A Vietnamese-American born and raised in the American Midwest, Jenna Le earned her B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University before obtaining her M.D. degree at Columbia University. She lives and works as a physician in New York. Le's full-length collection of poems, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), was a Small Press Distribution Bestseller. Her poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous periodicals including AGNI, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Massachusetts Review, The Normal School, and The Village Voice. Le has been a Minnetonka Review Editor's Prize winner, a two-time Pharos Poetry Competition winner, a William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition finalist, a Michael E. DeBakey Poetry Award finalist, a Pamet River Prize semifinalist, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She helped select the poetry in the June 2015 issue of Cha. [Cha profile]

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]

Ankur Agarwal is from India. He has been published before in, among others, Paper Wall, Barnwood Poetry Magazine, Cha, Mascara Literary Review, Other Poetry, and Halfway Down the Stairs. He works as a freelance editor for STM and humanities books, and loves travelling, playing card games (particularly schafkopf, polignac) and board games. He also reviews cinema, mostly European and Indian, at Great Movie Reviews. [Reviews] [Cha profile]

Ankush Banerjee is a mental health professional based in Kochi, Kerala. His first collection of poetry, As Essence of Eternity (Sahitya Akademi, Delhi) is scheduled to be published later this year. He blogs here. [Poetry]

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]

B.B.P. Hosmillo is a Southeast Asianist queer poet. Guest poetry editor at Cha, his poetry has appeared in places like Far Enough East, The Missing Slate, Alice Blue Review, and is forthcoming in Crab Fat Literary Magazine, Jujubes: Poets/Artists Supplemental Poetry Edition, Toe Good Poetry, and many others. He is the author of The Essential Ruin (forthcoming). Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it [Poetry] [Cha profile]

Cesar Ruiz Aquino was born during the extremely uncertain time that was World War II in which he lost his father, a captain and peacetime judge of Iligan, Lanao. He grew up in Zamboanga and has a PhD in Literature from Silliman University. He writes both poetry and prose for which he has won virtually all the national awards in the Philippines and one international – the Southeast Asian Writers Award from the royal family of Thailand in 2004. Taking off from Santayana, he has written of himself thus: 'He has no wife, and Michelle is their adoptive daughter.' [Poetry]

Christopher Siemer is a New York City photographer, interested in the interplay between art and our mediated perceptions of the world. His pieces in Issue 28 of Cha attempt to capture the Zen aesthetic of spontaneous engagement with nature—not as we see it but as we exist absolute with it. Contant: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it [Photography]

Clara Changxin Fang was born in Shanghai, China and immigrated to the United States when she was nine years old. She holds an MFA from University of Utah and a Master of Environmental Management from Yale University. Her poems have been published in Poet Lore, Nimrod, Borderlands, Crab Creek Review, among others. She currently lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and writes a blog at Residenceo On Earth. [Poetry]

Collier Nogues is the author of The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground, which was selected by Forrest Gander as the winner of the 2014 Drunken Boat Book Contest, and On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way, 2011). Her writing has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Fishtrap. She teaches creative writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and curates Hong Kong's English-language poetry craft talk series, Ragged Claws. She also co-edits poetry for the U.S. literary journal Juked. [Reviews]

Daryl Wei Jie Lim is first and foremost a Singaporean. He read history at the University of Oxford, and has a Master's in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge. His work has appeared in Ceriph, QLRS and Wallflowers. He is particularly interested in the literary uses of history. [Fiction]

Dwight Watson is a Professor of Theater and the LaFollette Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Wabash College, Indiana, United States. As the former Chair of the Department of Theater and Chair of the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, he has directed over sixty theater productions, and his creative and academic writing appears in several books and journals. The recipient of the 2015 McClain-McTurnan-Arnold Excellence in Teaching Award, he offers courses in dramatic literature, playwriting, and performance. His teaching experience also includes appointments as a Professor and Academic Director for SIE International Summer School, Nanjing University. [Creative non-fiction]

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]

Hasanthika Sirisena's stories, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in J Journal, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, Narrative and other magazines. Her collection The Other One won the 2015 Juniper Prize for Fiction and will be released in 2016. Visit her website for more information. [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 1 | 2]

Jim Pascual Agustin writes and translates in Filipino and English. He grew up in the Philippines and moved to Cape Town, South Africa in 1994. His work has appeared in, among others, Rhino Poetry, Burnt Bridge, GUD Magazine, and Modern Poetry in Translation. His first short story collection in Filipino, Sanga sa Basang Lupa, and his seventh poetry collection, A Thousand Eyes, will be released in Manila in 2015. His ramblings can be found at Matangmanok. [Poetry]

Jimmy Pappas received an MA in English Literature from Rivier University. After serving in Saigon, South Vietnam, with the Palace Dog programme teaching English to South Vietnamese soldiers, he taught high school English, poetry, and philosophy for many years. Since his retirement, he has facilitated writing workshops for adults and young poets and has focused on putting together at least four collections of his poetry for publication. Pappas's poems have been published in such journals as Atticus Review, Red River Review, Kentucky Review, Poppy Road Review, The Poets' Touchstone, and War, Literature and the Arts. He is a recent first prize winner of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire's National Contest. [Poetry]

Joshua Burns is a homebody poet. He lives not the life of the mind but the life of the line. With Chinatown TV in his basic cable package and Eastern art books at the library (not to mention anime DVD's), there is enough "local" stuff to keep him grounded. The Intanet, of course, and online literary journals like Cha (Google bless 'em) give him a voice he might otherwise not have. Most of his published work is a binding, an image from the East is the presence he makes perfect. [Poetry]

Kelly Cressio-Moeller's poetry has new work forthcoming in burntdistrict, Gargoyle, Iodine Poetry, Spillway, and THRUSH. Previously her work can be seen at Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She lives in Northern California. Visit her website for more information. [Poetry]

[Photography]

Lucía Damacela's poetry and short fiction have recently appeared in various online and print publications such as RiverLit, Poetry Quarterly, and Three Line Poetry. Her short story "The Grapes" was included in Rojak, the Singapore Writers Group's first book, in 2014; an ultra-short is forthcoming in The Binnacle. Born in Ecuador, Damacela moved from London to Singapore in 2013. She writes for local magazines, blogs at Notes from Here and There, and tweets as @lucyda. [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. The images that appear in Issue 28 of Cha were inspired by her time at home raising her son. [Photography & Art] [Cha profile]

Michael O'Sullivan is from Ireland and he teaches literature in Hong Kong. He writes short stories, poems and essays and he has published a book on James Joyce and Marcel Proust and a book on Michel Henry. His essays appear in such journals as Mosaic and Parallax. His most recent book is Weakness: A Literary and Philosophical History. Along with Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, Kate Rogers and Michael Tsang, he co-edited the "Whither Hong Kong?" section in the September 2014 issue of Chal. (Photo credit: Dan Short) [Reviews] [Cha profile]

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. Tsang is a Staff Reviewer for Cha and along with Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, Kate Rogers and Michael O'Sullivan, he co-edited the "Whither Hong Kong?" section in the September 2014 issue of the journal. Visit his Warwick profile for more. [Reviews 1 | 2 | 3] [Cha profile]

Mike Frick lives in Brooklyn, New York where he works in global health advocacy. For several years, he lived in Yunnan Province, China and worked with Chinese grassroots organizations on a number of public health initiatives related to HIV, tuberculosis and tobacco control. His writing on China has appeared in Danwei and The China Beat, and he is working on a series of poems about finding Mao mixed with new religion in China's countryside. [Poetry]

Nick Admussen is an Assistant Professor of Chinese literature and culture at Cornell University. He has translated the work of Ya Shi, Zang Di, Genzi, and Liu Xiaobo; his original poetry has appeared in magazines like Fence, Blackbird, and Sou'wester. He blogs on Chinese poetry in American life for the Boston Review; his first book, on contemporary Chinese prose poetry, will be published with the Hawaii University Press. [Poetry]

Patricia Lim is a freelance writer based in Manila. She left her advertising job to travel, photograph, and write full-time, collecting stories of people and places from around the Philippines. Along the way, she stumbled upon her one true love - writing fiction. She now spends most of her time making things up, and dreams of someday coming out with a children's book, an anthology of short stories, and a novel. [100-word Stories]

Phillip Donnelly has written three novels and produced travel writing on India, China, Vietnam and the Lebanon. Letters from the Ministry, an Orwellian satire on office life, and Kev the Vampire, a quixotic farce, have recently been published by Rebel ePublishers. About two dozen pieces of writing have appeared online, mainly travel writing and short stories; and one of them, "The Interactive Classroom", won a Bewildering Stories Mariner Award in 2010. He has worked in thirteen countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia and he is currently based in Seoul. Visit his website for more information. [Fiction]

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 and published articles in travel magazines and on websites. 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 so. And this is why she’s in love with both. [Poetry]

Sabrina Merolla is a freelance photographer, sinologist and multimedia storyteller, who has long been living between China and Italy. Her projects have mainly focused on contemporary China and its multifaceted identities and displacements and on contemporary social issues. She attended the University of Bolton (UK) and did an MA in International Multimedia Journalism at Beijing Foreign Student’s University. Her photographs have been exhibited at, among other locations, the Palace of the Arts of Naples (Italy: 2010 and 2012), the Italian Consulate of Guangzhou (2010), Yin Photo Gallery (798 Art District, Beijing: 2012) and the Pingyao International Photography Festival (China; 2012). In 2012, she was one of Creative Commons' Focus on China prize winners. In 2014, she earned third place for her photo essay and two honorable mentions for photojournalism at the Mobile Photo Awards (MPA). Visit her website for more information. [Photography]

Sharmini Aphrodite is a recent graduate from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts with a diploma in Performing Arts Mangement. In the future, she would like to pursue a career in literature, quite possibly teaching it, which would no doubt be of a shock to her old secondary school teachers, she is sure. She is currently living in Singapore and turned 20 in April. [Fiction]

Ya Shi is the author of four collections of poetry and one of prose, including the celebrated collection The Qingcheng Poems and most recently, a special issue of the alternative magazine Blade devoted to his work. He is a winner of the Liu Li'an prize, and has served as the editor of several influential unofficial poetry journals. His work has appeared in English in Poetry International, New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, and is forthcoming in the New England Review. A graduate of Beijing University, he currently teaches mathematics at a university near the city of Chengdu. [Poetry]