Dorothy Chan helped select the poetry in the September 2016 issue of Cha. The Assistant Editor of The Southeast Review, she was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and a 2016 semi-finalist for The Word Works' Washington Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Spillway, Plume, Little Patuxent Review, Dialogist, and Hinchas de Poesia. In 2012, she was nominated for a Pushcart. [Cha profile]

 

 

Reid Mitchell helped select the prose in the September 2016 issue of Cha. Originally from New Orleans, he is a historian, poet and novelist. He has previously taught in New Orleans, Princeton, Berkeley and Budapest. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he has spent much of his time in Hong Kong and China, and has taught at Jiangnan University in Wuxi, Huaqiao University in Quanzhou, Qinghua University in Beijing, and the Center for Creative Writing at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou. Mitchell is the Consulting Editor of Cha and until recently, he was the poetry editor of the Asia Literary Review. He is currently working in Qingdao, China. [Cha profile]

Ricardo M. de Ungria was one of the two judges (with Tammy Ho Lai-Ming) of the "Addiction" Poetry Contest. He has published eight books of poetry and edited a number of anthologies, for which he has won eight National Book Awards. As a Fulbrighter, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, MO. Recently he was writing fellow at the Hong Kong Baptist University and the Sun yat-Sen University in Guangzhou. He is a founding member of the Philippine Literary Arts Council, which published the first and only poetry journal in the Philippines in the eighties, and the Davao Writers Guild that holds annual readings in the schools and malls in the city and publishes a literary journal called Dagmay in a local paper that features literary works in various languages by young writers in the Davao region and in Mindanao. [Addiction] [Cha profile]

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, founding co-editor of Cha, was the editor of the "Umbrella Movement" section in the September 2016 issue of the journal and one of the two judges (with Ricardo M. de Ungria) of the "Addiction" Poetry Contest. She is currently an assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, where she teaches fiction, poetics and modern drama. Earlier this year, she received the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Her first collection of poetry is Hula Hooping. [Editorial] [Interview] [Umbrella Movement] [Addiction] [Cha profile]

Aaron Anfinson is a photographer and a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong. His research is concerned with the greater realignments brought about by the advent of late modernity and the role of language in the construction of State sovereignty and social inequality. Visit his website to see his ongoing work. [Umbrella Movement]

Ankush Banerjee is a mental health professional and Ethics and Organisational Behaviour instructor working with the Navy, based in Kerala. His poetry collection, An Essence of Eternity (Sahitya Akademi) is scheduled to be published later this year. He is the recipient of the 2014 USI Gold Medal for his essay on Military Ethics. His work has appeared in Muse India, Eclectica, Cha and Linden Avenue Literary Journal. He also serves as Wellness Therapist at the Bethzaitha Home for Orthopedically Challenged Girls at Kochi. Visit his website for more information. [Addiction]

Antony Huen is a PhD student at the University of York, researching contemporary poetry in relation to visual art. He is a recurring contributor to Cha. Recently he wrote a found poem as part of a debate on Poetic Measures, and he is reviewing for the forthcoming issue of Eborakon. [Poetry]

Atar Hadari’s Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik (Syracuse University Press) was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award and his own collection, Rembrandt’s Bible, was published by Indigo Dreams. Lives of the Dead: Poems of Hanoch Levin was recently awarded a Pen Translates 2016 grant and is forthcoming from Arc Publications. Hadari also trained as an actor at the University of East Anglia before winning a scholarship to study playwrighting with Derek Walcott at Boston University. His plays have won awards from the BBC, Arts Council of England, National Foundation of Jewish Culture (New York), European Association of Jewish Culture (Brussels) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was Young Writer in Residence. Plays have been staged at the Finborough Theatre, Wimbledon Studio Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles) and both the Nat Horne Studio Theatre and Up Theatre in Manhattan. [Addiction]

B.B.P. Hosmillo is the author of The Essential Ruin (forthcoming) and Breed Me: a sentence without a subject (AJAR Press, 2016) translated into Vietnamese by Hanoi-based poets Nha Thuyen & Kaitlin Rees. His poetry is anthologised in Bettering American Poetry (BlazeVOX, 2016) and has recently appeared or forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Blueshift Journal, BOAAT Journal, Transnational Literature, minor literature[s], and other publications. He is the founding editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Literary Journal of Transgressive Art. Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it [Poetry] [Cha profile]

Brad Weslake was born in Australia and is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at NYU Shanghai. [Photography 1 | 2 | 3 | 4]

Craig Fishbane is the author of On the Proper Role of Desire (Big Table Publishing). His work has also appeared in the New York Quarterly, Gravel, Bartleby Snopes, Drunken Boat and The Nervous Breakdown, as well as the Flash Fiction Funny anthology. Visit his website for more information. [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]

Born in Singapore, Eddie Tay is a long time resident of Hong Kong. He is an associate professor at the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses on street photography, creative writing and poetry. He is also the reviews editor of Cha. Tay has published four collections of poetry, the latest is Dreaming Cities. You can find out more about his street photography on the website Hong Kong Lucida. [Umbrella Movement] [Cha profile]

Gerald Dicen hails from the town of Sibulan but spent most of his academic life in Dumaguete City. He finished his BS in physics in Silliman University and is currently pursuing his graduate studies in environmental science in Ateneo de Manila University. While he had worked as an online freelance writer, “Re-apparition” is his first published poem. [Addiction]

Henry Wei Leung is the author of a chapbook, Paradise Hunger, which won the 2012 Swan Scythe Press Poetry Prize. He earned his degrees from Stanford and the Helen Zell Writers' Program, and has been awarded Kundiman, Soros, and Fulbright Fellowships. He finished a year of research on the literatures and protests in Hong Kong, and is continuing this research at the University of Hawaii at Manoa toward the completion of a PhD. He is currently the Managing Editor of the Hawai'i Review. [Poetry] [Umbrella Movement 1 | 2 | 3 | 4]

Holden Liang is a full-time spiritual vagabond, constantly drifting through real and imaginary time and space. Always on the lookout for new ways to connect and become, he consumes various forms of art with gusto. His latest incarnation is as a PhD candidate researching temporality and children in literature. He is known for his proclivity for juvenile humour and angst. Do not feed wild Holdens. [Photography]

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 AH White is an emerging Japanese-American writer. He is the author of the chapbook hiku [pull] (Porkbelly Press, June 2016) and the winner of a 2014 AWP Intro Journals Project award in Poetry. His writing appears in Colorado Review, Passages North, Tahoma Literary Review, Hermeneutic Chaos, DIAGRAM, and other journals. A native of Surrey, England, he currently writes and teaches in South Florida. A native of Surrey, England, he currently writes and teaches in South Florida. You may follow him on Twitter at @jamesahwhite. [Poetry]

 

Jason S Polley 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 is an associate professor teaching at Hong Kong Baptist University and his areas of interest include poststructuralism and postmodernism. [Umbrella Movement] [Cha profile]

Jeremy Tiang has translated more than ten books from Chinese, including novels by Zhang Yueran, Yeng Pway Ngon and Chan Ho-Kei, and been awarded a PEN/ Heim Grant, NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, and a People's Literature Award Mao-Tai Cup. He first worked with Un Sio San while resident at the Vermont Studio Center. Tiang also writes and translates plays, most recently A Dream of Red Pavilions (performed off-Broadway by Pan Asian Repertory Theater), and his short story collection It Never Rains on National Day (Epigram Books) was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. Visit his website for more information. [Poetry]

Kate Rogers's new poetry collection, Foreign Skin, debuted with Toronto's Aeolus House Press in 2015. In the summer of 2016, she was a featured reader for the Toronto poetry reading series, Hot Sauced Words; at the League of Canadian Poets new members reading, Toronto, and at the Kingston, Ontario, ArtFest. Rogers is also 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 The Guardian, Quixotica: Poems East of La Mancha, Eastlit, Asia Literary Review, Cha, Morel, The Goose: a Journal of Arts, Environment and Culture, Kyoto Journal, ASIATIC: the Journal of the Islamic University of Malaysia, Orbis International and Contemporary Verse II. [Umbrella Movement] [Reviews] [Cha profile]

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. [Reviews 1 | 2]

Lian-Hee Wee is a phonologist-by-coincidence whose childhood aspirations to be knowledgeable and reasonable continue to gnaw at his daily efforts to cope with how he has not learnt music enough, not created art enough, not written words enough to overcome his urgent fears of meaningful existence. His latest solace is in the publication of “Tone Assignment in Hong Kong English” in the journal Language (92.2, June 2016). His current set of role models include: Noam Chomsky, Will Leben, K.P. Mohanan, Tara Mohanan, Diana Archangeli, Jason S Polley, Tammy Ho, Ong Chang Woei, and Dean Tio; they enable Wee to see his inadequacies. [Umbrella Movement]

Lo Mei Wa (Wawa) is a poet from Hong Kong. Some of her work can be found in Cha, Guernica Daily, The Margins, and the anthology Quixotica: Poems East of La Mancha. They have also been featured in various art exhibits, and was recently broadcast on Radiophrenia Glasgow from September to November 2016. Her first book of poems, Pei Pei the Monkey King, of which "Flying Tree" is taken, is forthcoming from Tinfish Press. Visit her website for more information. [Poetry] [Umbrella Movement 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5]

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]

Graduated in Central Queensland University, Manson Wong received his BA in multi-media design. His journalistic photography is seen upon his return to Hong Kong across Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, propelled by a momentum in photo documentation. He founded United Social Press in 2013 and is one of the "Ten Photographers of Social Movements in Pre and Post 97". His works and reviews are seen in Voice of Photography. His work However The Stock Moves was selected by Simon Wheahley, ex-photographer from Magnum, as one of the ten finalists of "Photography of Hong Kong 2012". Visit his website for more information. [Umbrella Movement 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5]

Meg Eden’s work has been published in various magazines, including Rattle, Drunken Boat, Poet Lore, and Gargoyle. She teaches at the University of Maryland. She has four poetry chapbooks, and her novel Post-High School Reality Quest is forthcoming from California Coldblood, an imprint of Rare Bird Lit. Visit her website for more information.  [Addiction]

Michael O'Sullivan teaches English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He writes creatively on literature and education and also through poems and short stories. His recent book is Academic Barbarism, Universities and Inequality. [Umbrella Movement] [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 languages, literatures and cultures. Michael is a Staff Reviewer for Cha. Visit his Warwick profile for more. [Umbrella Movement] [Cha Profile]

Michelle Robin La is the author of Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands: A Boy from the Mekong Delta, the true story of her husband growing up in the midst of the Vietnam War and his struggle for freedom after the Communist takeover. “Unconditional Surrender: April 30, 1975”, an excerpt from this book, was featured in The Missing Slate. Her work has appeared in Brain, Child Magazine, Cha, Creative Nonfiction, Literary Mama, and Mom Egg Review. La and her husband have three children and live in Santa Barbara, CA. She blogs about her culturally-blended life at michellerobinla.com. [Addiction]

Nadeem Zaman was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At fifteen he moved with his family to Chicago. He studied at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently writing his doctoral dissertation in Fiction and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Louisville, which includes a novel set during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. His work has appeared in Roanoke Review, The Milo Review, East Bay Review, The Copperfield Review, Eastlit, I-70 Review, 94 Creations, Open Road Review and Salon.com. [Fiction]

Paul Christiansen was born and raised in Wisconsin. He received his MFA from Florida International University and recently served as a Fulbright Fellow in Vietnam. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, Pleiades, Quarter After Eight, Zone 3 and elsewhere. Visit his website for more information. [Poetry]

Paul French is the author of the New York Times best seller Midnight in Peking (Penguin), currently being developed as a series for TV. His new book City of Devils will be published in 2017 and is centred on the dancehalls, casinos and cabarets of wartime Shanghai. Visit French's website and Twitter for more information. [Creative non-fiction]

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Peter Chen learned that Chinatown was a place where the fruit looked spotty but tasted sweet. That agricultural impression planted a seed that later grew to become the story he is thrilled to contribute to Cha. He now lives in Orange County, California, with his wife and two children. He was a participant in the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, and has previously published in Hospital Drive (University of Virginia). [Fiction]

Saudha Kasim is a writer living in Bengaluru, India where she works as a corporate communications professional. However, writing fiction is her true passion. Her short stories have been published in Pratilipi, Out of Print and Eclectica. Her story, "The Summer of the Cat", won the Elle India Fiction Prize in 2013. She is currently working on a novel set in Bengaluru. [Fiction]

Sithuraj Ponraj has been writing poetry in Tamil and English since his school days. His Tamil poems have appeared regularly in Singapore’s Tamil Murasu and various Indian magazines and literary journals. He has read his Tamil poems in radio programmes organised by Singapore’s Tamil radio station, then-named Olikkalanjiyam FM 96.8. His Tamil poems and short stories were published in two collections, Kaatraai Kadanthai and Maariligal, in 2015. Both books were shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize in the Tamil fiction and poetry categories respectively. Ponraj’s Tamil short novel Bernouilli’s Ghosts is forthcoming, while his short novel Kauntilya’s Square, a thriller for young adults in Tamil is in preparation and will be published later this year. The English translations of his works are expected to appear later this year as well. At present, Ponraj is working on translating a selection of Latin American Spanish poetry to Tamil. He is also currently completing a work in English on the subject of “The Body in Women’s Poetry in Tamil” [Addiction]

Stephanie Leung is an undergraduate student majoring in English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she has benefited from the bilingualism of the city and developed interest in both Chinese and English literature. While classical Chinese poetry is still her most confident way of expression, she also experiments with other forms such as free verse, prose and fiction, as well as writing in English. During her free time, she enjoys music, jogging and hiking. [Umbrella Movement]

Suneetha Balakrishnan is a bilingual writer, translator, journalist and editor who works in Malayalam and English. She lives in Trivandrum, South India. [Reviews]

Timothy O'Leary has lived in Hong Kong since 2001, having previously lived in Australia, France, and Ireland. He is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the School of Humanities at HKU, where he is also an elected member of HKU Council. He has written extensively on the work of Michel Foucault, especially in relation to ethics, aesthetics, and the powers of fiction. He co-founded the group HKU Vigilance and is also a founding member (and Secretary) of the newly-formed PEN Hong Kong. If forced to choose between reading a philosophy paper or a poem, he will invariably choose the latter. [Umbrella Movement]

Un Sio San was born in Macau, and studied at Peking University and Toronto University, where she gained her MA. Her awards include the inaugural New Star People's Literature Prize for Poetry, America's Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship for Chinese Poetry, and the Haizi Poetry Prize, and she was recently a poet-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center. She has written columns for newspapers in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Un's poetry collections include Exile in the Blossom Time, Wonderland, Here, Nude Picnic, Song of Migrants and Bitter Lotus Seeds. [Poetry]

William (Billy) Noseworthy is a Lecturer in the Department of Religious and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh & a PhD candidate in the Department of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He 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 traveled for work, intellectual interests and pleasure to Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Bali (Indonesia), Egypt, Singapore, Hong Kong, England, the Netherlands and France. In another life he was an English teacher in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam & Brooklyn, NY. He also spent a good amount of time in between, hitchhiking, playing guitar in coffee shops for bus money, and 'riding greyhounds' (2006-2009). Noseworthy has taught courses on History of the Vietnam Wars, Perceptions of China, Religions in a Global Perspective, and 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 1 | 2]

A native of Canada, where he majored in Theatre, Zach MacDonald has taught English in Japan and South Korea. He loves learning through travel and crafting stories born out of the people and places he encounters. He is putting the finishing touches on a collection of East and Southeast Asia-based short fiction, and plugging away at a novel set in his home province of Nova Scotia. His yet-to-be-published apocalyptic novel, Itsuki, undergoes a perpetual barrage of revisions and tweaks. He currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand. [Fiction]