Kazim Ali

Kazim Ali was born in the U.K. to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian and Egyptian descent. He received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an M.F.A. from NYU. His books of poetry include Sky Ward (Wesleyan, 2013), winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque (Alice James Books, 2005), winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions Ltd., 2008); All One’s Blue (Harper Collins, 2015); Inquisition (Wesleyan, 2018); and the cross-genre text Bright Felon (Wesleyan, 2012). His novels include The Secret Room: A String Quartet (Kaya Press, 2017), a new hybrid memoir, Silver Road: Essays, Maps, & Calligraphies (Tupelo Press, 2018), and a books of essays, Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice (Tupelo Press, 2011). Ali is a professor of Literature and Creative Writing at UC San Diego.

Marilyn Chin

Marilyn Chin is the author of A Portrait of the Self as Nation, Hard Love Province, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, Dwarf Bamboo, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, and Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. She has translated poems by Ai Qing and Gozo Yoshimasu, and won numerous awards, including the United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, two NEAs, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan. Additionally, she has been featured in various anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. She is Professor Emerita at San Diego State University and presently serves as a Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets.

OLIVER DE LA PAZ

Oliver de la Paz (Co-Chair, Advisory Board) is the author of Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2001, 2007), Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press, 2010), winner of the Akron Poetry Prize, Post Subject: A Fable (U. of Akron Press, 2014), and The Boy in the Labyrinth (U. of Akron Press, 2019). He is the co-editor of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (U. of Akron Press, 2012). A former member of the Board of Trustees for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and a recipient of a NYFA Fellowship and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust, his work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Poetry, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in Pacific Lutheran University’s Low-Residency MFA Program.

M. Evelina Galang

M. Evelina Galang is the author of the story collection Her Wild American Self (Coffee House Press, 1996), novels One Tribe (New Issues Press, 2006) and Angel De La Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery (Coffee House Press, 2013), the nonfiction work Lolas’ House: Filipino Women Living With War (Curbstone Books, 2017), and the editor of Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (Coffee House Press, 2003). Among her numerous awards are the 2004 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Prize for the Novel, the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for ONE TRIBE, the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Advancing Human Rights, and a 2002 Senior Research Fellowship from Fulbright. Galang directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami and is core faculty and board member of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices).

Jessica Hagedorn

Jessica Hagedorn is the author of Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster Of Love, and Dogeaters, winner of the American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of Danger And Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and the editor of three anthologies: Manila Noir, Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home In The World. Her work for the stage includes adaptations of Dogeaters and The Gangster Of Love, and collaborations with Fabian Obispo (Felix Starro), among others. Her honors and prizes include a Gerbode, Hewlett Foundations’ Playwriting Award, a Philippine National Book Award, a Lucille Lortel Playwrights’ Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, an NEA-TCG Playwriting Residency Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Sundance Playwrights’ Lab and the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab.

Kimiko Hahn

Kimiko Hahn is the author of nine books of poems, including Brain Fever (W.W. Norton, 2014), Toxic Flora (WWN, 2010), The Narrow Road to the Interior (WWN, 2006), The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which won the American Book Award, and Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. Her chapbooks include Ragged Evidence, A Field Guide to the Intractable, Boxes with Respect, The Cryptic Chamber, Resplendent Slug, and Dovetail. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY and has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and Kundiman. In 2016, Hahn was elected President of the Board of Governors, Poetry Society of America.

Jennifer Ho

Jennifer Ho is a professor in the department of Ethnic Studies and the director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA) at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of three books: Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (Routledge Press, 2005), Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which won the 2016 South Atlantic Modern Languages Association award for best monograph, and Understanding Gish Jen (University of South Carolina Press, 2015). She is co-editor of a collection of essays on race and narratology, Race, Ethnicity, and Narrative in the United States (OSU Press, 2017) and a series of teaching essays on Asian American literature, Teaching Approaches to Asian American Literature (forthcoming MLA). She has just been elected incoming president of the Association of Asian American Studies, effective April 2020. 

Lawson Inada

Lawson Fusao Inada was born in 1938 in Fresno, California, a third-generation Japanese American. In 1942, Inada and his family were sent to internment camps, first in Fresno, then in Arkansas and Colorado. Inada’s collections of poetry include Before the War: Poems as They Happened (1971); Legends from Camp (1992), winner of the American Book Award; Just Into/Nations (1996); and Drawing the Line (1997), winner of the Oregon Book Award. He edited the anthology Only What We Carry: The Japanese Internment Experience (2000), narrated the PBS documentaries Children of the Camps and Conscience and Constitution, and is featured in the animated film Legends from Camp, made with his son, Miles Inada. Inada was appointed Oregon poet laureate in 2006. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, fellowships from the NEA, and a Creative Arts Grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund.

Myung Mi Kim

Myung Mi Kim was born in Seoul, Korea. She immigrated with her family to the United States at the age of nine and was raised in the Midwest. She earned a BA from Oberlin College, an MA from The Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her collection of poems Under Flag (1991) won the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Award of Merit. Her other collections include The Bounty (1996), DURA (1999), Commons (2002), River Antes (2006), and Penury (2009). Myung Mi Kim is the subject of the book The Subject of Building Is a Process / Light Is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim (2008). She has taught at San Francisco State University and in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, where she is the James H. McNulty Chair of English.

Tan Lin

Tan Lin is the author of over 13 books, including Heath Course Pak (2012), Bib. Rev. Ed., Insomnia and the Aunt (2011), 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004., The Joy of Cooking (2010), which received the Association for American Studies Award for Poetry/Literature, Plagiarism/Outsource (2009), Ambience is a Novel with a Logo (2007), BlipSoak01 (2003), and Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (2000). His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Conjunctions, Artforum, Criticism, boundary2, Cabinet, the New York Times Book Review, Art in America, and Purple. His multimedia work has been presented at galleries throughout the U.S. and Paris. Lin is the recipient of a 2012 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Poetry, a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant for 2004-2005, and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant. He earned a PhD from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at New Jersey City University.

Timothy Liu

Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California to immigrant parents from Mainland China. He is the author of ten books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing, selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Say Goodnight, a 1998 PEN Open Book Margins Award; and Vox Angelica, which won the 1992 Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. Liu’s poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Liu is currently a Professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey and is an intuitive reader of occult esoterica, including the Tarot and the I-Ching.

Victory Matsui

Victory Matsui is an editor at One World, where they publish fiction and literary nonfiction, including works by Thi Bui, Jordy Rosenberg, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin. They began their publishing career at Little, Brown and Company, where they worked with a range of #1 New York Times bestselling and prize-winning writers, including Donna Tartt, Kevin Powers, J.K. Rowling, David Foster Wallace, and James Patterson. Victory co-facilitates the People of Color Sangha at the Brooklyn Zen Center, and is a founding member of Yellow Brown Power Hour, a radical Asian American performance group/hot pot club. A native New Yorker, they live in Brooklyn.

Vikas K. Menon

Vikas K. Menon is a poet, playwright and songwriter. He was a 2015 Emerging Poets Fellow at Poets House and his poems have been featured in numerous publications, including Indivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry. He co-wrote Priya’s Shakti, the first of a series of ongoing augmented reality comic books that address gender-based violence. He was also one of the co-writers of the lauded shadowplay “Feathers of Fire” which is currently touring the country.  His other plays have received readings at or been produced by Pratidhwani Theatre, Ruffled Feathers Theater Company, Ingenue Theatre and the Classical Theatre of Harlem. He is an Advisory Board Member of Kundiman, dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. He received his M.F.A in Poetry from Brooklyn College and his M.A. in Literature from St. Louis University.

David Mura

David Mura is the author of A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing and two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, which won an Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award and was a New York Times Notable Book, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity. Mura’s novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and the John Gardner Fiction Prize. Mura’s poetry collections are The Last Incantations, Angels for the Burning, The Colors of Desire which won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and After We Lost Our Way, a National Poetry Series Contest winner.  His other books are A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography & Addiction and a book of critical essays, Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto & Mr. Moto: Poetry & Identity. Mura teaches at VONA and the Loft and works with the Innocent Classroom.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments (2020, Milkweed Editions), and four previous poetry collections: Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), Lucky Fish (2011), At the Drive-in Volcano (2007), and Miracle Fruit (2003), the last three from Tupelo Press.  Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

Elda Rotor

Elda Rotor has served as a Senior Editor at Oxford University Press and currently serves as the Vice President and Publisher of Penguin Classics at Penguin Random House, where she oversees the U.S. editorial program, contributes branding strategies, and manages an 1800+ title backlist and 60+ title front list of paperbacks, hardcovers and eBooks, including the publishing programs for John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Shirley Jackson, William Golding, and the Pelican Shakespeare series. She has narrated, edited and co-produced Poems by Heart by Penguin Classics, which was named one of the Best Apps of 2013 by Apple. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Academy of American Poets and has served as Penguin Diversity Committee chair and a PRH Diversity & Inclusion council member.

Vijay Seshadri

Vijay Seshadri was born in India and came to the United States at the age of five. A prominent poet, essayist, and critic, Seshadri is the author of Wild Kingdom (Graywolf Press, 1996); The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 2003), which won the James Laughlin Award; and 3 Sections (Graywolf Press, 2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Having earned a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from Columbia University, Seshadri has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has worked as an editor at The New Yorker and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, where he currently directs the graduate non-fiction writing program.

Prageeta Sharma

Prageeta Sharma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts. Her parents emigrated from India in 1969, and Sharma was raised a Hindu. Sharma attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard as an undergraduate and earned her MFA from Brown University and an MA in media studies from The New School. Her poetry collections include Bliss to Fill (2000), The Opening Question (2004), which won the Fence Modern Poets Prize, Infamous Landscapes (2007), and Undergloom (2013). Sharma’s honors include a Howard Foundation Grant, among others. She has taught at the New School and Goddard College and is currently an associate professor in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Montana-Missoula, of which she has also served as director. She is the founder and president of the conference “Thinking Its Prescence: Race, Creative Writing, and Literary Studies.”

Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze is the author of ten books of poetry, including Sight Lines, Compass Rose, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Ginkgo Light, selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award, Quipu, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, selected for the Asian-American Literary Award, Archipelago, selected for an American Book Award, and one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon, selected for the Western States Book Award. He is also the editor of Chinese Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2010) and has received many honors, including a Lannan Literary Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts. From 2012-17, he served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and, in 2017, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Truong Tran

Truong Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam and earned his MFA from San Francisco State University. He is the author of five collections of poetry: The Book of Perceptions (1999), a finalist for a Kiriyama Prize; placing the accents (1999), a finalist for a Western States Book Award for Poetry; dust and conscience (2000), winner of a San Francisco State Poetry Center Prize; within the margin (2004); and four letter words (2008). He is also the author of the children’s book Going Home, Coming Home (2003). Tran is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Fund for Poetry grant, three San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity grants, and an Intersection for the Arts Writer in Residency Fellowship. His visual art has been shown in Bay Area galleries such as Intersection, APAture, Kearny Street Workshop, and A. Muse Gallery. He is currently a visiting professor in poetry at Mills College.