Authors, Artists, & Moderators

Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. Recipient of the Gutekunst Prize, Alta’s translations from German and Italian have appeared on BBC Radio 4, Trafika Europe, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Alta’s translation of Juli Zeh’s novel New Year (World Editions, 2021) was a finalist for the PEN America Translation Prize as well as the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize, and Alta’s translation of Mithu Sanyal’s novel Identitti was published by Astra House this past July. Instagram: @alta_l_price

Chris Campanioni’s latest book is A and B and Also Nothing (Otis Books|Seismicity Editions, 2020), a re-writing of Henry James’s The American and Gertrude Stein’s “Americans” that merges theory, fiction, and autobiography, forthcoming from Unbound Edition in 2023 in its second printing. He is a recipient of the International Latino Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. The film adaptation of his poem “This body’s long (& I’m still loading)” was in the official selection at the Canadian International Film Festival, and his multimedia work has been exhibited at the New York Academy of Art and staged at the &Now Festival of Innovative Writing. His work on transnational mobilities and the mediated practices of migrants has been published by Diacritics, Social Identities, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and presented at MIT’s “Media in Transition” biennial. In 2019, he joined the Transnational Joint Research Center for Migration, Logistics, and Unequal Citizens, where he continues to broach the multiple, intersecting, and extant repercussions of the Cold War.

Gina Apostol has written five novels. She won the 2022 Rome Prize to work on a novel-in-progress, The Treatment of Paz. Her forthcoming book, La Tercera, is out in May 2023. Publishers' Weekly named her last book, Insurrecto, one of the Ten Best Books of 2018. Gun Dealers' Daughter won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Her first two books, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Philippine National Book Award. She grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines and lives in New York City and western Massachusetts. She teaches at the Fieldston School in NYC.

Jay Gao is a poet and author of Imperium (Carcanet, 2022) plus three poetry chapbooks. He is a Contributing Editor at The White Review. He is a winner of the 2022 Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction, the 2021 London Magazine Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, he earned his MFA at Brown University and is a PhD student at Columbia University in New York City. 

Krystal A. Sital is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad, which was a finalist for the PEN America Emerging Writers Award. Her essays have been anthologized in A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home and Fury: Women’s Lived Experiences in the Trump Era. Krystal’s work has been featured in The New York Times, ELLE, Huffington Post, Today’s Parent, Salon, Catapult, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the University of Tahoe’s MFA program.

Dr Nazry Bahrawi is an assistant professor of South-east Asian Literature and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle, as well as an editor-at-large at Wasafiri, a British literary magazine focusing on international contemporary writing. He is also a literary translator of Malay literary works to English.

Timothy Yu is the author of Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia; Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965; and a poetry collection, 100 Chinese Silences. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry and Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets. He is the Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

YZ Chin is the author of Edge Case, a New York Times Editors' Choice, and Though I Get Home, winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. Her translation of The Age of Goodbyes by Li Zi Shu will be out in November. Born and raised in Taiping, Malaysia, she now lives in New York.

bani haykal experiments with text + music. As an artist and musician, bani considers music as material, and his projects revolve around human-machine intimacies through various forms of interfacing and interaction. He is a member of b-quartet. Manifestations of his research culminate in works of various forms, encompassing installation, poetry, and performance. In his capacity as a collaborator and a soloist, bani has participated in many festivals, including MeCA Festival (Japan), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Media/Art Kitchen (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan), Liquid Architecture, and Singapore International Festival of Arts.

Dorothy Wang, Professor of American Studies at Williams College, is the author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford, 2013), which won the Association for Asian American Studies' 2016 award for best book of literary criticism and was included in The New Yorker magazine's year-end list, "The Books We Loved in 2016." She also conceived of and co-founded Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK), an initiative that opened up discussions of race and colonialism in UK poetry. Wang has contributed essays to The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry, The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, Poetry Review (UK), Boston Review, and the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, among other publications. She is the recipient of an ACLS  Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship.

Hamid Roslan is the author of parsetreeforestfire (Ethos Books, 2019). His other work can be found in the Asian American Writers Workshop, Asymptote, Tilted Axis Press, minarets, the Practice Research & Tangential Activities (PR&TA) Journal, The Volta, Of Zoos, and the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, among others.

Jhani Randhawa (they/them/theirs) is a counterdisciplinary maker, collaborator, and editor. Their work is interested in precarity, queer* ecology, diaspora and migration, spiritual activism, and fugue states. Jhani is the recipient of a Yasmin Fellowship from Millay Arts, and was named a 2021 finalist for the PEN American Emerging Voices Fellowship. Jhani has taken residence and refuge at the Wormfarm Institute, Upaya Zen Center, Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, and was a 2022 Deborah Anne McNeely Writer-in-Residence at Writers House Pittsburgh. Their first full-length poetry collection TIME REGIME (Gaudy Boy, 2022) was selected by Dr. Dorothy Wang (author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry, Stanford University Press) as the 2021 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize winner. With Teo Rivera-Dundas, they are a co-founding editor of the experimental arts journal rivulet.

Laurie Stone is author of six books, most recently Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening (Dottir Press). Winner of the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle, she was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation, and critic-at-large on Fresh Air. Her newsletter on Substack is Everything is Personal (lauriestone.substack.com).

Shelley Fairweather-Vega is a professional translator of Russian and Uzbek, based in Seattle, Washington. She translates poetry, fiction, screenplays and more, with a special focus on the contemporary literature of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Fairweather-Vega holds degrees in International Relations and Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies. As a translator, she is most interested in the intersection of culture and politics in modern history. Her published projects and work in progress are at fairvega.com/translation.

Vivek Narayanan teaches poetry in the MFA program at George Mason University. His website is naravive.tumblr.com. His books of poems include After (New York Review Books, July 2022), Universal Beach, and Life and Times of Mr S. His poems, stories, translations, and critical essays have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Granta.com, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, and The Caribbean Review of Books, as well as in The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry.  Narayanan is also a member of Poetry Daily’s editorial board. Twitter: @naravive

Cherian George is Professor of Media Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. His books include Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and its Threat to Democracy (MIT Press, 2021), which Publishers Weekly named one of the best 100 books of the year; and Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship (MIT Press, 2021), honored by the Association of American Publishers as one of the year’s three top scholarly books in both the Media & Cultural Studies and Graphic Nonfiction categories. His best-selling books of essays on Singapore include Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited (2020). 

Gaiutra Bahadur is a writer, critic, and journalist based in Jersey City, New Jersey. Her book Coolie Woman, a personal history of Indian indenture in the Caribbean, was shortlisted for Britain’s Orwell Prize for artful political writing in 2014. An associate professor of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers-Newark, and a former newspaper reporter, she writes for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Nation, and Dissent, among other publications. Her work has been recognized with literary residences at MacDowell and Italy’s Bellagio Center and fellowships from Harvard, the British Library, and the New York Public Library.

The intimate works of visual and performance artist ila (b.1985, Singapore) incorporate objects, moving images, and live performance. Through weaving imagined narratives into existing realities, she seeks to create alternative nodes of experience and entry points into the peripheries of the unspoken, the tacit, and the silenced. Using her body as a space of tension, negotiation, and confrontation, her works generate discussion about gender, history, and identity in relation to pressing contemporary issues. She has shown at DECK, National Gallery Singapore, The Substation, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, National Design Centre, Coda Culture, and ArtScience Museum.

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry, including the short story collections The Drone Outside, Butterfly Dream, and Age of Blight, as well as the poetry collections Black Arcadia, Meditations of a Beast, and Lifeboat. She co-edited the British Fantasy Award-winning anthology People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! and Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines. Muslim is the translator of Filipino authors Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Marlon Hacla, and Rogelio Braga. Her stories recently appeared in Conjunctions and Neo-Decadence Evangelion, an anthology from Zagava Books.

Lily Philpott is the Director of Programs & Partnerships at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She has many years of experience curating literary programs in New York City, including at PEN America, the Guggenheim Museum, and the New York Public Library. She is a member of the Brooklyn Book Festival’s International Literature Committee and The Starlings Collective of BIPOC adoptee writers and artists, as well as a candidate for an MFA in Fiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Described by Sabotage Reviews as “a right-on wordsmith and master of comic poignancy,” Stephanie Dogfoot (they/she) has won national poetry slam championships in Singapore (2010) and the UK (2012) and has represented both countries at international poetry slams. She has toured North America, Germany, and Australia with her poetry. She is the author of a poetry collection called Roadkill for Beginners and the founder and producer of Singapore's premier poetry open-mic night, Spoke & Bird.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is the co-author of Singapore: A Biography and co-editor of In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, won the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize, and been shortlisted for the Sewanee Review Fiction Contest and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University and is writing a novel with the support of a 2022 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Originally from Singapore, she now lives in Boston.

 

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5th Festival Organizing Committee

Organizer & Fundraiser 
Jee Leong Koh
Design Consultant
Pey Emery
Publicity Consultant
Ally Chua     
Technical Director 
Henrik Cheng
Event Managers/Helpers
Michel Ge
Pey Emery
Kimberley Lim
Judy Luo
Emily von Borstel
Reception
Hong-Ling Wee
Candice Miller
Website
Emily von Borstel
Photography
Joel Pitra
Video Editing
Tomson Tee