Contributors / October 2018 (Issue 41: Writing Singapore)


Editors and Guest Editors
ImageTammy Ho Lai-Ming is a founding co-editor of Cha, an editor of the academic journals Hong Kong Studies and Victorian Network, and the English Editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. She has also edited or co-edited seven literary books and her literary translations have appeared in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, Drunken Boat, Pathlight, among other places, and by the Chinese University Press. Her first poetry collection is Hula Hooping, for which she won the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. She is an Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, where she teaches fiction, poetics, and modern drama. She also serves as the Vice President of PEN Hong Kong, a Junior Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities and an Advisor of the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. Her second poetry collection Too Too Too Too (Math Paper Press) and her first collection of short stories Her Name Upon the Strand (Delere Press) are forthcoming. She also has two single-authored academic books to be published by Palgrave and Springer. She is currently co-editing a poetry anthology promoting cross-cultural understanding between the West and Asia for Goldfish Press (USA). [Cha Profile]
 
ImageJoshua Ip is a poet, editor, and literary organiser. He has published four poetry collections with Math Paper Press, won the Singapore Literature Prize for his debut, sonnets from the singlish, and placed in three different categories of the Golden Point Award. He has edited seven anthologies, including the A Luxury We Cannot Afford and the SingPoWriMo series. He co-founded Sing Lit Station, an overactive literary charity that runs community initiatives including SingPoWriMo, Manuscript Bootcamp, poetry.sg and the world’s first wrestling/performance-poetry hybrid, Sing Lit Body Slam. He received the Young Artist Award from the National Arts Council (Singapore) in 2017. Ip is the guest poetry editor for the “Writing Singapore” issue of Cha. Visit his website for more information. Ip helped select the poetry in Issue 41—"Writing Signapore—of Cha. (Photo credit: Esquire Singapore) [Cha Profile]
 
ImageEddie Tay is a poet, street photographer and literature professor at the Department of English, Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses on reading and writing poetry, children’s literature, autoethnography, photography and social media. He is the author of four volumes of poetry. His first, remnants (2001), consists of renditions of mythic and colonial history of Malaya as well as an homage to the Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai, Du Fu and Li He. His second volume, A Lover’s Soliloquy (2005), extends his interests in Tang Dynasty poetry through renditions of the poetry of Li Shang-yin. The volume is also about the modern cities of Hong Kong and Singapore. His third, The Mental Life of Cities, is a winner of the 2012 Singapore Literature Prize. In it, he experiments with bilingual (English-Chinese) poetry. His most recent collection is Dreaming Cities (2016), featuring his street photography and poetry. He is the Reviews Editor of Cha and an editor of the first academic journal devoted to Hong Kong, Hong Kong Studies. Tay helped select the prose in Issue 41—"Writing Singapore" of Cha. [Cha Profile]
 
ImageOriginally from Canada, Jeff Zroback is a founding co-editor of Cha. He has an MA in History. He is an editor by trade and has previously worked in Canada, Korea, Hong Kong and the UK. He was the co-editor of the short fiction collection Love & Lust (with Tammy Ho Lai-Ming) and has published fiction and poetry. [Cha Profile]


 
Al Lim
ImageAl Lim is an Urban Studies major at Yale-NUS College. Part-Thai and part-Singaporean, he grew up in Sydney and South Carolina before returning to his home continent. His works have appeared in STAPLE Magazine, Harvard’s Tuesday Magazine, pressure gauge press, as well as anthologies like SingPoWriMo (Math Paper Press) and Twin Cities: An Anthology of Twin Cinema from Singapore and Hong Kong (Landmark Books). [Book Reviews]
 
Alfian Sa’at
ImageAlfian Sa’at is a Resident Playwright with W!ld Rice. His published works include three collections of poetry: One Fierce Hour, A History of Amnesia and The Invisible Manuscript; a collection of short stories, Corridor; a collection of flash fiction, Malay Sketches; two collections of plays as well as the published play Cooling Off Day In 2001, Sa’at won the Golden Point Award for Poetry as well as the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature. He has also been awarded the Life! Theatre Awards for Best Original Script four times. His works have been translated into German, Swedish, Danish and Japanese. [Poetry]
 
Alvin Ong
ImageAlvin Ong (b. 1988) synthesises histories, mythologies and folk-forms into surreal improvisations and non-linear narratives. A graduate from the Ruskin School of Art (University of Oxford) and the Royal College of Art, he is the 2018 recipient of the Chadwell Award. At the age of 16, he became the youngest winner of the UOB Painting of the Year Award in 2005. He has since exhibited at Singapore Art Museum (2007, 2012, 2013), Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (2007), Asian Civilizations Museum (2010), Peranakan Museum (2015), Northampton Contemporary (2017) and National Portrait Gallery (2018). (Photo credit: Genevieve Chua) [Visual Arts]
 
Alvin Pang
ImageAlvin Pang was Singapore's Young Artist of the Year for Literature in 2005, and received the Singapore Youth Award for Arts and Culture in 2007. A poet and editor, he is a Fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program and a board member of the International Poetry Studies Institute. Listed in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English (2nd Edition, 2013), his writing has been published worldwide in more than 20 languages, including Swedish, Macedonian, Croatian and Slovene. His recent books include: When the Barbarians Arrive (Arc, UK), and What Happened: Poems 1997-2017 (Math Paper Press, Singapore). [Poetry]
 
Angus Whitehead
ImageAngus Whitehead is a lecturer in English Literature at Singapore’s National Institute of Education. His teaching and research interests include archival recovery of the immediate social and historical contexts within which William and Catherine Blake lived and worked, early nineteenth century labouring class poetry, lyrics in current dissenting rock music (especially Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper, Peaches Nisker, Julian Cope & Mark E Smith) and roads less/hitherto never travelled in Singapore literary studies (notably poet Wong May & local migrant worker writings). Whitehead recently co-edited a collection of essays on Anglophone Singapore literature, Singapore Literature and Culture; Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts (Routledge, 2017). Most recently he has completed essays on Peaches Nisker (“stick it to the pimp”: Peaches’ Penetration of American Popular Culture’, Tristanne Connolly and Tomyki Iino, eds Canadian Music and American Culture: Get Away From Me (Palgrave, 2017)) and William Blake’s letters (‘The Uncollected Letters of William Blake’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 2017). He is currently researching comically politically satirical strategies in the works of Kelantan writer Che Husna Azhari, bi/sexualities in contemporary millennial Singapore poetry and homosocial metaphor, wit and allusion in the song lyrics and other writings of Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper, Julian Cope and Mark E Smith. [Book Reviews 1 | Book Reviews 2]
 
Ann Ang
ImageAnn Ang is a published writer of poetry and fiction, and her work has appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Softblow, the California Quarterly and the Jakarta Post. She is also the author of Bang My Car (Math Paper Press, 2012), a Singlish-English collection of short stories, which has received numerous complaints for being excessively funny. An academic with research interests in narrative structure and world literature, Ang currently teaches at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. [Book Reviews]
 
Anna Onni
ImageAnna Onni is a teacher, writer, and illustrator who lives in Singapore. She has a degree in English Literature from the National University of Singapore. Fascinated by the obsessions and routines of daily life, she is currently writing fictional prose and researching the possibilities of curative art-making habits. Her illustrations can be found on her website. [Book Reviews]
 
Anurak Saelaow
Image Anurak Saelaow is a Singaporean poet and writer. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Rogue Agent, Hayden's Ferry Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Ekphrastic Review, Street Light Press, Ceriph, and elsewhere. He is the author of one chapbook, Schema (The Operating System, 2015), and holds a BA in creative writing and English from Columbia University. [Poetry]
 
Ashish Xiangyi Kumar
ImageAshish Xiangyi Kumar obtained his BA in law and LLM from the University of Cambridge. He currently lives and works in Singapore, where poetry is one of his many errant interests. He has written for a long time, but only just started sending work for publication. He has been published in The Kindling, Cordite Poetry Review, Oxford Poetry, and Quarterly West. He won the 2018 Writers at Work Poetry Contest and took second place in the 2017 December Fortnight Poetry Prize. In his free time, he enjoys good food, arguments with friends, BoJack Horseman, music, and basketball. He considers himself very lucky to be living in a country as wonderful and strange as Singapore. [Poetry]
 
Benjamin Lo
ImageBenjamin Lo is a first-year undergraduate student at Nanyang Technological University studying English. He enjoys reading and drawing in his spare time. [Fiction]
 
Carissa Cheow
ImageThe founder of Singapore's first labour movement simulation conference, Carissa Cheow wears many hats but actually owns none. On top of her interests in research and advocacy, she attempts to infuse her takeaways from these involvements into writing poems. A sophomore undergraduate at the National University of Singapore, she volunteered as a junior moderator for SingPoWriMo 2018. Her poem "you need a very small space to read this poem", also the titular poem for a poetry collection she is working on, was shortlisted for the National Poetry Competition 2018 and some of her other poems have been published in anthologies. [Poetry]
 
Celia Hauw
ImageCelia Hauw is Singaporean currently living in Chicago. She is interested in how people think about language, and studies in Neuroscience and Creative Writing at Northwestern University. She is a recipient of the Academy of American Poets College Prize, and her poetry has been published in Words Dance, We Are A Website, and elsewhere. [Poetry]
 
Chee Wei Teck
ImageChee Wei Teck is a Singaporean Visual Artist[Visual Arts]
 
Cherian George
ImageCherian George is professor of media studies at Hong Kong Baptist University's School of Communication, where he also serves as the director of the Centre for Media and Communication Research. He is the author of five books, including Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and its Threat to Democracy (MIT Press, 2016). He blogs about Singapore at Air-Conditioned Nation. He received his PhD in Communication from Stanford University. Born and raised in Singapore, he was a journalist with The Straits Times before switching to academia. He moved to Hong Kong in 2014. Visit his website for more information. [Creative Non-fiction]
 
Chloe Leung
ImageChloe Leung is currently an MPhil student of English Literary Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include modernist writings (especially Virginia Woolf), postmodernist writings (especially Sylvia Plath and J.M. Coetzee). She is also interested in contemporary writers such as Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, and Penelope Fitzgerald. She is currently working on a thesis focusing Virginia Woolf and early 20th-Century ballet, exploring the portrayal of physical gestures and bodies in stylising self-expression. She graduated from the Master of Arts (Literary Studies) in 2017 and completed her BA in English at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. [Book Reviews]
 
Clara Chow
ImageClara Chow is the author of story collections Dream Storeys (2016) and Modern Myths (2018). [Fiction]
 
Clarissa Goenawan
ImageClarissa Goenawan is an Indonesian-born Singaporean writer. Her award-winning short fiction has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Singapore, Australia, the UK, and the US. Rainbirds is her first novel. [Fiction]
 
Cyril Wong
ImageCyril Wong is the Singapore Literature Prize-winning author of poetry collections such as Unmarked Treasure and The Lover's Inventory. A past recipient of the National Arts Council's Young Artist Award for Literature, he completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His poems have been anthologised in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W. W. Norton 2008) and Chinese Erotic Poems (Everyman's Library 2007). [Poetry]
 
Daren Goh
ImageDaren Goh is an amateur fiction author with a day job. He's also part of the founding team of The Proletariat Poetry Factory, and has performed as a poet, musician, and manager through its performances at The Night Festival, Singapore Writers Festival, and flea markets over the last ten years. His personal reading habits include long books but D-named authors he doesn't quite understand (David Foster Wallace; Don DeLillo; Dostoevsky), but hopes to one day. In the meantime, he'll work on his fiction novels (he has 3 full ones, and 2 half ones) until they're crisp and tasty enough to be published and enjoyed by people all over the world. [Fiction]
 
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
ImageDesmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé is the author of an epistolary novel, five hybrid works, and nine poetry collections. A former journalist, he has edited over twenty books and co-produced three audio books. Trained in publishing at Stanford University, Kon received his world religions masters from Harvard University and creative writing masters from the University of Notre Dame. He is the recipient of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, Independent Publisher Book Award, National Indie Excellence Book Award, Poetry World Cup, Singapore Literature Prize, two Beverly Hills Book Awards, and three Living Now Book Awards. He helms Squircle Line Press as its founding editor. [Poetry]
 
Divya Victor
ImageDivya Victor is the author of Kith (Fence / Fence Books/ Book Thug), a book of verse, prose memoir, lyric essay and visual objects; Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow Press, Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and Things To Do With Your Mouth (Les Figues Press). Her chapbooks include Semblance and Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place. Her criticism and commentary have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Jacket2, and The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet. Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including, more recently, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, and boundary2. Her poetry has been translated into French and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Divya Victor is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Writing at Michigan State University and Guest Editor at Jacket2. She is currently at work on a project commissioned by the Press at Colorado College. (Photo credit: Jon Gresham) [Poetry]
 
Eddie Tay
ImageEddie Tay is a poet, street photographer and literature professor at the Department of English, Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses on reading and writing poetry, children’s literature, autoethnography, photography and social media. He is the author of four volumes of poetry. His first, remnants (2001), consists of renditions of mythic and colonial history of Malaya as well as an homage to the Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai, Du Fu and Li He. His second volume, A Lover’s Soliloquy (2005), extends his interests in Tang Dynasty poetry through renditions of the poetry of Li Shang-yin. The volume is also about the modern cities of Hong Kong and Singapore. His third, The Mental Life of Cities, is a winner of the 2012 Singapore Literature Prize. In it, he experiments with bilingual (English-Chinese) poetry. His most recent collection is Dreaming Cities (2016), featuring his street photography and poetry. He is the Reviews Editor of Cha and an editor of the first academic journal devoted to Hong Kong, Hong Kong Studies. [Creative Non-fiction] [Cha Profile]
 
Chang Ya Lan
ImageChang Ya Lan is currently doing her PhD in Law at the University of Cambridge. She is a writer at heart. Her work has appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and she hopes to publish more of her writing. She loves literature, likes philosophy, enjoys tennis and running, appreciates a good glass of red wine, and finds pure peace and freedom in the simple act of swimming in the open sea. [Fiction]
 
Eileen Chong
ImageEileen Chong is a Singapore-born Australian poet. She is the author of eight books. Her most recent full-length collection of poetry is Rainforest (Pitt Street Poetry). Her latest published work is a chapbook, Dark Matter (Recent Work Press). She has collaborated with the photographer Charlene Winfred on Map-Making, a limited edition artist's book of poems and photographs about Singapore, published by Potts Point Press, Sydney. She is published in the USA by George Braziller. Her books have shortlisted for several awards, including twice for the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards. She lives and works in Sydney. Visit her website for more information. [Poetry]
 
Eugene Ong
ImageEugene Ong is interested in city planning, architectural heritage and photography. His photographs on housing estates have appeared in <<联合早报>>. He has co-authored a book on Singapore's vanished public housing estates and he has taught in School of the Arts, Singapore and the Singapore University of Technology and Design. Visit his website for more information. [Creative Non-fiction]
 
Grace Chia
ImageGrace Chia is the author of poetry collections, womango, Cordelia and Mother of All Questions, a short story collection, Every Moving Thing That Lives Shall Be Food, a novel, The Wanderlusters, two nonfiction books and editor of We R Family. Her work has been anthologised in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Twin Cities, Anthology of English Writing in Southeast Asia, The Brooklyn Rail, Singapore Literature in English, Fish Eats Lion, A Luxury We Cannot Afford, From Walden To Woodlands, UnFree Verse, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Poetry.sg and translated for die horen (German), La Traductiere (French), Six on the Dot (Chinese/Portuguese) and Knijzevne Novine (Serbo-Croat). The inaugural NAC-NTU Writer-in-Residence for 2011-2012, she has been awarded residencies in Macau and Korea. Her poetry collaboration with HK-based photographer Marcel Heijnen on a book about garage dogs will be out by Christmas 2018. [Poetry]
 
Ho Kin Yunn
ImageHo Kin Yunn is a part-time undergraduate of English and Film at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, and is looking to further his studies in creative writing. Through his travel writing (supplemented with grainy photography), he currently hopes to explore the deeper issues underlying voluntourism and the importance/unimportance of maintaining a geographical identity. He is also a perennial pursuer of the perfect lasagne recipe. [Visual Arts]
 
Ikmaliah Idi
ImageIkmaliah Idi is a creative who relies on coffee to function. A producer, writer and photographer, she cares about language and aesthetic very much. She is currently pursuing her Master of Arts in Creative Writing at LASALLE College of the Arts. [Fiction]
 
Isa Ho
ImageIsa Ho was born in Singapore and raised in Beijing. She graduated from Yale-NUS College in 2017 with a degree in Literature, and currently works as a Writing & Speaking Fellow at NYU Shanghai. She spent much of her time in college learning (and re-learning) the art of the essay in its various forms, from attending the Prague Summer Program to working in the Yale-NUS Writers' Centre as a peer tutor. She is passionate about cities, films, and the Oxford comma. [Fiction]
 
Jee Leong Koh
ImageJee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet Press), named a Best Book of the Year by UK's Financial Times, and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the USA. He has published three other books of poems and a book of zuihitsu. Originally from Singapore, he lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound. [Poetry]
 
Jeremy Tiang
ImageJeremy Tiang was born in Singapore and now lives in New York. His translations include novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Zhang Yueran, Chan Ho-Kei and Li Er; plays by Xu Nuo, Wei Yu-Chia, Zhan Jie and Quah Sy Ren; and, most recently, Jackie Chan's autobiography Never Grow Up. Tiang is also a playwright, and the author of State of Emergency (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2018) and It Never Rains on National Day (shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize). His translations of Un Sio San and Zou Jingzhi have previously appeared in Cha. [Translation 1 | Translation 2]
 
Jerome Lim
ImageJerome Lim is currently reading for an MPhil in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, where he works on the late poetry of the neo-Modernist J. H. Prynne. His writing has been published in various literary journals and anthologies such as Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Twin Cities: An Anthology of Twin Cinema from Singapore and Hong Kong (Landmark Books), and his poetic sequence "Archipelago" was recently awarded the Ursula Wadey Memorial Prize in the UK. He serves as an Associate Editor for poetry.sg. [Book Reviews]
 
Jerrold Yam
ImageJerrold Yam is a Singaporean lawyer based in London, UK. He is the author of three poetry collections: Intruder (Ethos Books, 2014), Scattered Vertebrae (Math Paper Press, 2013) and Chasing Curtained Suns (Math Paper Press, 2012). His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Time Out Magazine, The Straits Times, Washington Square Review and Oxford Poetry. Named by the National Arts Council as one of the "New Voices of Singapore 2014", he has received awards from the British Council, National University of Singapore and Poetry Book Society, and been nominated for the Forward and Pushcart Prizes. [Poetry]
 
Jinny Koh
ImageShortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Jinny Koh's stories and essays have appeared in Pembroke Magazine, The Carolina Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, Columbia Journal, Best New Singaporean Short Stories Volume 2, and Litro, among others. Koh graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a Master of Professional Writing from the University of Southern California, where she was the Fiction Editor for The Southern California Review. The Gods Will Hear Us Eventually is her debut novel. Visit her website for more information. [Fiction]
 
Jon Gresham
ImageJon Gresham is a writer and photographer based in Singapore. His debut collection of short stories, We Rose Up Slowly, was published by Math Paper Press in 2015. Jon is also a Director of the Singaporean literary community, Sing Lit Station. He leads the Book A Writer programme and the Writing the City Creative Writing Workshops. His writing has appeared in various anthologies and literary journals including Best New Singaporean Short Stories, Esquire, In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel, From The Belly Of The Cat, Eastern Heathens, the mono-titular anthology Coast, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. More of his images can be found at www.igloomelts.com. He is currently working on a novel. [Visual Arts]
 
Jonathan B Chan
ImageJonathan B Chan is a university student and occasional poet. Born to a Malaysian father and Korean mother in the United States, he was raised in Singapore and is currently based in the UK. He is interested in questions of identity, human expression, and the intersection of art and faith. He has recently been moved by the writing of John Donne, Ishion Hutchinson, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. [Poetry]
 
Joshua Ip
ImageJoshua Ip is a poet, editor, and literary organiser. He has published four poetry collections with Math Paper Press, won the Singapore Literature Prize for his debut, sonnets from the singlish, and placed in three different categories of the Golden Point Award. He has edited seven anthologies, including the A Luxury We Cannot Afford and the SingPoWriMo series. He co-founded Sing Lit Station, an overactive literary charity that runs community initiatives including SingPoWriMo, Manuscript Bootcamp, poetry.sg and the world’s first wrestling/performance-poetry hybrid, Sing Lit Body Slam. He received the Young Artist Award from the National Arts Council (Singapore) in 2017. Ip is the guest poetry editor for the “Writing Singapore” issue of Cha. Visit his website for more information. (Photo credit: Esquire Singapore) [Book Reviews] [Cha Profile]
 
Kate Rogers
ImageKate Rogers's poetry is forthcoming in Elsewhere: a Journal of Place and Catherines, the Great (Oolichan). She was shortlisted for the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Twin Cities: An Anthology of Twin Cinema from Singapore and Hong Kong; Juniper; OfZoos; The Guardian; Asia Literary Review; Morel; The Goose: A journal of Arts, Environment and Culture; Kyoto Journal and ASIATIC: International Islamic University of Malaysia. Her poetry collection, Out of Place (Aeolus House—Quattro Books) debuted in Toronto, Hong Kong and at the Singapore Writers Festival between July and November 2017. [Book Reviews] [Cha Profile]
 
Lin Li
ImageLin Li is a full-time writer and educator based in Belgium, Cambridge and Singapore. She graduated from Queens' College at Cambridge University with a PhD in English in 2017 and currently writes mixed media fiction, essays and academic pieces. Her forthcoming book on music, Where to place the grace note? Conversations on piano music with Yu Chun Yee, will be published by World Scientific in 2018. [Visual Arts]
 
Lune Loh
ImageLune Loh is an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore. She is a core member of Stop At Bad End Rhymes - SABER, an up-and-coming local writing collective first formed in 2017. Her poems have been published in both SingPoWriMo 2017 and SingPoWriMo 2018 (Math Paper Press), and Anima: The Poetics of Mirroring (Squircle Line Press). She has been featured in LGBTQIA+ literary events in Singapore such as TransIt 2 and Contradiction XIII. She takes approximately 28 days to orbit around the Earth. Visit her website for her experimental forays. (Photo credit: Ng Yi-Sheng) [Poetry]
 
Mandy Chi Man Lo
ImageMandy Chi Man Lo is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at the National University of Singapore. She was a Visiting Student Researcher of the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012/13. Her MA thesis focuses on the identity issue in the Indian Canadian author Rohinton Mistry's novels. Her broader research interests include cosmopolitanism and globalisation theories and fiction, and transnational studies with an emphasis on Asia. She has some of her poems and short stories published on EWCC Review. She also likes to play ukulele in her spare time. [Book Reviews]
 
Marc Nair
ImageMarc Nair is a poet and photographer. He is a recipient of the 2016 Young Artist Award. He has performed spoken word in solo and group performances for fifteen years in more than ten countries and has represented Singapore in international poetry slam competitions. Nair has published five single-authored volumes of poetry and has released another three collections in collaboration with visual artists, photographers and graphic artists. (Photo credit: Dalene Low) [Poetry]
 
Melissa De Silva
ImageMelissa De Silva is the author of ‘Others’ is Not a Race, awarded the Singapore Literature Prize 2018 in the Creative Non-fiction category. Her fiction has been published in Best New Singaporean Short Stories Vol. 3, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction. She has just finished writing a historical novel set in Singapore during the British colonial era. De Silva is Singapore's Education Ambassador for online global creative writing platform Write the World, which promotes writing across genres among teens. She has worked as a magazine journalist and book editor. [Creative Non-fiction]
 
Michael Tsang
ImageMichael 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 (Chinese University Press). Visit his Warwick profile for more information. [Book Reviews] [Cha Profile]
 
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
ImageMohamed Latiff Mohamed is one of the most prolific writers to come after the first generation of writers in the Singapore Malay literary scene. His accolades include the Montblanc-NUS Centre for the Arts Literary Award (1998), the SEA Write award (2002), the Tun Seri Lanang Award, Malay Language Council Singapore, Ministry of Communication, Information and Arts (2003), the National Arts Council Special Recognition Award (2009), the Cultural Medallion (2013), and the Singapore Literature Prize in 2004, 2006 and 2008. His works revolve around the life and struggles of the Malay community in post-independence Singapore, and have been translated into Chinese, English, German and Korean. Two of his novels have been translated into English as Confrontation (2013) and The Widower (2015). [Fiction]
 
Nazry Bahrawi
ImageNazry Bahrawi is literary critic and educator at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. As a literary translator, he works on transforming Bahasa texts into English. He has translated Nadiputra’s play Muzika Lorong Buang Kok (2012), Fuzaina Jumaidi’s poem "Tika Hamba Menjadi Tuannya" (2015) for the Mentor Access Project that is managed by the National Arts Council of Singapore, as well as the 2017 winning short story for the Golden Point Award, “Balada Kasih Romi Dan Junid”. He has also subtitled the classic Malay film Noor Islam (1960) produced by Cathay Keris. Bahrawi was formerly the interview editor of Asymptote, an international journal of literary translation. [Translation]
 
Nerisa del Carmen Guevara
ImageNerisa del Carmen Guevara is a queer writer from the Philippines. She has received a Palanca Award for Poetry, a Silver Cup for Dance Solo in the April Spring Festival in Pyongyang, and a Catholic Mass Media Award. Guevara has an M.A. in English Studies from University of the Philippines, Diliman. She has performed at the 9th Philippine International Performance Art Festival and SIPA International Performance Art Festival 2017 and PERFORMATURA 2017. She is one of sixty featured Southeast Asian performance artists in the digital archives of Live Art Digital Agency, London. [Fiction]
 
Ng Joon Kiat
ImageNg 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. [Visual Arts]
 
Ng Yi-Sheng
ImageNg Yi-Sheng is a Singaporean poet, playwright, fictionist, critic, journalist and activist. His books include last boy (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2008), SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, Eating Air, Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, A Book of Hims and Lion City. Additionally, he translated Wong Yoon Wah’s Chinese poetry collection The New Village and has co-edited national and regional anthologies such as GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singaporean Poetry and Prose, Eastern Heathens, and Heat. He tweets and Instagrams at @yishkabob. (Photo credit: Joanne Goh) [Book Reviews]
 
Nina Powles
ImageNina Powles is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently living in London. Her work has recently appeared in Poetry, Hotel, Starling, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Best New Zealand Poems 2017. A collection made up of five poetry chapbooks, Luminescent, was published by Seraph Press in 2017. Her pamphlet Field Notes on a Downpour is forthcoming from If A Leaf Falls Press in Autumn 2018. In 2018 she was selected as the winner of the Jane Martin Poetry Prize. She is half Malaysian-Chinese and is poetry editor at The Shanghai Literary Review. [Book Reviews]
 
O Thiam Chin
ImageO Thiam Chin is the author of five collections of short fiction: Free-Falling Man, Never Been Better, Under The Sun, The Rest Of Your Life and Everything That Comes With It, and Love, Or Something Like Love. He was a recipient of the National Arts Council's Young Artist Award in 2012, and has been shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize. His debut novel, Now That It's Over, won the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015, as well as the Best Fiction title at the 2017 Singapore Book Awards. His second novel, Fox Fire Girl, was published in 2017. [Fiction]
 
Pan Huiting
ImagePan Huiting creates sculptural impasto paintings that foreground the materiality of the paint and is based in London and Singapore. She graduated from the Royal College of Art, London with a Master of Research in Fine Art and Humanities in 2018. Her paintings have been featured in books, magazines and newspaper and she has participated in several exhibitions of her work—both group and solo. [Visual Arts]
 
Patrick Jiang
ImagePatrick Jiang has lived in several countries in Asia, the Americas and Europe but calls Hong Kong home. He dabbled in literature and linguistics while studying for his law degree at the University of Hong Kong, and remains interested in the interplay and intersection between the three fields. When not working on court cases, he enjoys—or at least tries to make time for—reading modern and contemporary fiction, with a special interest in British and Japanese writers. [Book Reviews]
 
Paul Jerusalem
ImagePaul Jerusalem is a final-year Literature major at Yale-NUS College. His works have been published by Vagabond Press, Likhaan Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and SingPoWriMo, Singapore's annual poetry collective. He considers Singapore and the Philippines his homes. [Book Reviews]
 
Pooja Nansi
ImagePooja Nansi is Singapore's first Youth Poet Ambassador. Her work has been described as "unflinching, lyrical and quietly honest". She is the author of two collections of poetry, Stiletto Scars and Love is An Empty Barstool. Her one woman show You Are Here which explores a family history of migration has toured to Australia for the Queensland Poetry Festival. She was a recipient of the Young Artist Award in 2016 and her latest work Thick Beats for Good Girls in conjunction with Checkpoint Theatre explores the intersections between feminism, hip hop and race. Visit her website for more information. [Poetry]
 
Pow Jun Kai
ImagePow Jun Kai, PhD, is a cultural historian and critic, specialising in music, politics and sexualities. His research interests include the global reception of music and Asian literary and media cultures, with a specific focus on the political representation of ethnicities and sexualities in the arts. He is published in ArtsEquator, Intersections and Transgender Studies Quarterly, and is the co-editor of Queer Singapore (2012) and Singapore Soundscape (2014). Visit his website for more information. [Book Reviews]
 
Robert Yeo
ImageRobert Yeo (b. 1940) has published poems, plays, a novel, essays and a memoir. He has also written librettos for opera and he is currently revising the opera FENCES for a second performance. His latest books are Routes: A Singaporean Memoir 1940-75 (Ethos Books, 2011, second edition 2014), the collected poems, The Best of Robert Yeo (Epigram Books, 2012) and the play The Eye of History (Epigram, 2016). Currently he is working on the second volume of his memoirs. [Creative Non-fiction]
 
Samantha Toh
ImageFormer production stage hand, high school teacher, and diplomat Samantha Toh jumped from job to MPD job, and now spends her time making commissioned paintings. Her work spans visual, stage and the literary arts. She has published fiction, poetry and Mandarin to English translations in Spittoon v1-v3, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Leland Quarterly, and Best New Singaporean Short Stories (Volume Two). A collection of her work is available at her website. [Book Reviews]
 
Sandro Lau
ImageSandro Lau, born and raised in Hong Kong to a local father and Italian mother, is currently working towards a PhD in English Literary Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his BSSc in Architecture and MA in English Literary Studies at the same university. His major interest is speculative fiction, and his personal interests include learning about languages and cultures. [Book Reviews]
 
Sebastian Mary Tay
ImageSebastian Mary Tay is an interdisciplinary artist who graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with Master of Research in Creative Practices and Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Fine Art. In the last few years, his works were exhibited in the UK, Lithuania, Singapore, Malaysia, and China; in various museums, galleries, and festival shows, including the Royal Scottish Academy. A work from the series "An Inquiry into the Marine Condition" won the Royal Scottish Academy Latimer Award. His research interests inquire the (in)commensurability in East and West philosophical concepts, particularly the relations between Heideggerian and Daoist metaphysics. Sebastian is a lecturer at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts; he is also a member of the Society of Scottish Artists. Visit his website for more information. [Visual Arts]
 
Sharlene Teo
ImageSharlene Teo is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer's Award for Ponti, her first novel. She was awarded the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship to complete an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she won the David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Award. She is a 2014 Sozopol Fiction Fellow, a 2017 University of Iowa International Writing Fellow and was shortlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize and the 2018 Hearst Big Book Award. [Fiction]
 
Stephanie Studzinski
ImageStephanie Studzinski is a PhD student in Literary Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also a surrealist painter and carpenter whose works can be found at elucious.com. [Book Reviews]
 
Teo You Yenn
ImageTeo You Yenn received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently Associate Professor and Head of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Teo has published in journals such as Economy and Society, Signs, Social Politics, Development and Change, in addition to book chapters and newspaper commentaries. In 2011, her book Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How Family Policies Make State and Society was published by Routledge. In 2016, she received the American Sociological Association Sex and Gender Section’s Feminist Scholar Activist Award. [Creative Non-fiction]
 
Theophilus Kwek
ImageTheophilus Kwek has published five volumes of poetry, most recently The First Five Storms (2017), which won the New Poets' Prize. He came Second in the Stephen Spender Prize in 2016, and is shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize this year. He is currently based in Singapore as a writer and researcher on history, migration and other issues, and his poems and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Irish Examiner, and the Asian Review of Books, among other platforms. He serves as Co-Editor of Oxford Poetry and Editor-at-Large for Singapore at Asymptote. [Poetry | Book Reviews]
 
Toh Hsien Min
ImageToh Hsien Min has published four books of poetry, most recently Dans quel sens tombent les feuilles (Paris, 2016). Besides Cha, his work has also been published in venues such as the London Review of Books and PN Review. He is the Chief Editor of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. (Photo credit: Alvin Pang) [Poetry]
 
Wesley Leon Aroozoo
ImageWesley Leon Aroozoo is a lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts and a filmmaker with 13 Little Pictures. His feature film I Want To Go Home had its World Premiere and was In Competition at the Busan International Film Festival 2017. Its companion dual-language novel published by Math Paper Press is Aroozoo's second novel. His other films have screened in festivals such as The International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival. He is a graduate with a Master of Fine Arts from New York University Tisch Asia and a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours from Nanyang Technological University. [Creative Non-fiction]
 
Yanyun Chen
ImageYanyun Chen (b. 1986, Singapore) is a visual artist. She runs a charcoal-based drawing a/r/tographical practice, deconstructing how one receives dying bodies—witnessing flowers unfurl and wither; researching nudity embroiled in historical spectacles and censorship; investigating the fictions and operations of etymology; reading scars on skin. Her works ground themselves in readings—fictional and philosophical—and are brought forth through a blend of classical Eastern and Western drawing methods and techniques. She has been shortlisted for the President's Young Talents 2018, and her works have been exhibited at Singapore Art Museum 8Q, Art Porters Gallery, ChanHampe Galleries, and Art Seasons Gallery. Yanyun is a PhD candidate at The European Graduate School in Switzerland/Malta, where she also obtained her Masters in Communications. She has trained in Singapore, Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Denmark. She currently teaches in the Humanities department at Yale-NUS College; manages illustration and animation studio Piplatchka; co-founded Delere Press; and has been awarded the Special Jury Prize at the 15th Japan Media Arts Festival. Her published works include 50 Drawing Exercises, Tracing Etymology: Origin and Time, Monsters and Demons, and It’s Fiction. [Visual Arts]
 
Yeng Pway Ngon
ImageYeng Pway Ngon is a poet, novelist, playwright and critic from Singapore who has published twenty-six volumes in the Chinese language. His work is noted for its examination of the modern human condition, and has been translated into English, Italian, and Malay. He received Singapore's Cultural Medallion in 2003 and the SEA Write Award in 2013, as well as being a three-time recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize, for his novels Art Studio (2012), Trivialities About Me and Myself (2008) and Unrest (2004). Costume was named one of the top ten Chinese novels of 2015 by Yazhou Zhoukan, and won a 2016 Singapore Literature Prize merit award. The English translation of Costume is forthcoming from Balestier Press. [Fiction]
 
Yolanda Yu Miaomiao
ImageYolanda Yu Miaomiao was born in northeastern China and has been living in Singapore since 1998. She has received multiple literature awards, including Singapore Tertiary Chinese Literature Award, Golden Point Award 2017 (1st place, Chinese Short Story), and Golden Point Award 2015 (1st Runner Up, Chinese Poetry). Her collection of poems was exhibited in the joint photography exhibition “Meandering with Medina” with Shivaji Das. Her work has been published in anthologies, and magazine & newspapers such as the New York Times Travel Magazine, Guangxi Literature, Zuo Pin Magazine in China, Lianhe Zaobao and Bukit Timah Literature in Singapore. [Fiction]
 
Website © Cha: An Asian Literary Journal 2007-2018
ISSN 1999-5032
All poems, stories and other contributions copyright to their respective authors unless otherwise noted.