Regional Chairs
Northeast
Kathy chow
Kathy Chow is an assistant editor at The Yale Review and a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Yale University. Her literary criticism and essays can be found in Hyphen Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, and Astra. She is a 2022-2023 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow.
thuy phan
Thuy Phan is a Vietnamese American writer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is part of the 2022-2023 cohort of GrubStreet's Essay Incubator Program and holds degrees from Harvard and Boston University. Thuy's work has been published in WBUR Cognoscenti and diaCRITICS, and is forthcoming in Pangyrus. She also creates literary-themed craft cocktails and reviews books on her Instagram @mixaphoria and was featured on NPR's Life Kit Podcast episode on how to find a hobby. In addition to being Regional Co-Chair of Kundiman Northeast, Thuy serves as a committee member of Tell-All Boston to produce reading events for nonfiction writers in her local area.
Midwest
Helene Achanzar
Helene Achanzar is a Filipina Canadian poet and educator. Her writing can be found in Oxford American, jubilat, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Editor for Poetry Northwest and works as the Programs Manager at the Chicago Poetry Center.
South
Tiffany Mi
Tiffany Mi is a Chinese-American poet interested in collective memory and the archive. A Kundiman South Regional Co-Chair and Watering Hole Fellow, she has published work in Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence, where she is pursuing an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University.
Joshua Nguyen
Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and the chapbook, "American Lục Bát for My Mother" (Bull City Press, 2021). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships/residencies from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is the Wit Tea co-editor for The Offing Mag, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA.
Southwest
edie tsong
Edie Tsong is an artist, writer, facilitator, and educator. Her socially-engaged community collaborations, Snow Poems Project and Love Letter to the World, create spaces for the voices of participants to bring intimacy to our public spaces. Her limited edition artist book Scattered Memory was published by Women’s Studio Workshop. She is a VONA alumna and lives and works in northern New Mexico with her daughter. www.edietsong.com
MOUNTAIN WEST
LEAH SHLACHTER
Leah Shlachter lives in Jackson, Wyoming and currently works as the adult programs coordinator at Teton County Library. A Kundiman poetry fellow, she has published with the American Library Association, and in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Hawai'i Review, and Talking Writing. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University.
Pacific Northwest
Ching-In Chen
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They are also a Kelsey Street Press collective member and an Airlie Press editor. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as the Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond. www.chinginchen.com
Asela Lee Kemper
Asela Lee Kemper is a poet based in Southern Oregon. She is a poetry editor at Variety Pack magazine and has previously worked with presses and magazines including Timberline Review, and Copper Canyon Press. She also has published works in Silk Club: QUIET, Mag 20/20 and the anthology No Tender Fences. She is the author of the digital chapbook Cherry Blossom Festival and audio microchapbook Finally: The Mixtape. Asela is currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Pacific Northwest College of Arts. You can find Asela on Twitter @AselaLeeK and Instagram @thesakuraink.
Northern California
Isa Maloof
Isa Maloof was born in Hong Kong. She is a poet and current Teaching Fellow at St. Mary’s College of California.
Southern California
Jessica Abughattas
Jessica Abughattas is a Palestinian American poet and the author of Strip (University of Arkansas Press, 2020), which was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Her short poetry film “Dinner Party” premiered at Mizna Twin Cities Film Festival in 2021, was a finalist for Palette Poetry’s Brush and Lyre Prize, and appeared at RAWI Fest. From 2020 to 2022, she was the Poet Laureate of Altadena, California and editor of Altadena Poetry Review. A Kundiman fellow and current Regional Co-Chair for Kundiman in Southern California, her poems have appeared in The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Lit Hub, Waxwing, and other places. She lives in Los Angeles, where she’s writing a second poetry collection.
Kien Lam
Kien Lam is the author of EXTINCTION THEORY, winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, forthcoming from UGA Press (Fall 2022). Individual poems have been published in Poetry, The New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from Indiana University. He lives in Los Angeles and is currently working with Paramount+ and the creators of American Vandal on an esports mockumentary called PLAYERS, set to release Summer 2022.
Hawaiʻi
Joseph Han
Joseph Han is the author of Nuclear Family, named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a best book of the year by NPR and Time Magazine. He is a 2022 National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ honoree and a Kundiman fellow in fiction. His novel won the 2023 Asian/Pacific American Literature Award Adult Fiction Honor, the 2024 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. In 2023, he received the Elliot Cades Award for Literature for Emerging Artist from the Hawaiʻi Literary Arts Council. He is an editor for the West region of Joyland Magazine and an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury 2023), a USA Today national bestseller. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was a Fiction Fellow. Currently a Visiting Faculty in Fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program and a Fiction Editor for No Tokens journal, she lives in Honolulu.
international
Neil Aitken
Neil Aitken is a Chinese-Scottish Canadian writer, editor, translator, and programmer. He is the author of Babbage’s Dream (Sundress Publications, 2017) and The Lost Country of Sight (Anhinga Press, 2008), winner of the 2007 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. His chapbook Leviathan (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2016) won the Elgin Prize for Science Fiction Poetry Chapbook. He holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Southern California, an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, and has received fellowships from both Kundiman and Idyllwild. Neil is also the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, co-director of De-Canon: A Library Project, and creator of Have Book Will Travel, an author resource site. After spending over twenty years in the United States, he returned to Canada in 2019 and now lives in Regina, Saskatchewan where he works as a creative writing coach and manuscript consultant.