MEENA ALEXANDER was born in Allahabad, India in 1951. She was raised in both India and the Sudan, in North Africa. She received a bachelor's degree in French and English from Khartoum University, and a doctorate in English from Nottingham University in England. Alexander's collections of poetry include Raw Silk (TriQuarterly Books, 2004), and Illiterate Heart (2002), the winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into several languages including Malayalam, Hindi, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, French, German and Swedish.Her poems frequently confronts the difficult issues of exile and identity, while still maintaining a generous spirit. About her work, Maxine Hong Kingston has said: "Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar, places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her visions and remembers and is uplifted."
Alexander is also the editor of Indian Love Poems (Everyman’s Library/ Knopf, 2005) and the author of two novels, Nampally Road (1991), and Manhattan Music (1997), and The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996), a volume of poems and essays. Her works of criticism include The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (1979), and Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989). Her memoir, Fault Lines, was reissued by the Feminist Press in 2003 with a Coda composed after 9/11. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. malexander@gc.cuny.edu
NIKHIL BILWAKESH is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. He teaches Asian American Literature at Hunter, and he has also taught Asian American Literature at SUNY Old Westbury. His dissertation is titled Emerson, India, and American Cosmopolitanism. bilwa45@hotmail.com
MARGARET M. CHIN joined the Sociology Department as an Assistant Professor in September 2001. Prior to coming to Hunter College, she was a Social Science Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow in International Migration. She received her BA in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and her MA and PhD in Sociology from Columbia University.
Her research interests focus on new immigrants, working poor families, and race and ethnicity. Professor Chin uses qualitative and comparative methods in her research. Her publications include, Sewing Women: Immigrants in the New York City Garment Industry (Columbia University Press 2005), "Moving On: Chinese Garment Workers after 9/11" published in a volume entitled Wounded City, edited by Nancy Foner (Russell Sage 2005). Prof Chin has also published two articles with Katherine S. Newman, "High Stakes, Hard Choices," in the The American Prospect, Summer 2002, and "High Stakes: Time Poverty, Testing and the Children of the Working Poor," in the Journal of Qualitative Sociology, Spring 2003. Professor Chin was a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Junior Faculty Career Grant Recipient in 2004-05 and was also a Gender Equity Project Associate from 2002-2004. She has taught courses in qualitative research methods, the family, and the second generation experience of Asians, Latinos and Blacks. mmchin@hunter.cuny.edu
CHONG CHON-SMITH Assistant Professor, PhD University of California, San Diego. Fields of Interest: Asian American Studies; American Studies; Cultural Studies; Visual/Film Studies; Comparative Ethnic Studies. cchonsmi@hunter.cuny.edu
Poet and translator JENNIFER HAYASHIDA was born in Oakland, CA, and grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco. She was recently awarded a 2007 PEN Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Swedish poet Fredrik Nyberg’s Clockwork of Flowers - Explanations and Poems; she is also the translator of Eva Sjödin's book-length prose poem, Inner China (Litmus Press, 2005).Her translation of Nyberg's A Different Practice is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. She has been a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the recipient of a Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Poems and translations have appeared in Circumference, The Literary Review, Insurance, The Asian Pacific American Journal, and Action, Yes; text-based work has been included in group exhibitions at The Vera List Center for Art and Politics and Artists Space. She received her MFA in writing from Bard College in 2003 and currently lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches Asian American Studies at Hunter College and the University of California, Davis. jennifer.hayashida@hunter.cuny.edu
WINNIE TAM HUNG is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation research focuses on Fujianese youth, neoliberalism, and the restructuring of New York City Chinatowns. Her project, Chinatown Rim: Chinese Subjectivities and the Cultural Politics of an Ethnic Space, is situated at the intersection of Asian American Studies, the politics of racial and class formation in the United States, and the relationship between immigration and the organization of urban spaces. During the summer of 2005, she was a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Research Institute. Her research on the Chinese cheongsam became the script for an upcoming exhibit at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas which examines the garment in the context of Chinese American diasporic identity. She also co-authored The Derivative Status of Asian American Women, an essay exploring the construction of Asian American Women through a critical reading of American immigration laws. wintam@ucdavis.edu
PAOLO JAVIER is a 2007/8 LMCC Writer-in-Residence. He is the author of Goldfish Kisses(Sona Books), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year award. He edits 2nd Ave Poetry and lives in Brooklyn. psjavier@gmail.com
PETER KWONG (PhD Columbia University) is Professor of Asian American Studies and Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, as well as Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is best known for his work on Chinese Americans and on modern Chinese politics. Peter sits on the Board of Directors of several organizations: Downtown Community TV; Manhattan Neighborhood Network; International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship; and The New Press, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of New York Foundation. He is the recipient of a CINE Golden Eagle Award for co-producing a PBS program on immigration, and a Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship from Hunter College.
His latest books are Chinese America: The Untold Story of America's Oldest New Community and Chinese Americans: An Immigrant Experience , co-authored with his wife, Chinese historian Dusanka Miscevic. His other books include Forbidden Workers: Chinese Illegal Immigrants and American Labor , The New Chinatown , and Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics 1930-1950. Kwong is a regular contributor to The Nation. pkwong@hunter.cuny.edu
IRWIN LEOPANDO was born and raised in the Philippines. He has lived in New York since 1995 and is currently working on his dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center. His academic interests include composition-rhetoric, critical pedagogy, cultural studies, and liberation theology. irwinleopando@yahoo.com
ANGELA REYES received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. She teaches courses in the structure and history of English, language and ethnicity, and sociolinguistics. Her primary research areas are in linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and Asian American studies. Examining the language practices of Asian Americans and other racial minorities, her current work is interested in the ways in which links between dialects and ethnic groups become established, disrupted, and appropriated in discursive interaction. Her book, Language, Identity, and Stereotype among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian (2006, Lawrence Erlbaum), is an extension of her award-winning dissertation, which was a four-year ethnographic and discourse analytic study examining how Southeast Asian refugee youth formed their identities in relation to circulating stereotypes. Her work has appeared in several academic journals, including the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Discourse Studies, and a Special Issue of Pragmatics that she also co-edited. arreye@hunter.cuny.edu
ZOHRA SAED is a Brooklyn-based Afghan American poet, educator and editor. She received her MFA in Poetry at Brooklyn College and is Doctoral Candidate in English at the City University of New York Graduate Center with an emphasis on Afghan American Literature and Art. She serves as Editor for Up-Set Press. an independent publishing house based in Brooklyn. She has given talks and performed her poetry at the American Museum of Natural History, the Asia Society, MTV, WBAI Radio, WNYC Radio and numerous university campuses. In 2007, Saed performed as part of Ping Chong's Undesirable Elements Show at the first National Asian American Theatre Festival. Her poetry/essays have been published in the following anthologies Cheers to Muses; Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out; Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality; This Day in the Life: Diaries of American Women; Cut Loose; and forthcoming in an anthology of Asian women published by Penguin India. Saed's academic focus is on West Asian; Central Asian; Muslim Diaspora Poetry, Film and Video. zohrasaed@yahoo.com
EMELYN TAPAOAN (M.S. International Affairs, The New School; M.A. Asian Studies, the University of the Philippines) liyab2001@yahoo.com
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