Contributors for Vol. 2 Issue 1

Mark Allen is a technical writer for an electronics company in Chengdu. He occasionally works as a voiceover artist and MC. His work has appeared in various Chengdu magazines, and Random Stuff zine.

Bai Hua, (penname of Chen Youhua) was born in 1930 in Henan province, China. Attacked as a ‘rightist’ during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, Bai Hua was persecuted and silenced for twenty-two years. After the Cultural Revolution, he was finally able to publish again and, undaunted by his experiences, continued to produce the sort of fiction and poetry which was sure to annoy the authorities. Many Chinese critics feel that Bai Hua has never received the recognition he deserves, because of the opprobrium attached to his name in official circles.

Zachary Baker was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. Much of his youth was spent in swimming pools and cinemas to stay out of the oppressive Arizona heat. Around the age of ten he started playing soccer, and continued to do so competitively through college. He graduated from Azusa Pacific University in 2008 with a Creative Writing English degree. He is now twenty-five and currently living in Chengdu, Sichuan where he teaches English, like every other foreigner in the city.

Born in Africa, Chandru Bhojwani grew up between Nigeria, India and the UK. With a Masters in International Business from the University of Westminster, he moved to New York where he worked as a Business Development Manager. Chandru has been writing for Beyond Sindh since 2004. His stories entitled The Love Letter and Zero have been published in anthologies in India. The Journey of Om, Chandru’s debut novel was published in 2009.

Jessie Brett is an Australian painter, writer and tattoo artist living in China since 2006.

Ingrid Booz Morejohn is a Swedish-American photographer and writer living in Chengdu. She first came to China as a backpacker in 1985 and frequently visited Chengdu, staying at the infamous underground bomb shelter Black Coffee Hostel for five yuan a night. One thing led to another and over the next 25 years she has traveled to every province in China and written and photographed three books on China and Chinese culture.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College. His many books include Anglomania, Inventing Japan, and Murder in Amsterdam, which won a Los Angeles Times Book Award. He is a regular contributor to many publications, including the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the Financial Times.

Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong in 1950 of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage. He is the author of nine novels, including the multi-award-winning Double-Wolf and Shanghai Dancing. His novels have been translated into French, German and Chinese. His latest novel The Bath Fugues was shortlisted for four prizes, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award. He holds the Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

Sam Chambers has been living in China for the past decade as a freelance writer. Currently Dalian is home, though he tends to pop up all over the place. He is the co-author (with Paul French) of Oil and Water: Tankers, Pirates and the Rise of China (Zed Books, 2010).

Chen Xiaoyuan grew up in a small town along the Yangtze River, and moved to Chengdu in 2003. Now, she works and lives in the once-come-never-leave city with a passion for poetry, art and every beautiful thing related. She is also a badmintonoholic.

Yu Yan Chen was born in a fishing village in Fujian but grew up in New York City. Enchanted by the traveller’s tales her grandfather told, she set sail to seek her own adventures. She currently resides in London, working as a freelance interpreter and translator. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Stand and the New York Quarterly.

Jacob Dreyer hails from Charlottesville US, and is a Shanghai based writer and artist. His work has a soft spot for the hidden spaces of urban transformation, and related shady social occurrences, as seen in the short piece Hongkoumeng.

Graham Earnshaw was born in England and has lived most of his adult life in the China world. He speaks Cantonese and Mandarin and his translation of the Jin Yong kung fu novel The Book and the Sword into English was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press. He has been a journalist, writer and publisher. Other books he has written include Life and Death of a Dotcom in China (2000), and Tales of Old Shanghai (2008).

William Ellis received his Ph.D in Literature from Boston College, then taught humanities at Vanier College in Montreal, Canada. In 2004, he was hired as the Senior Foreign Expert of the English department at Sichuan University. There, he offers courses in Western Intellectual History, Art History, European Literature, and Canadian Studies. He was awarded the Sichuan Province Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. He is the author of The Theory of the American Romance, an Ideology in American Intellectual History, nominated in 1989 for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize.

Peter Goff, from Dublin, Ireland, is a co-owner of The Bookworm and set up the Chengdu and Suzhou venues. As a journalist his work appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Guardian, The Times, The LA Times, The Australian, Agence-France Presse, Lonely Planet and the South China Morning Post, among other publications.

Katrina Hamlin lives in Shanghai, where she writes and edits for the Shanghai Business Review and H.A.L. Literature. She has previously lived in Chengdu, England, and Hong Kong.

Gerard Hanberry is an award-winning poet from Ireland. His third collection At Grattan Road was published in 2009 by Salmon Poetry. A fourth collection is due out in 2012. His biography of Oscar Wilde and his family More Live Than One is to be published by The Collins Press (Ireland) in 2011. Gerard teaches poetry and creative writing at National University of Ireland, Galway and English Lit at St Enda’s College, Galway, Ireland.

Justin Hancock was born in Texas, the product of a hippie, who would later become a Baptist preacher, and a woman who loved horses more than anything else. In addition to writing stories and short bios, he is a singer-songwriter, and his first album, Somewhere Not Here, will be released on his birthday, March 26. He is currently writing his first novel, To Find A Diamond, which he has been writing, off and on, for the past six years.

Nicky Harman lives in the UK. She works as a literary translator as well as teaching on a translation studies course at Imperial College London. She is currently working on the novel 《金山》Gold Mountain Blues, by Zhang Ling, and a volume of Han Dong’s poetry.

Born 1961, Nanjing, Han Dong is an avant-garde poet as well as an essayist, fiction writer, editor of non–official poetry journals and blogger. His first novel, 《扎根》, was translated as Banished! (UHP, 2009) and long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. In 2009, he won the judges’ prize at an independent poetry festival held in Yunnan, China.

Australian Slam Champion 2010 Kelly-Lee Hickey is a poet, performer, and community artist living in Alice Springs. Her writing, exploring themes of whiteness, identity and location. Her poems have appeared in Going Down Swinging, Voiceworks Magazine and Rattapallax. She co-directed the National Young Writers Festival in 2006 and 2007, the Darwin Fringe in 2008, and is a member of the National Young Writers Festival board. The poem Reflux, which appears here, was shortlisted in the 2009 NT literary awards.

Lynn Huang graduated magna cum laude with a BA in English literature from Barnard College of Columbia University. Her poetry has been published in the Southern Poetry Review. Her translations have been published in various contemporary Chinese art catalogues and publications in China and New York. She was a professional modern dancer in New York before being awarded a Fulbright to study ethnic minority dance.

John Jamison was born in Los Angeles and received his MA in English from Iowa State University. Since 1996 he’s been living in China and is currently located in Chengdu where he manages employee communication for Intel’s local manufacturing site. He has co-authored the book Intercultural Communication Skills (published by Sun Yat Sen University Press) as well as academic and entertainment articles on the same subject.

Malarvizhi Jayanth loves the feeling of inhabiting two countries inside her head – English and Tamil – which is probably why she experiences translation as an act of travel and exploration. Her day job includes translating books for a children’s publishing house in India. She has earlier worked as a journalist, and has translated eight children’s books into Tamil and a collection of Tamil stories into English.

Wade Kaardal is Minnesota born and raised. As an undergraduate he studied Journalism and Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is a staunch skeptic, lover of all things rhetorical and reader of many things speculative. In the past Wade has worked as an English teacher, a public relations specialist, the lead singer in a band and a parking lot attendant.

Fergal Keane is one of the BBC’s most distinguished correspondents, having worked for the corporation in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Asia and the Balkans. He has been awarded a BAFTA and has been named reporter of the year on television and radio, winning honours from the Royal Television Society and the Sony Radio Awards. He has also been named Reporter of the Year in the Amnesty International Press Awards. His first work of military history is the Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 (2010).

Roy Kesey is the author of a novella called Nothing in the World (winner of the Bullfight Media Little Book Award), a collection of short stories called All Over (a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, and one of The L Magazine’s Best Books of the Decade), and a historical guide to the city of Nanjing, China. His debut novel, Pacazo, from which Las Huaringas is excerpted, will be published in 2011. His work has appeared in several anthologies including Best American Short Stories, New Sudden Fiction, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and The Future Dictionary of America, and in more than seventy magazines including McSweeney’s, Subtropics, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review and Ninth Letter.

Sophia Kidd is many things. Each of these roles she plays, be it writer or performance artist, visual arts curator or sinologist, is merely an attempt to fiddle with the fixtures of reality. Ever meddling, she pits ontology against teleology, Chinese ideograms against Arabic numerals, self against Self, subject against object and center against margin. Her latest fascination is with what Teilhard de Chardin calls the noosphere…a film of living thought which wraps around the earth. Kidd is from southern California and has in lived on Mainland China and in Taiwan for most of the past eleven years.

Michael Kohn worked for three years (1998-2000) as an editor for the Mongol Messenger newspaper. He continues to spend a part of each year in Mongolia, reporting for media organisations such as AFP, BBC, the South China Morning Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the author of the Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia as well as Dateline Mongolia: An American Journalist in Nomad’s Land.

Lei Yu was born in 1970 and has been a news photographer since 1995. Since 1996 he has worked at Chengdu Commercial Daily as a photojournalist, news journalist, Director of Photography, photo director, etc. Currently, he is the chief photographer of Pioneer – Real Estate Weekly Magazine. In his ten-year career as a photographer, he has used his lens to document China’s rapid development. He has photographed the Three Gorges Dam migration, the Wenchuan Earthquake, the Asian Financial Crisis and other momentous events that have influenced Chinese contemporary history.

Winnie Li was born near the shores of Lake Michigan, but it was the beaches of California that kept her company through her early childhood. At the age of six she moved to Suzhou, China and is now a ninth grader at the Suzhou Singapore International School. As a Chinese American, she has attended schools of both cultures, and is bilingual in English and Chinese. She was seven when her first article in English was published, and has won various prizes for her writing in Chinese.

Emily Luo teaches Chinese literature in a Chengdu high-school. She paints and sketches every day and tries to capture the many fascinating changes happening around her. By the time she’s forty she plans to be living in a cottage down a lane, either somewhere in Scandanavia or in Ireland, where she will sketch all day long and discuss the ways of the world with the local plants.

Andri Snær Magnason is an award-winning Icelandic writer who has written novels, poetry, plays, short stories and essay. He also wrote and directed the critically-acclaimed documentary Dreamland (2009) which looks at the dark side of green energy in Iceland. His work has been published or performed in more than 25 countries.

Sascha Matsuzak is a writer based out of Shanghai. He spent eight years living and writing in Chengdu and he often returns to get himself a dose of mala. He would rather be writing love stories, hustler tales and odes to the spirit but we still live in a money based socio-economic model, so unfortunately he has to work for a living.

Lara Messersmith-Glavin is an educator and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Alltopia Antholozine, Perspectives, and The Spoon Cafe. She spent a year in Chengdu teaching linguistics at Sichuan Normal University; her blog of this period, “Chengdu Letters,” won a Chinalyst.com award for best English-language travel writing on China.

Jennifer Mills is the author of two novels, Gone and The Diamond Anchor, and a chapbook of poems, Treading Earth. In 2010 she was Asialink Writer-in-Residence at the Bookworm in Beijing.

Canadian Christopher G. Moore is the creator of the award winning Vincent Calvino crime fiction series and the author of the Land of Smiles Trilogy. He wrote radio plays for CBC and NHK before his first novel was published in New York in 1985. He’s lived in Thailand since 1988 and his novels have appeared in a dozen languages.

Omar Musa is a rapper and poet who was born in 1984 and raised in Queanbeyan, New South Wales. He has numerous awards including the Australian Poetry Slam in 2008, the British Council’s Realise Your Dream Award in 2007 and has featured at numerous literary festivals. He published his first book of poetry, The Clocks, in 2009 and his debut full-length album World Goes to Pieces was released in 2010, and promoted on tour supporting the legendary dub-poet Gil Scott-Heron.

Matt Muller is a migrant worker and master of allusions, this foreign barbarian journeyed so far west he found himself in the Far East where he seeks his fortune, the great American novel, and other expat writers. He currently suffers from dromomania for which the elusive remedy lies somewhere west of his current location. Scribbling provides temporary relief for his condition. He maintains a travelogue of his own called Pathology of Wanderlust at matthewmuller.com

Scott Ness graduated from the California state university system with degree in Literature. After this accomplishment, and when looking for a job that didn’t involve French Fries, he came to China. He’s been an ESL teacher for three years and is now learning to be a teacher in the International Baccalaureate Primary Year’s Program. It sounds more impressive than it is.

Catherine Platt arrived in Beijing as a language student in 1985 and her life and work have intersected with China ever since. She has degrees in East Asian Studies and Anthropology of Development. Based in Chengdu with her family since 2004, she is a freelance writer, translator, editor and consultant to non-governmental organisations.

Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China. He is the author of the award-winning Inspector Chen series of mystery novels. His latest book, Years of Red Dust: Stories of Shanghai was named one of the 100 Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. He is also the author of two books of poetry translations, Treasury of Chinese Love Poems and Evoking T’ang, and his own poetry collection, Lines Around China. Qiu’s books have sold over a million copies and have been published in twenty languages.

Originally from Spain, Ignacio Santonja has lived and worked in China since 2004. After graduating with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in tourism, the financial crisis pushed him to Asia. In search of a new beginning and a reason to smile again he co-founded Sands-Meibei in 2009, where he works as the Managing Editor and co-photographer; when armed with his camera, he is obsessed with presenting travel experiences and emotions which force the viewer to conceive of a story behind the caption. In his free time he tries to teach his beloved dog Meio to do anything besides sleeping.

David Sedaris is a Grammy Award-nominated American humorist, comedian, bestselling author, and radio contributor. He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. His next five subsequent essay collections, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames, have become New York Times Best Sellers. In 2010, he released another collection of stories Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary.

Maggie Shelton has lived abroad most of her life and has shared her experiences through her articles and stories published in various magazines, journals and newspapers. In 2007 she published “Red Lacquer Bridge” a historical account of a Japanese settlement on Terminal Island, California. Presently Maggie and her husband divide their time between their homes in Baja Mexico, Gilbert Arizona, and their Chongqing China residence where she co-hosts the Chongqing Writing Group.

Bill Stranberg is a young, eccentric, writer based in Chengdu, China. His daily life revolves around athletics with repetitive slapping motions; flavors of every variety (minus that of salty canned fish); writing instruments, users of them and the things they produce; silliness, nonsense and the living, breathing, utterly-utter world.

Allen Sutterfield is a poet, visual artist, and teacher of writing. Originally from the USA he has lived in Canada since 1967. Allen has published poems and stories in many magazines, is the author of a children’s book Stone Soup, and has had more than 40 exhibitions of his collages, drawings and photographs. Allen is hard at work completing his 30-year epic The City of Words.

Harvey Thomlinson is the founder of Make-Do Publishing, based in Hong Kong. Under its ‘Modern Chinese Masters’ imprint, Make-Do aims to challenge preconceptions about Chinese fiction, and has published English translations of Sheng Keyi, Jimmy Qi and the controversial Fujian writer Chen. He translated Murong’s Leave Me Alone, Chengdu and his own experimental novel The Strike, based on events in northeast China, was published in the UK literary journal Tears on the Fence.

Mike Turner has been a practicing artist for over 18 years, living and working in London, UK , Sydney, Australia and since January 2008, Chengdu, China. With a BA in Jewellery Design, he combines his metal-smithing techniques with realistic sculpture to depict a variety of genetic oddities and strange devices, from a dark and dystopian future. His work has been featured in numerous jewellery magazines.

Nury Vittachi is a journalist and author based in Hong Kong. His columns are published in a variety of newspapers in Asia as well as on his website. He is best known for the comedy-crime novel series The Feng Shui Detective, published in many languages around the world, but he has also written non-fiction works and novels for children. He is also noted for his role in founding the Asia Literary Review, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the Man Asian Literary Prize, and was the chairman of the judges of the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008.

A graduate of Carleton College and a lifelong resident of Minnesota, Emily Walz has worked for a library, a variety of magazines, and an independent publisher. She currently studies in China on the pretext of earning a degree in Asian Languages from the University of Minnesota, but mostly for the opportunity to travel in Asia. At age 10, Emily won a library short story contest and ten whole dollars.

Julia Wang has an English BA. She worked as a teacher before becoming a freelance writer and translator.

Jessica Wilczak ate a masala omelette on the train from Trivandrum to Alleppey, and survived to tell about it. She is still working on self-realization.

Xi Yongjun is a poet and editor from Qionglai, Sichuan. He has been writing poetry since the age of 16, and at 21 he published his first poem Winter Night in the magazine Poet. Since then he has published widely, including the poetry collections Chinese Fengshui and Spring Wooden Ox. He has edited anthologies including The Case of Poetry, Indoor Magazine Poetry Anthology and Under the Exploding Stars, Selected Works by Chengdu Poets. Xi Yongjun currently lives in Chengdu, where he is Editor-in-Chief of Indoor Magazine.

Murong Xuecun, one of China’s most famous authors, was born in 1974. In 2002, when his novel Leave Me Alone, Chengdu took China by storm, Murong gave up his job as a lawyer and devoted himself to writing full time. An English translation of Leave Me Alone, Chengdu was published in 2009 and longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize. Dancing Through Red Dust, from which I Wish I Had Never Been Born was excerpted, will be published in an English edition in 2011.

A native of Chengdu, Zhou An is a painter, photographer and woodblock artist. Inspired to document Shui Jing Fang, one of the last remaining areas of traditional housing in the city, he taught himself photography and worked there from 2002 to 2009. He also photographs street life in Chengdu.