Board of Trustees
andy chen
Andy Chen (Secretary) is a Taiwanese American poet and educator. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation, he holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. He is a Kundiman Fellow and attended the 2014, 2016, and 2022 Retreats as a Fellow before returning to the 2023 and 2024 Retreats as an alumni staff member. His poems appear in Ploughshares, New England Review, The Offing, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere, and his reviews appear in Hong Kong Review of Books, Hyphen, and Colorado Review. He lives in St. Louis and teaches at John Burroughs School, where he serves as Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity, and Engagement and serves on the Diversity and Education Committee of the Board of Trustees. He was born and raised in New Jersey. To read more, visit heyandychen.com.
ching-in chen
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen (Treasurer) is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Massage Parlor Outreach Project core member, Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council of Seattle's Cultural Space Agency and on the board of Seattle City of Literature. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC and Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They currently teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.
Noah arhm choi
Noah Arhm Choi is the author of Cut to Bloom, winner of the 2019 Jack McCarthy Book Prize. A Lambda Literary Poet-In-Residence and Valentines Editor for Honey Literary, they received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, and their work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Split this Rock, The Rumpus, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Noah was shortlisted for the Poetry International Prize and received the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Adirondack Center for Writing. A K-12 educator of fifteen years, they work to embolden the intersection of education, activism, and the arts. They currently work at NYU Metro Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools.
kavita das
As a writer, Kavita Das explores culture, race, gender, and their intersections, writ large and small. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Kavita is currently a Masters in Fine Arts candidate in creative nonfiction and screenwriting at Antioch University where she is the Eloise Klein Healy Scholar. Her work has been published in Salon, WIRED, CNN, Teen Vogue, Catapult, Fast Company, Tin House, Longreads, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, NBC News Asian America, Guernica, Electric Literature, Colorlines, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Kavita’s second book Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues (Beacon Press, October 2022) is inspired by the Writing with Conscience class she created and teaches. Her first book, Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar, was published by Harper Collins India in 2019. Kavita lives in her hometown of New York City and tries to keep up with the city that doesn’t sleep and her six-year-old. She can be found virtually at Instagram: @kavitadas, X: @kavitamix, and at kavitadas.com.
rANA TAHIR
Rana Tahir (President) is a poet and author. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a member of RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers). In addition to her Choose Your Own Adventure novels, her work can be found in BAHR Magazine, Quarterly West, and Salt Hill Journal among others. She received her MFA from Pacific University and lives in Portland, OR. www.rana-tahir.com