Jenna Le a daughter of Vietnamese refugees who lives and works as a physician and educator in New Hampshire. She is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), which was a Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller, and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016), which won Second Place in the 2017 Elgin Awards. Her poetry, fiction, essays, book criticism, translations, and visual art appear or are forthcoming in many publications including AGNI, Bellevue Literary Review, The Best of the Raintown Review, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Le helped select the poetry in Issue 37 of Cha. Visit her website for more information. [Cha profile]

Wawa is a Hong Kong poet. She received her degrees in Philosophy in Hong Kong and the Netherlands. She has been a soprano, a philosophical counselling assistant, and a cowherd. Some of her work can be found in Guernica Daily, The Margins, Hawai’i Review, Apogee Journal, and the anthology Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections on a Borrowed Place. Her collaborative work with artists has been featured in various art exhibits in Hong Kong and Glasgow. Wawa is the author of  Pei Pei the Monkey King (Tinfish Press, 2016), and Anna and Anna (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She has resided in Köln and Pengchau, and is currently farming with her husband on the island of Keawe. Lo helped select the fiction and creative non-fiction in Issue 37 of Cha. [Cha profile]

Originally from Hong Kong, Aaron Chan is currently reading for a PhD in Education at the University of Glasgow. Having taught English in a Hong Kong secondary school for three years, he has decided to turn a new page and return to academia. He is now working on a thesis about the conflicting discourses in and about institutional education as represented in children’s literature. His research interests include children's literature, education and pedagogy. Visit his blog for more information. [Reviews]

Adam Radford is a short story and poetry writer based in Hong Kong. He lives with poet Viki Holmes and two maine coons, Mia and Marlowe. His work can be found in the anthology Outloud Too and will also appear in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. His poem's "Old Shikumen Gate" was a finalist in Cha "The Past" contest and published in 2012. [Poetry]

Bill Vernon served in the United States Marine Corps, studied English literature, then taught it. Writing is his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folk dances. Five Star Mysteries published his novel Old Town, and his poems, stories and nonfiction have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Recent publications include stories in The Ekphrastic Review; Bull; Teach, Write; Under the Sun; Indiana Voice Journal; The Wild Musette Journal; and Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders Journal. He plays Uncle Sam in Dayton, Ohio's annual spring festival A World A'Fair. [Creative non-fiction]

Colin Webb is a native of Maryland, USA, and writes both poetry and fiction. His poetry has been published widely in magazines and journals throughout the United States, with latest and forthcoming publications that include Mad Swirl, Forage Poetry, and The Northridge Review, and his novella, Coping with Coincidence, was shortlisted for the 2015 Arch Street Prize. [Poetry]

Collier Nogues' poetry collections are The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground (Drunken Boat, 2015) and On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way, 2011). Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Lingnan University. She teaches creative writing in the Chinese University of Hong Kong's MA Program in Literary Studies, and is a PhD Fellow at the University of Hong Kong, where she studies contemporary poetry's response to US militarisation. She also co-edits poetry for Juked and curates Ragged Claws, Hong Kong’s English-medium poetry craft talk series. [Reviews]

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. [Reviews]

Hari Ravikumar is a writer, violinist, and designer based in Bangalore. At various points of time in his life, he has been a mechanical engineer, coder, content manager, teacher, copyeditor, product strategist, community/event manager, pedagogue, and writing facilitator. His interests include Eastern wisdom, Carnatic music, comics, education, and films. He has (co-)written nine books including The New Bhagavad-Gita. His articles and essays have appeared in Daily O, IndiaFacts, Prekshaa, Swarajya, and The Economic Times. His short stories have appeared in Bhavan's Journal, Indian Short Fiction, Open Road Review, Spark, The Criterion, The Four Quarters Magazine, and The New Indian Express. [Fiction]

Ian Heffernan was born in 1965 and grew up just outside London. He studied at University College London and SOAS, University of London. He has also lived in Hong Kong and China (Shijiazhuang). He visited the annual Tiananmen Square commemoration in Victoria Park in 2014 and 2017. [Poetry]

Jenny Wong is a Canadian writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. When she's not attempting to put her computer science degree to good use, she can be found tucked inside Greek monasteries, climbing volcanoes, or at home in her little beige house writing and spending time with her wise-cracking husband and their grumpy middle-aged dog. Her poetry and short stories have been published or will soon be published in The Quilliad, 3Elements Review, Peacock Journal, and Vallum. [Poetry]

Joshua Burns is reading Why Cats Paint, a book which should be fake. Like his poetry it seems an unaffordable curiosity. Do cats (and you and I, dear reader) really need more glitz? [Poetry]

Judith Huang is a Singaporean writer, translator and editor. Named a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2001, 2003 and 2004, her writing has been published in journals including Prairie Schooner, Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literarry Review Singapore, Cha, Loreli, Ceriph, LONTAR, Spittoon, Stylus, Clockwise Cat, Asymptote and the Harvard Advocate, as well as in anthologies such as In Transit, Journeys, Singpowrimo 2014, Ayam Curtain and Body Boundaries. She holds an A.B. from Harvard, where she belongs to the Signet Society of Arts and Letters. Her first collection of poetry is forthcoming from Ethos Books in 2018, her first novel The Utopia Machine has been longlisted for the Epigram Fiction Prize, and her online portfolio can be found here. [Poetry]

Katie Wong Nga Ki is an everywoman who attempts to send ripples through the pond of boredom via. the medium of art. As a graduate of English literature, she has been exposed to the beauty of words. Every art, regardless of its language, such as musical notes, body movement, or brushstrokes, tells stories. She is therefore always in search of new sensations to be an illustrator, calligrapher and arts spectator, in the hope of creating stories that will inspire the uninspired. [Art]

Kay Sexton has been a finalist for several writing awards including the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the Willesden Herald Fiction Contest and winner of both the Fort William Festival Contest and the Wollongong Literary Festival Short Story Contest. She also has had two non-fiction books and one novel published. [Reviews]

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]

Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is a poet and essayist from Cebu, Philippines. He recently received an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St Louis on a Fulbright Scholarship. His first book of poems, The Highest Hiding Place (2009) was given the Madrigal Gonzalez Best First Book Award. His work also straddles the borders between poetry and prose, text and image. He teaches writing at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. [Poetry]

Leah Oates has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Fulbright Fellow for study at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. She recently had a solo show at Susan Eley Fine Art, NYC and has had numerous solo shows at venues including The Central Park Arsenal Gallery, The Center for Book Arts, Real Art Ways, Tomasulo Gallery, Artemisia Gallery, Anchor Graphics, Woman Made Gallery, Sara Nightingale Gallery, The Brooklyn Public Library and Susan Eley Fine Art. Work by Oates was recently installed as part of the MTA Arts & Design Light Box series at 42nd Street at 6th Avenue in Bryant Park, NYC. She has been part of group shows in NYC at The Pen and Brush Gallery, Peer Gallery, 440 Gallery, Metaphor Contemporary Art, NYOC Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, Nurture Art, Momenta Art, Associated Gallery, Susan Eley Fine Art and Denise Bibro Fine Art. Works on paper by Oates are in numerous public collections including the Harvard University Libraries, The Brooklyn Museum Artists' Book Collection, The Walker Art Center Libraries, The Smithsonian Libraries and the Franklin Furnace Archive at MoMA, NYC. Visit her website for more information. [Photography]

Leath Tonino is the author of The Animal 1,000 Miles Long, a book of environmental nonfiction scheduled to come out in 2018. The poems included in Issue 37 of Cha are drawn from a project that responds to The Roaring Stream, an anthology of significant writings by Ch'an/Zen masters edited by Jack Shoemaker and Nelson Foster. Other poems from the project have appeared or are forthcoming in Tricycle and Kyoto Journal. [Poetry]

Lee Tse Mei is a Singaporean who loves music, traveling, and writing about people and places. Her poems and writings have been published online and in Japan, and she is currently working on a series of original music albums. [Creative non-fiction]

Matt Turner is a writer who lives in New York City. Writings of his can be found in Seedings, Asian Review of Books, Hyperallergic Weekend, and forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Bookforum. His translation of Lu Xun's 1927 book of prose poetry, Weeds, is forthcoming from Shanghai's Seaweed Salad Editions. [Reviews]

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. Tsang is a Staff Reviewer for Cha and a co-editor of Hong Kong Studies. Visit his Warwick profile for more information. [Reviews 1 | 2 | 3] [Cha profile]

Min Lim is an undergraduate from Yale-NUS College in Singapore. She is the winner of the National Poetry Competition 2016 and has been long-listed in the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor's International Poetry Prize 2017. Her works have appeared in SOFTBLOW, Breakwater Review, and Eunoia Review. Visit her website for more information. [Poetry]

Natalie Linh Bolderston studied English at the University of Liverpool, and now works as an Editorial Assistant in London. Her work has been featured in the poetry publication Smoke, and she was the recipient of the Felicia Hemans Prize for Lyrical Poetry in 2016, awarded by the Centre for New and International Writing. Follow her on Twitter for more information. [Poetry]

Ng Joon Kiat started painting in the late 1990s. He is one of the few Singaporean painters to have received a full national scholarship to study for his Master’s in the UK and also one of the few to have had a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore. He was one of the 25 Asian artists selected to exhibit with Britain’s Royal Academicians at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. His works were exhibited at biennales in Asia and major art fairs. Notable collections include the Aspen-re art collection, the Magma collection, the Singapore Embassy in Berlin and the National Art Gallery of Singapore. He has had solo exhibitions in Singapore and Hong Kong, and his works have been written about and curated by respected figures including Dr Charles Merewether and David Chan. The prominent Southeast Asian art historian T. K. Sabapathy has written about his works. Visit his website for more information. [Art]

Nidhi Arora was born and raised in India and currently lives in Singapore with her family. She is a business consultant by training and writer by passion. She writes short stories that explore meaning in the humdrum experiences that eventually stack up to shape our lives. She also writes essays and reviews. Her work has been published in Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, Thrice Fiction, Open Road Review, Mothers Always Write and a print anthology of fiction in Singapore published by the National Library Board. Visit her Facebook page for more information. [Fiction]

Paoi Hwang holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. She was a lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University from 2003-2010. Currently, she resides in Britain and teaches part-time at Durham University. Her academic papers, reviews and creative stories have appeared in Partial Answers, EurAmerica, Wenshan Review, Asiatic, and elsewhere. She was the Deputy Editor of National Taiwan University Press's East-West Cultural Encounters Series and she continues to serve on the advisory board of the journal Encounters. [Reviews]

Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. Among the anthologies and journals in which her poetry has appeared are The Widows' Handbook, Birdsong, Spillway, Peacock Journal, Surreal Poetics, Naugatuck River Review, New Verse News, Portside, and Star 82 Review. Social issues are a major focus of her work, and when she's not writing you might find her escorting at a local abortion clinic. A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, she has read her poetry on the radio, and in coffee shops and bars. She's exhibited in fiber artist/poet collaborations. Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it [Poetry]

Roland Buckingham-Hsiao is an artist and researcher based in the UK and Taiwan. His work investigates the boundaries of language—text/image, text/body and text/object relations—often via East-West cultural exchange. His creative practice is interdisciplinary but revolves around photography, calligraphy and poetry. He studied Art at Universities in Canterbury, Belfast and London, and Mandarin and Chinese calligraphy at University in Taichung, Taiwan. He has exhibited artworks at many museums and galleries around the world including Tate Britain in London and is currently engaged in practice-based doctoral research at the University of Sunderland, UK. Visit his website for more information. [Photography]

Sagnik Datta is from Siliguri, India. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Texas at Austin. He also has a degree in Engineering Physics, but he is not sure where he has kept it. His fiction has appeared in The Bombay Review, Flapperhouse, eFiction India and some other places. He currently lives inside a small room, where he is working on a novel. [Fiction]

See Wern Hao is pursuing Law and Liberal Arts at the National University of Singapore and Yale-NUS College. His works have been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Softblow, Forage Poetry and Apercus Quarterly. He has also contributed to anthologies such as SingPoWriMo 2015/6 and Rollercoasters & Bedsheets. [Poetry]

Shadab Zeest Hashmi, author of Kohl and Chalk and Baker of Tarifa, is the recipient of the San Diego Book Award, the Nazim Hikmet Prize, and multiple Pushcart nominations. Her work has been translated into Spanish and Urdu, and has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mudlark, The Cortland Review, Poetry International, Vallum, POEM, The Adirondack Review, Wasafiri, World Literature Today, and other journals worldwide. Ghazal Cosmopolitan, her book about the culture and craft of the Ghazal, is forthcoming later this year. Visit her website for more information. [Poetry]

Smita Sahay co-conceptualized and served as Associate Editor of Veils, Halos & Shackles—International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women (Kasva Press 2016). The anthology is currently being taught in literature and gender studies courses in New York. Her own writings have appeared in national and international journals and anthologies such as Muse India, Cha, the Pedestal Magazine, among others. She holds an MBA from the Indian School of Business and is the founder of AccioHealth, a social venture in India that works to shatter the stigma associated with mental health. She teaches Creative Writing at the Whistling Woods International Film School, and is currently working on her first book length collection of poetry. Visit her website for more information. [Reviews]

 

Ting J Yiu is a Hong Kong native, raised in New Zealand and currently based in Sweden. A graduate of English Literature and Human Geography from the University of Otago, her writing explores the relationship between place, time and identity. She draws inspiration from spatial boundaries—borders both artificial and natural. When not writing, she travels obsessively, seeking liminal spaces where in-between peoples and cultures defy definition. Her poetry and fiction have been published online and in Two Thirds North. She is pursuing an MA degree in Transnational Creative Writing at Stockholm University. [Creative non-fiction]

William (Billy) Noseworthy is a Lecturer 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 travelled for work, intellectual interests and pleasure to Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Bali (Indonesia), Egypt, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, England, the Netherlands and France. In another life he was an English teacher in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, and 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, History of the Afro-Atlantic, Asian-American History, History of China, Introduction to World Religions, Religions in a Global Perspective, Asian 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 Islam in Southeast Asia in Suwannabhumi: Multidisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. [Reviews]

William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections: Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014), Charles of the Desert (Paraclete Press, 2016), and Spring Up Everlasting (Paraclete Press, forthcoming). His fiction chapbook The Boy with Fire in His Mouth (2014) won the Epiphany Editions contest. His poems, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Image, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, AGNI, and other journals. He edits Speaking of Marvels, a gathering of interviews with poets and prose writers. [Poetry]

Wong Wen Pu enjoys the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the fiction of Virginia Woolf. [Reviews]

Yanyun Chen (b.1986, Singapore) works in charcoal. Her studio-based drawing practice is driven by questions and the craft of working in charcoal. Currently, she teaches drawing at Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore and at the School of Art Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. Her first exhibited series Chasing Flowers challenges the 'still-life' genre, by drawing portraits of flowers as they wilt. They are representations of time manifested in the changing conditions of decaying flowers, yet culminating in what appears to be unmoving still-life drawings. This led to explorations in the mythologies of flowers in her ongoing series Poppies. In the 2016 Horn Trio concert at the Esplanade, Chen presented her Experiments with Johannes Brahm's Horn Trio Movement 1 - 4 shown alongside the performance of Brahms' compositions. Her drawings have been exhibited in Singapore, notably at ChanHampe Galleries, Visual Arts Development Association Singapore, Jendela (Visual Art Space) and NoiseSingapore. Aside from drawing, she does research navigating minor gestures, with particular emphasis on themes surrounding blinking, and nudity. She is also the co-founder and managing partner of Singapore-based publishing house Delere Press LLP. She is a PhD candidate at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where she obtained her Masters in Communications. She received the Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal Award and the Nanyang Scholarship for her Bachelors in Fine Arts [Hons] 1st class from Nanyang Technological University (Singapore); and has been trained at the Florence Academy of Art (Sweden), The Animation Workshop (Denmark), and under puppet makers Miroslav Trejtnar and Zdar Sorm (Czech Republic). She has published books including 50 Drawing Exercises (co-written, published by Ministry of Education, Singapore), Tracing Etymology: Origin and Time; Monsters and Demons (published by Atropos) and It’s Fiction (co-written, published by Delere Press). Jimmyfish, an eco-awareness flash game built by her team, was awarded the Jury Selection in the 15th Japan Media Arts Festival, 2011. [Art]

Zilka Joseph was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Mantis, Review Americana, Quiddity, and in anthologies such as Cheers To Muses: Works by Asian American Women. Lands I Live In and What Dread, her chapbooks, were nominated for a PEN America award and a Pushcart respectively. Her new book Sharp Blue Search of Flame was published by Wayne State University Press and was a finalist for the Forward Indie Book Award. Joseph teaches creative writing workshops, and is an independent editor and manuscript coach. A review of her book was broadcast on Stateside, a programme on Michigan Public Radio and you can hear it here. Visit Joseph's website for more information. [Poetry]