David Raphael Israel February 23, 2013

Contributor and Guest Editor

Born in California in 1956, David Raphael Israel was educated at a small Quaker school. He’s written poetry from a young age. After studying classical Chinese at UC Berkeley, he pursued arts journalism, focusing on music. He wrote and edited at EAR Magazine (NYC), then moved to Washington, DC. Emigrating to India (2007), he lived at Dhrupad Sansthan (a music school in Bhopal), returning to California in 2009. His ghazals are seen in Ravishing DisUnities and Here and Now: an Anthology of Delhi Poets. His experimental documentary, Padma Bilawal, was screened in Bangalore. Living in Los Angeles, he plays sarangi.

Contributions:

• Issue #18 (September 2012): Shanghai Pensées (Night thoughts) [Read]
• Issue #26 (September 2014): Guest Prose Editor [forthcoming]

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Rheea Mukherjee February 23, 2013

Contributor and Guest Editor

Rheea Mukherjee received her MFA in creative writing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ultra Violet, Southern Humanities Review, Cha, Out-Of-Print, Bengal Lights, Every Day Fiction, and A Gathering of Tribes. Her previous fiction has been a Top 25 finalist in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award. Her unpublished collection of stories, In These Cities We Dreamed, was a Semi-Finalist in the Black Lawrence Press, St Lawrence Book Award, 2011. She co-founded and facilitates Bangalore Writers Workshop. She lives, writes, and caters to the demands of Nimbu her pet dog in Bangalore, India.

Contributions:

• Issue #15 (November 2011): An Urban Inquiry: Three Poems [Read]
• Issue #25 (June 2014): Guest Prose Editor [forthcoming]

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Dorothy Chan February 22, 2013

Contributor and Guest Editor

Dorothy Chan is currently working towards her MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) at Arizona State University. She is the poetry editor for ASU’s national/international literary magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review. In 2012, she graduated from Cornell University, with a cum laude degree in English with a minor in History of Art. Chan’s work has been in Cha and The Writing Disorder. Her honours include a 2012 Pushcart Prize nomination for her poem “Ikebukuro Train Rides” featured in The Writing Disorder, along with the 2011 Corson-Browning Award for Poetry (Cornell English Department) and the 2011 and 2012 Robert Chasen Memorial Prize (Cornell English Department).

Contributions:

• Issue #18 (September 2012): Eels [Read]
• Issue #26 (September 2014): Guest Poetry Editor [forthcoming]

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Michael Gray February 22, 2013

Contributor and Guest Editor

Michael Gray is a MFA candidate at CSU-Fresno and an editorial intern for The Normal School. He won a 2012 AWP Intro Journals Project Award and attended the 2012 Raleigh Review Writers’ Studio Workshop. Poems appear on Downtoearthnw.com, in Rock & Sling, the Aurorean, Cha, Puerto del Sol and The Country Dog Review. He is also known as “顾明康.”

Contributions:

• Issue #17 (June 2012): Resurfacing a Football Pitch, Shanghai [Read]
• Issue #18 (September 2012): Letter to Queen Victoria from the People of Hong Kong, 2012 [Read]
• Issue #24 (March 2014): Guest Poetry Editor [forthcoming]

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Andrew Barker November 19, 2012

Contributor and Contest Judge

Andrew Barker is the creator of the online lecture website Mycroft, where examples of his poetry lectures can be seen. He is the author of the poetry collection snowblind: from my protective colouring (Chameleon Press) and holds a PhD in American Literature and an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature. He currently teaches for the University of Hong Kong and Lingnan University.

Contributions:

• Issue #7 (May 2009): Welded to Reason by Brittle Metals [Read]
• Issue #16 (March 2012): On Encountering Jean-Claude Van Damme [Read]
• Issue #18 (September 2012): The Seamstress’ Goodbye to Liu [Read]
• Issue #19 (November 2012): Sonnet 143. Phantom Memories [Read]
• Cha “Betrayal” Poetry Contest: Judge [information]
• Issue #20 (March 2013): “Betrayal” Poetry Contest Winners: Why We Choose These Poems [Read]

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Benjamin Huang October 21, 2012

Guest Tea Taster

Benjamin Huang lives in Pasadena, California, on the easternmost border of the Pacific Rim. He is a graduate of Yale (BA), the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (MFA) and the University of California, Irvine (PhD) and has taught at a number of West Coast colleges and universities, most recently the University of Southern California. He has published his work in Ploughshares, Guernica and other venues, and is currently writing a novel. In addition to being a writer and a scholar, he also throws pots, pumps iron, and has been an extra in a zombie movie.

Contributions:

• A Cup of Fine Tea: Ricky Garni’s “The Tarsier” [Read]
• A Cup of Fine Tea: May Dy’s “We” [Read]

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Kaitlin Solimine September 19, 2012

Contributor and Guest Editor

Although raised in New England, Kaitlin Solimine [website] has considered China a second home since 1996. Graduated from the MFA program in writing at UC-San Diego in 2011, she was previously a Harvard-Yenching scholar at Beijing University (2000) and a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Creative Arts Fellow in China (2006-2007) and she was the Donald E. Axinn Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2010). She is also the 2012 recipient of the Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program award and is represented by William Clark Associates. Solimine wrote and edited Let’s Go: China (St. Martin’s Press) and blogs at Cold Mountain Collective.

Contributions:

• Issue #14 (July 2011): Song for Chongwenmen [Read]
• Issue #20 (March 2013): Guest Prose Editor [forthcoming]

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Stefani Kuo July 1, 2012

Guest Tea Taster

Stefani Kuo is a senior at Deerfield Academy, and is currently the editor-in-chief for the art and literary magazine Albany Road, the editor for the humor magazine Slightly Ajar, and journalist and book reviewer for the newspaper Scroll. Her prose and poetry has been published in all three publications as well as the online literary magazine Barriers. She has represented the school in world issue conferences in England and Canada, and is an avid writer and actress, having been selected to go to the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf, Middlebury College, and performed and directed in various productions. She is also an advocate for the organization Room To Read, which funds children’s education through building libraries and schools, and is continuing to raise enough money to build a library in Nepal by the end of 2013. She would love to pursue creative writing and theatre both in college and as a career. Contact: stefani.kuo@gmail.com.

Contributions:

• A Cup of Fine Tea: Kathlene Postma’s “Chinese Box” [Read]

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Matt Shoard June 19, 2012

Guest Tea Taster

Matt Shoard won the Poetry Society’s Young Poet of the Year Award and a Frogmore Press Short Shorts Fiction Prize. He edits Fleeting Magazine and writes about books and culture for The Guardian. He is currently teaching creative writing, working on a PhD and writing his first novel The Space.

Contributions:

• A Cup of Fine Tea: Jee Leong Koh’s “Razminovenie, or Nonmeeting” [Read]
• A Cup of Fine Tea: Ricky Garni’s “Literal Translation of Korean Ideograms” [Read]

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Michael Tsang April 19, 2012

Contributor and Staff Reviewer

Michael Tsang received his BA in English and MPhil in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is now reading for a PhD degree at the University of Warwick, specializing in postcolonial English literature in Hong Kong. Language and literature are part of his life. He likes to write stories and poems in his spare time, and is devoted to language learning. His ultimate goal is to learn Tibetan and Finnish. In April 2012, Tsang joined Cha’s editorial team as Staff Reviewer.

Contributions:

• Issue #10 (February 2010): Revival and Reinterpretation in Translation [Read]
• Issue #11 (May 2010): The Power of Children: A Review of Prashani Rambukwella’s Mythil’s Secret [Read]
• Issue #13 (February 2011): In Transit: Xu Xi’s Habit of a Foreign Sky [Read]
• Issue #13 (February 2011): Stop and think: Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s Hiroshima in the Morning [Read]
• Issue #15 (November 2011):  Writing with Guts: Sherry Quan Lee’s How to Write a Suicide Note [Read]
• Issue #15 (November 2011): Colouring life, Colourful life: Sweta Srivastava Vikram’s Kaleidoscope: An Asian Journey of Colors [Read]
• Issue #16 (March 2012):  Giving Reader Access: Xu Xi’s ACCESS: Thirteen Tales [Read]
• Issue #17 (June 2012): Confronting Sameness, Confronting Difference: Nicholas YB Wong’s Cities of Sameness [Read]
• Issue #17 (June 2012): A Voice from the Edge [Read]
• Issue #18 (September 2012): Innovations: Three Collections by Kate Rogers, Gillian Bickley and Vaughan Rapatahana [Read]
• Issue #19 (November 2012): Consuming Love: Zhang Yueran’s The Promise Bird [Read]
• Issue #19 (November 2012): Resurrecting the Sacrifices of Modernity: Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mother [Read]
• Issue #20 (March 2013): More than Meets the Eye: Sky Lanterns and the New Village [Read]

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Berit Ellingsen December 21, 2011

Contributor and Guest Editor

Berit Ellingsen [website] was born in South-Korea, grew up in Norway and has lived in Portugal, Sweden and the US. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Bluestem, Cha, Thunderclap, SmokeLong Quarterly, Metazen and decomP magazinE (More stories here). She received an honorable mention in the 2011 Glass Woman Ghost Story Competition. Ellingsen’s debut novel, The Empty City, is a story about silence.

Contributions:

• Issue #15 (November 2011): Summer in Estoril [Read]
• Issue #18 (September 2012): Guest Prose Editor  [Read]

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Marc Vincenz October 16, 2011

Contributor, Guest Editor and Contest Judge

Marc Vincenz reads “Unfathomable Mammals”, first published in PIF Magazine and reprinted in October Babies:

Marc Vincenz was born in Hong Kong during the height of the Cultural Revolution to Swiss-British parents. His poems and translations have appeared extensively online and in print, including Washington Square Review, The Bitter Oleander, Canary, Exquisite Corpse, Crab Creek Review, Tears in the Fence, Nth Position, Guernica, The Potomac, Spillway Review and Poetry Salzburg Review. Recent books include: The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees (Argotist, 2011/re-release Spuyten Duyvil, 2013) and Pull of the Gravitons (Right Hand Pointing, 2012).

Secret Letter, Vincenz’s translation of Swiss poet, Erika Burkart’s poetry collection Geheimbrief, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press in 2013. His translation of Werner Lutz’s Kissing Nests is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil (2012). An English-German bi-lingual collection of his poems Additional Breathing Exercises / Zusätzliche Atemübungen is to be released by Wolfbach, Zurich (2013).

Vincenz is Editor-in-Chief of Mad Hatters’ Review and MadHat Press, and divides his time between Reykjavik, Zurich and New York City.

Contributions:

• Issue #10 (February 2010): Hunchback Rat of the Red Star Hotel  [Read]
• Cha “The Past” Poetry Contest: Judge [information]
• Issue #20 (March 2013): Guest Poetry Editor  [forthcoming]-

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Lucas Klein October 16, 2011

Contributor and Guest Editor

Lucas Klein — a former radio DJ and union organizer — is a writer, translator, and editor of Cipher Journal. His translations, essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming at Two Lines, Jacket, and Drunken Boat, and he has regularly reviewed books for Rain Taxi and other venues. A graduate of Middlebury College (BA) and Yale University (PhD), he is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese, Translation & Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong. Endure, a small collection of Bei Dao 北島 poems translated with Clayton Eshleman, is now out from Black Widow Press, and his translations of Xi Chuan 西川 are forthcoming from New Directions. He is also at work translating Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin 李商隱.
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Contributions:

• Issue #14 (July 2011): Five sections from Thirty Historical Reflections [Read]
• Issue #22 (August 2013): Guest Editor  [forthcoming]

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Sumana Roy October 3, 2011

Contributor and Guest Tea Taster 

Sumana Roy teaches at the Department of Humanities, Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College. An early draft of her first novel, Love in the Chicken’s Neck, was long listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. Her poems, fiction and essays have appeared in 21 Under 40 (Zubaan), The New Anthem (Westland), Pratilipi, Caravan, Asia Writes, Himal Southasian, Biblio, OPEN, Tehelka, among other places.
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Contributions:

• Issue #14 (July 2011): Love: Made in China [Read] [Discussed here]
• A Cup of Fine Tea: Anindita Sengupta’s “Arambol, Goa”  [Read]
• Issue #20 (March 2013): The Third is a Betrayal [Read]

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Vineet Kaul October 3, 2011

Contributor and Guest Tea Taster 

Droning in the aesthetic purgatory between consciousness and seizure, Troubadour walks the thin line between what could be as much of an Ah-hah moment as a Blah-Blah experience. His visions are single-minded soliloquies of a triumph, usually about or over nothing.

Always scavenging for the granular visions trapped between volition and void, Vineet Kaul [website] is quasi- hedonist. He writes in spasms triggered by verbal jocularity and persnickety fixations that sometimes surprise him with their epiphanies.

Troubadour Kaul is a collaboration project between the two Indians exploring poetry, travelogues, prose, photography and music. Their poetry has appeared in Asia Writes, Short Fast and Deadly, The Scarlet Sound, Nether Magazine, Fleeting, Loch Raven Review, Subliminal Interiors and others. Despite being a Best of the Net nominee, Winner of the Asian Age Poetry Contest, Best Short Writing in the World finalist, their ranking in the Indian arranged-marriage-market remains dismal.

While Vineet Kaul rents out his vocabulary to his partner-in-rhyme, the Troubadour brings his imagination to the table. Neither of them, however, is bringing any bread to the table. Maybe that is what happens when you collaborate with your alter-ego. Always looking to collaborate with other artists. Contact: vineetkaul85@gmail.com
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Contributions:

• Issue #13 (February 2011): Parapraxis [Read] 
• A Cup of Fine Tea: Nicholas Y.B. Wong’s “Appetites” [Read]
• Issue #16 (March 2012): Three Poems from Letters to Samārā [Read]
• Issue #16 (March 2012): Placeless in Pushkar [Read]
  

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Daniel A. Nicholls October 3, 2011

Guest Tea Taster 

Daniel A. Nicholls lives above a traffic circle in Keene, NH, and writes as a part of the Starving Artist Collective. He tweets about art and literature @nomopoetry.
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Contributions:

• A Cup of Fine Tea: Ji Shengli’s “Policemen” [Read]

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W.F. Lantry September 28, 2011

Contributor and Guest Tea Taster 

W.F. Lantry [website], a native of San Diego, received his Maîtrise from L’Université de Nice, M.A. in English from Boston University and PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. In 2010 he won the Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (in Israel), the Crucible Editors’ Poetry Prize, the CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, and the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry. In 2011 the Atlanta Review awarded him its International Publication Prize. His work has appeared in The Tower Journal, protestpoems.org, Spilling Ink Review, Now Culture, Gulf Coast and Aesthetica. His recently published chapbook, The Language of Birds (Finishing Line Press 2011), is a lyric retelling of Attar’s The Conference of the Birds. He currently works in Washington, DC, and is a contributing editor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry and Kindred Prose.
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Contributions:

• Issue #12 (September 2010): Rainbow Bridge [Read] 
• Issue #14 (July 2011): Forever Lasting Love [Read]
• A Cup of Fine Tea: Arthur Leung’s “Earthen Houses”  [Read]
• Issue #15 (November 2011): Silk Road [Read]
• Issue #19 (November 2012): Loom [Read]

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Marybeth Rua-Larsen September 26, 2011

Guest Tea Taster 

Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives on the south coast of Massachusetts in the USA and teaches basic composition and ESL at Bristol Community College. Her poems, essays, flash fiction and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Raintown Review, Lilt, The Shit Creek Review, The Flea, Measure, Verse Wisconsin, The Nervous Breakdown and Newport Review , among others. She has been a finalist for the Philbrick Award, nominated several times for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net, and was recently named winner in the Poetry category for the 2011 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition.
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Contributions:

• A Cup of Fine Tea: Maysa Vang’s “Between Her and Me”  [Read]

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Rumjhum Biswas September 26, 2011

Contributor and Guest Tea Taster 

Rumjhum Biswas [blog] has been published in India and abroad, in online and print journals and anthologies. One of her poems was long listed in the Bridport Poetry Prize 2006 and was also a finalist in the 2010 Aesthetica Creative Arts Contest. She has won prizes in poetry contests in India. Her poem “March” was commended in the Writelinks’ Spring Fever Competition, 2008. Her story “Ahalya’s Valhalla” was among storySouth’s Million Writers’ notable stories of 2007. Her poem “Bones” was nominated for a 2010 Pushcart by Cha. She was a participating poet in the 2008 Prakriti Foundation Poetry Festival in Chennai, and a featured poet during the Poetry Slam organized jointly by the US Consul General, Chennai and The Prakriti Foundation in December 2009. In December 2010 she was a participating poet at the first Hyderabad Literary Festival organized by Osmania University and Muse India. She is one of the ten Indian poets to feature in an exclusive forthcoming anthology edited by Jayant Mahapatra along with Yuyutsu RD Sharma. She has a monthly column at Flash Fiction Chronicles.

Contributions:

• Issue #12 (September 2011): Bones [Read] [Discussed here]
• A Cup of Fine Tea: Sumana Roy’s “Love: Made in China”  [Read]
• Issue #17 (June 2012): The Gypsy Woman of the Cooum [Read]

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Ivy Alvarez August 25, 2011

Contributor and Guest Editor 

Ivy reads “Fossil”:

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006). A recipient of writing residencies from MacDowell Colony (USA), Hawthornden Castle (UK) and Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), her poetry is published in journals and anthologies in many countries and online. Visit her website for more details.

Contributions:

• Issue #7 (May 2009): vena cava [Read]
• Issue #7 (May 2009): bend [Read]
• Issue #18 (September 2012): Guest Poetry Editor [Read]

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