Authors, Artists, & Moderators
Aimee Liu is the bestselling author of the new novel Glorious Boy, as well as of Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face, and the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. These books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, published as a Literary Guild Super Release, and serialized in Good Housekeeping. Liu has received a B&N Discover Great New Writers Award and holds an MFA from Bennington College. She teaches in Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program at Port Townsend, WA. More at aimeeliu.net
Amanda Lee Koe won the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for her first story collection Ministry Of Moral Panic (Epigram Books). Her debut novel, Delayed Rays of A Star (Doubleday/Vintage Anchor), was one of NPR's Best Books of 2019 in the U.S., and a #1 Straits Times bestseller in Singapore.
Diane Josefowicz's writing has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Sou'Wester, The Saint Ann's Review, and Necessary Fiction. She is a regular contributor of book reviews to Singapore Unbound. With Jed Z. Buchwald, she is the author of The Riddle of the Rosetta, a new history of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics published in September 2020 by Princeton University Press. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Jackie Wang is a scholar, poet, multimedia artist and Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School’s Eugene Lang College. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), a book on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the U.S. carceral state. In addition to her scholarship, her creative work includes the forthcoming poetry collection, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021) and the experimental essay collection Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotexte, 2021).
Judy Luo is Assistant Editor at Gaudy Boy, where she is devoted to amplifying Asian literary voices that open radical political possibilities. A student and abolitionist organizer, Judy is finishing her degree in carceral studies at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
Meira Chand’s multicultural heritage is reflected in her 9 novels. A Different Sky was longlisted for the Impac Dublin award and featured on Oprah Winfrey’s reading list. Her most recent novel is Sacred Waters. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and is involved in promoting young writers in Singapore. More about her work can be found on meirachand.com
Paula Mendoza earned her BA in English at the University of Texas and her MFA in Poetry at the University of Michigan. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She is the recipient of the Yalobusha Review Poetry Award, the Hopwood Award in Poetry, and the Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry. Hyphenated, she's Filipino-Canadian. Regionally, an Austinite. Mostly, her home's in words. She lives and writes in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Sonny Liew’s multi-Eisner winning The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye was a New York Times and Amazon bestseller, and the first graphic novel to win the Singapore Literature Prize. Other works include The Shadow Hero (with Gene Luen Yang), Doctor Fate (with Paul Levitz) and Malinky Robot, as well as titles for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, DC Vertigo, Boom Studios and Disney Press.
Named one of “30 of the planet’s most exciting young people” by the Financial Times, Elaine Castillo was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her debut novel America Is Not the Heart was named one of the best books of 2018 by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, The New York Public Library, The New York Post, The Boston Globe, Real Simple, and Lit Hub. Her writing can be found in The New York Times, The Nation, Freeman’s, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the politics of our reading culture.
Jini Kim Watson is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. She teaches and writes on postcolonial literature, film and theory, and is a co-convener of NYU’s Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium. Her publications include The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (2011); The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (co-edited with Gary Wilder, 2018), and Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization, forthcoming from Fordham University Press in Spring 2021.
Kirsten Han is a Singaporean freelance journalist and curator of the newsletter We, The Citizens. Her work often revolves around the themes of social justice, human rights, politics, and democracy, with bylines in publications like The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Foreign Policy. She received an Honorable Mention from the World Justice Project’s Anthony Lewis Prize for Exceptional Rule of Law Journalism in 2018, and a Human Rights Press Award for her commentaries on "fake news" and freedom of expression in 2019. Her essay "The Silhouette of Oppression" was published by Epigram Books in 2019. Kirsten is also a founding member of We Believe in Second Chances, a group advocating for the abolition of the death penalty in Singapore.
Melinda Lauw is an artist, experience designer, and immersive creator working across the fields of art, immersive entertainment, and experiential marketing. She is the co-founder of Whisperlodge, a production company pioneering the practice of live ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). Melinda has been featured on Netflix and in The New York Times and has worked with brands such as Museum of Ice Cream, Refinery 29, and Marriott Hotel Group. Melinda received her BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and her MA in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York.
Ricco Villanueva Siasoco is a writer, educator, and activist based in San Francisco. His work has been published in AGNI, Joyland, Drunken Boat, and The North American Review. He has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, Lambda Literary, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He received his MFA from Bennington College and has taught at Columbia University, Boston College, and the Massachusetts College of Art. Ricco is a board member of Kundiman, a national literary organization dedicated to Asian American
literature.
Tania De Rozario is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Tender Delirium (Math Paper Press, 2013) and Somewhere Else, Another You (Math Paper Press, 2018). Born in Singapore, she lives and works on the traditional unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, colonially known as Vancouver.
Deborah Germaine Augustin is the Membership Engagement Manager at New Naratif. Outside of New Naratif she’s a writer and educator. She dreams of a world where we all have freedom of movement.
Inez Tan is the author of This Is Where I Won’t Be Alone: Stories, a national bestseller in Singapore. A recent Kundiman fellow, she holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan and an MFA in poetry at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches creative writing.
Joy (she/they) is an illustrator and cartoonist. After graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art, they’ve illustrated and designed for several organizations such as New Naratif, NPR, The Substation, Mynah Magazine, and the National Museum of Singapore, and The Moon bookstore & cafe. Their work has been recognized by the Will Eisner scholarship and the Society of Illustrators in the US. They organise and design for Queer ZineFest, and recently collaborated with migrant poets for Our Pandemic, a series pairing illustrators and poets on life under lockdown during COVID. (twitter & instagram: @feever_dreem)
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle Award, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (short-listed for the Lambda and Publishing Triangle Awards), Bodymap, Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. She is a lead artist with Sins Invalid and holds an MFA for Mills College.
Nuraliah Norasid is a writer and researcher. She graduated with a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Her writing has been published in a variety of publications including, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), Karyawan Magazine, Perempuan: Muslim Women in Singapore Speak Out, and Mynah Magazine. Her debut novel The Gatekeeper won the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2016. In 2018, she was named the Most Promising Asian Woman Writer by Indiase Magazine. She also received the Nanyang Outstanding Alumni and Creativity-Leadership-Innovation-Community (CLIC) awards from NTU in 2017.
Based in Singapore, Shirin Rafie is a freelance illustrator and the co-founder of Wild Dot (@wildd.sg). She enjoys creating light hearted and colorful artworks for people, whether for educational tabletop games, or explainers on the Singapore political scene. At Wild Dot, she experiments with creating natural art materials by researching flora and horticultural waste that can be found within Southeast Asia and Singapore.
Thum Ping Tjin (“PJ”) is a historian of Malaya and a campaigner for democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression in Southeast Asia. His historical work centers on the legacy of colonialism in Southeast Asia. Founder and Managing Director of New Naratif and Visiting Fellow at Hertford College, University of Oxford, he is a Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, Olympic athlete, and the only Singaporean to swim the English Channel. He is also the creator of “The History of Singapore” podcast, available on iTunes. He has been repeatedly attacked, smeared, and harassed by the PAP government of Singapore, but remains unbroken and unbowed.
Co-Presenters
We are proud to partner with the following organizations to present this year’s festival.
Adelphi University's MFA Program and Soapbox Series
Asia Society
Books Actually
The Evergreen Review
New Naratif
NYU English Dept's Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies (PRDS) Colloquium
The Southeast Asian Studies program (SEATRIP) at the University of California-Riverside)
Sponsors
Special thanks to our festival supporters.
Ethos Books
The Evergreen Review
Individual donors
4th Festival Organizing Committee
Founder & Organizer
Jee Leong Koh
Concept Consultant
Melinda Lauw
Design Consultant
Flora Chan
Publicity Consultant
Ally Chua
Technical Consultant
Henrik Cheng
Event Managers
Kimberley Lim
Judy Luo
Janelle Tan
Social Media Team
Chu Jia Sing
Zhen Qi Teo
Jade Onn
Jiaoyang Li
Emily von Borstel
Closed Captioners
Chu Jia Sing
Kendrick Loo
Melinda Lauw
Zhen Qi Teo
Video
Tomson Tee