared in Delmarva Review, Sotto Voce, Philadelphia Stories and Confrontation. As a journalist, she reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, an experience that led to her recently completed novel, Crossing to Kabul. Her story, "Crossing Over", published in Issue #11 of Cha, is adapted from a chapter. She lives in Missoula, Montana. [Read]

Jim Fuess works with liquid acrylic paint on canvas. Most of his paintings are abstract, but there are recognizable forms and faces in a number of the paintings. He is striving for grace and fluidity, movement and balance. He likes color and believes that beauty can be an artistic goal. There is whimsy, fear, energy, movement, fun and dread in his paintings. A lot of his paintings are anthropomorphic. The shapes seem familiar. The faces are real. The gestures and movements are recognizable. More of his paintings, both in color and black and white, may be seen at www.jimfuessart.com. [View]

Mary Gilmer was born in San Diego, California, but spent much of her early childhood in Japan. Her essays are influenced both by her experience growing up in a bicultural home, as well as by her mother’s experience in World War II. With a BS in Psychology and a keen interest in the field of addictions, some of her essays are recovery related and inspirational. Currently writing her compilation-of-essays book, she is a Feng Shui consultant, having studied under Kathleen McCandless. She volunteers locally in the recovery community, and visits Hospice with her Certified Pet Therapy dog. Presently, she resides in Florida with her husband. [Read]

Steven Hirst was born and educated in Yorkshire, England and has lived and worked in Chengdu, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, where he is currently based. After obtaining a degree in English from Wadham College, Oxford, he worked as assistant director to Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, at the Old Vic in London and the Royal Shakespeare Company in London and Stratford. He also worked in theatre in the UK as a freelance director on a variety of new and classic work. He has studied creative writing at Hong Kong University with Shirley Lim, Gish Jen and Xu Xi. More recently, he has been private language tutor to several internationally renowned Chinese film actors. His photography and writing has been published in Time Out Hong Kong and the Asia Literary Review. [View]

Peauladd Huy was born on April 10, 1967, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She was eight years old when the Khmer Rouge took over on April 17, 1975. In 1980, she immigrated to the USA with some of her mother's relatives and some of her siblings. Her work has appeared on bluebegoniapress.com, on khmerinstitute.org, and in the Nou Hach Literary Journal. She currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and her three daughters. Although she has never returned to Cambodia, she hopes to see it one day with them. [Read]

A Vancouver-based writer born in Scotland, Fiona Tinwei Lam is the author of two books of poetry, Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize) and most recently, Enter the Chrysanthemum. Her work has been published in literary magazines Canada-wide and in over a dozen anthologies. You can watch a video of "Chrysanthemum" and listen to some audio poems. Visit Lam's website for more information. [Read]

Born on the shores of the Great Lakes, Mark Malby spent his formative years messing about in the Canadian outdoors, reading National Geographic and snapping photos with an old Kodak instamatic. He bought his first backpack at age 18 and hasn't stopped travelling since. To date, He has lived and worked in such farflung locales as Toronto, London, Vancouver, Singapore, and Hong Kong - playing various roles along the way: tree-planter, shop-keeper, harbourmaster, high school science teacher, journalist, editor and university lecturer – whatever pays the rent. Recently he has slipped off the mantle of workaday life in order to pursue his passions of travel, writing and photography more fully. Visit Mute Planet to learn more. [View]

Donna Miscolta, a resident of Seattle, Washington, won the 2008 Bread Loaf/Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Fiction and has received writing awards locally from Artist Trust, 4 Culture, and Seattle City Artists. Her short fiction has aired on public radio, and appeared in Raven Chronicles, The Americas Review, Seattle Magazine, New Millennium Writings and Calyx, and is forthcoming in the Connecticut Review. She has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her story "A Month in the Tropics", published in Issue #11 of Cha, is the opening chapter of her as yet unpublished novel When the De La Cruz Family Dances. [Read]

O Thiam Chin's short stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Kyoto Journal, The Jakarta Post, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Karavan, Qarrtsiluni, as well as in several literary anthologies. He is the author of two short story collections, Free-Falling Man and Never Been Better (longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award 2010), and his new collection of flash fiction, Under The Sun, will be published in 2010. (Photo credit: Tommy Ng) [Read]

Originally from Long Island, New York, Rosanna Young Oh is a recent graduate of Yale College. This fall, she will begin attending the Writing Seminars in Poetry at the Johns Hopkins University. In addition to reading and writing, she enjoys playing flute in chamber groups, cooking, running, and collecting letterpress art. Among her inspirations are paintings, films, music, and Buddhism. [Read]

Arjun Rajendran is a technical writer based in St.Louis. His creative works have been published in Switched-on Gutenberg, The Pittsburgh Quarterly and Pratilipi. He has a passion for out-of-print literature and his favorite poets are Pablo Neruda and W.S.Merwin. He loves snow storms, black coffee and Victoria's Secret. Visit his blog for more detail. [Read]

Brenton Rossow is the lead singer of an experimental three piece called The Folding Chairs. His work has been published in Thieves Jargon, Parameter Magazine, Barrel House, Dogzplot, Decomp Mag, Jerseyworks, Flutter, Sein Un Werden, Zygote in My Coffee, Nefarious Ballerina, Unlikely 2.0, The New Writer, Weyfarers, Qwerty, and Indigo Journal among others. He is currently working on a novel about grasshoppers in Laos. He enjoys sherbet and herpetology. [Read]

Todd Swift is a Core Tutor with The Poetry School, and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University. Poems of his have appeared in The Guardian, Poetry London, and Poetry Review. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Seaway: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2008) and Mainstream Love Hotel (Tall-lighthouse, 2009). His blog is Eyewear. [Read]

Michael Tsang is a Hong Kong native and received his B.A. in English from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is now pursuing an MPhil degree in gender studies, working on novels by Murakami Haruki. His poetry and short story have been published in CU Writing in English Volume IX(2009). 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. [Read]

Alice Tsay is currently studying English literature at Oxford University. A native of California, she has taught English in Hong Kong and Taiwan and holds a degree in Music and English from Amherst College. She has also reviewed poetry and photography for Cha. [Read]

Maysa Vang is a 23-year old Hmong artist, poet and freelance writer. She was born and raised in the inner cities of Minnesota after her parents migrated to the United States. A recent college graduate, she enjoys traveling, making art and trying exotic foods with good friends. [Read]

Robert E. Wood teaches in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. His film studies include essays on Fosse, DePalma, and Verhoeven, as well as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He is the author of Some Necessary Questions of the Play, a study of Hamlet. His poetry has appeared recently in Blue Fifth Review, Jelly Bucket, Jabberwock Review, Sojourn, and Prairie Schooner. His chapbook, Gorizia Notebook, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2009. [Read]

Zhang Taozhou was born in 1971 in Hubei, received a doctorate in literature in 2000 from Nanjing University, and is currently an assistant professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing. He has published more than 60 essays and other works of criticism, including the book Modern Chinese Poetic Space: Research into Poetic Discourse with the Beijing University Press in 2005. [Read]