Contributors have spotlight pages, where you can read excerpts from their writing and the statements they have produced about it. Please click on the highlighted names to go to these pages.
Mary Archer is a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa graduate with a baccalaureate in English. Her writing has appeared in the two previous editions of Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men. A poetry suite dedicated to Robert McHenry, a professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, appeared in the inaugural edition of Ms. Aligned. In spring 2015, her essay and narrative fiction piece appeared in Ka Hue Anahā: Journal of Academic & Research Writing, Kapi‘olani Community College’s student periodical. She is a New York native and current Hawai‘i local.
Mary Carozza
is a translator and writer living near Zurich, Switzerland. Originally from the Midwest, she holds an undergraduate degree in German studies and a graduate degree in English and creative writing. Her translations have appeared in various scholarly journals and art publications. In her writing, she explores themes of otherness and belonging.
Melissa Chimera is a conservationist and Honolulu native of Lebanese and Filipino ancestry. Her work investigates species extinction, globalization and human migration and has been exhibited worldwide, with solo shows such as Migrant at the Honolulu Museum of Art and Agents of Change at the Hui No‘eau Visual Arts Center, Maui. Her most recent project as artist and curator is The Far Shore: Navigating Homelands for the Arab American National Museum. The exhibition of contemporary art and poetry concerns a highly politicized issue–Arab immigration to America–viewed through the lens of the personal and familial. She is the recipient of the Catherine E. B. Cox Award and has been named as a finalist for the 2019 Lange-Taylor Prize, Duke University Documentary Studies. She keeps a studio on Hawai‘i Island where she lives with her husband and son.
Ryane Nicole Granados is a Los Angeles native who earned her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in various publications including The Manifest-Station, Forth Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, Scary Mommy, The Atticus Review, and LA Parent Magazine. She is an alum of Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Sicily, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her storytelling has been showcased in the national stage production Expressing Motherhood and KPCC’s live series Unheard LA.
Lillian Howan spent her early childhood in Tahiti and later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Her writings have been published in Asian American Literary Review, Café Irreal, Calyx, Jellyfish Review, New England Review, South Dakota Review, Vice-Versa, and the anthology Under Western Eyes. She is the editor of Rosebud and Other Stories, a collection by legendary playwright Wakako Yamauchi. Her debut novel The Charm Buyers received the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award for Excellence.
Carly Elizabeth Huggins grew up driving around South Florida, making her way from Naples to West Palm Beach. She works in multiple media, including paint on canvas and jewelry. She finds inspiration in reflection and through the fluidity of nature and music. After years of living in West Virginia, she recently moved with her husband and son to Fort Myers, Florida. To see more of her artwork, please visit her website.
Gerda Govine Ituarte is the author of four poetry collections: Poetry Within Reach in Unexpected Places (2018), Future Awakes in Mouth of NOW (2016), Alterations |Thread Light Through Eye of Storm (2015), and Oh, Where is My Candle Hat? (2012). She established the Pasadena Rose Poets in 2016. In February 2017 she instituted poetry reading at Pasadena city council meetings. Her poetry has been featured in exhibits at Art Produce, Avenue 50 Studio, California Center for the Arts Museum, El Gatito Gallery, New Americans Museum, The Front Gallery, and Vromans. Her work is included in the Altadena Poetry Review, Coiled Serpent, Dryland Arts and Letters, Journal of Modern Poetry, Ms. Aligned, and Spectrum. Selected readings include Avenue 50 Studio, Beyond Baroque, Huntington Gardens, LitFest Pasadena, Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art, The Last Bookstore, and The World Stage. She resides with Luis Ituarte, her artist husband, at El Rancho Alegre (Artist Dreamland) in Jamul, California.
Her work has been shown at the New Americans, California Center for the Arts, Bonita Museum, and The Front, and she has curated two international art exhibits at Avenue 50 Studio. The KPBS Audio Podcast “Only Here” featured Dia de los Muertos, her and her husband’s project journey from Baja, California, to the 2018 California Center for the Arts Escondido Museum Exhibit “Des Escondido No Longer Hidden.”
Caroline Kim was born in Busan, South Korea, but moved to America at a young age. Her poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Manoa, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Meridian, Jellyfish Review, Faultline, The Hunger, Five on the Fifth, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan in poetry, where she won a Hopwood Award, and was a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas/Michener Center. She lives with her family in northern California.
Rachel King’s short fiction has appeared most recently in One Story, Pigeon Pages, Flyway, and Lunch Ticket, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poetry chapbook Between Work and Light is available from Dancing Girl Press. She lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.
Pat Matsueda founded the Ms. Aligned project, which seeks to help the genders understand each other through the writing of women. She is the managing editor of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing and the author of Stray (a collection of poetry) and Bedeviled (a novella). With Lillian Howan and Angela Nishimoto, she recently produced the 2019 issue of Vice-Versa.
Donna Lee Miele plays with characters, settings, and conflicts that evoke her mixed heritage and her parents’ experiences of war. While she also writes historical fiction, she finds greater freedom to explore (and greater fun) in stories with less concrete settings, which was her intention with “Crocodile Teeth.” She hopes that readers will enjoy playing in this fictional intersection of contemporary Southeast Asia and the Depression-era United States. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in |tap| litmag, Atticus Review, Red Fez, and elsewhere, and she is a founding member of River River Writers’ Circle.
Angela Nishimoto holds the M.S. degree in botany from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She grew up on the windward side of O‘ahu, teaches on the leeward side, and lives in Honolulu. She writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and has published extensively, but not exclusively, in Hawai‘i. Her work can be found in Hawai‘i Review, Hawai‘i Pacific Review, Kaimana, Bamboo Ridge, Ms. Aligned, Writing Raw, and elsewhere.
Jeannine Ouellette has authored several nonfiction books and the children’s picture book Mama Moon. “Family, Family” first appeared as second-place winner in the 2016 Masters Review Fall Fiction Contest. Her work has also been recognized in the Iowa Review Awards, Bellingham Review’s Annie Dillard Award, Cutthroat’s Barry Lopez Creative Nonfiction Award, Narrative Story Contest, december magazine’s Curt Johnson Prose Awards, and Proximity’s Essay Contest, among others, and her essays and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, Utne, Penn Review, Cleaver, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and Nowhere, as well as several anthologies. She has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and support from the Millay Colony for the Arts, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and Tin House Writers Workshop. She teaches writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, mentors through the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and is the founder of Elephant Rock, a creative writing program based in Minneapolis. She recently completed her first novel.
Connie Pan, originally from Maui, earned an MFA in fiction from West Virginia University and a BA in creative writing from Grand Valley State University. Her writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Carve, PRISM international, Rosebud Magazine, Bamboo Ridge, and elsewhere. An excerpt from her novel-in-progress was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A freelance writer and editor, she lives in Mississippi.
Ann Pancake grew up in Romney and Summersville, West Virginia. Her first collection of short stories, Given Ground, won the Bakeless award. Her other books include the novel Strange as This Weather Has Been and Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories. She has received a Whiting Award, NEA fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and creative writing fellowships from the states of Washington, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
Grace Loh Prasad was born in Taiwan and raised in New Jersey and Hong Kong before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her MFA in creative writing from Mills College and is an alumna of the VONA workshop for writers of color along with residencies at Hedgebrook and the Ragdale Foundation. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Longreads, Catapult, Jellyfish Review, Ninth Letter, Blood Orange Review, Memoir Mixtapes, The Manifest-Station, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and The Rumpus, and she is a contributor to the anthology Six Words Fresh Off the Boat: Stories of Immigration, Identity and Coming to America. She is also a member of The Writers Grotto and frequently curates and participates in Bay Area literary readings with Seventeen Syllables, an Asian American writers collective. She is finishing “The Translator’s Daughter,” a memoir.
Shawna Yang Ryan is a former Fulbright scholar and the author of Water Ghosts (Penguin Press, 2009) and Green Island (Knopf, 2016). She is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA, the Asian American Literary Review, the Rumpus, Lithub, and the Washington Post. Her work has received the Association for Asian American Studies Best Book Award in Creative Writing, the Elliot Cades Emerging Writer award, and an American Book Award.
Marilyn Stablein is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and mixed-media artist whose collages, assemblages, sculptural artist’s books, and performance art explore and document visual narrative, travelogue, and memoir. Her recent books are Vermin: A Traveler’s Bestiary (Spuyten Duyvil), Houseboat on the Ganges & A Room in Kathmandu: Letters from India & Nepal 1966-1972 (Chin Music Press), and Milepost 27: Poems (Black Heron Press).
Rebecca Thomas’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain, The Massachusetts Review, Fifth Wednesday and other journals. In 2015, she received a Pushcart Prize nomination for fiction. She received her MFA in creative writing from West Virginia University. She received undergraduate degrees in creative writing and screenwriting from Chapman University. Originally from Orange County, California, she now teaches writing in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Marianne Villanueva was born and raised in the Philippines. She is the author of the short-story collections Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila, Mayor of the Roses, and The Lost Language. Her novella, Jenalyn, was a 2014 finalist for the UK’s Saboteur Award. Her individual stories have been finalists for the O. Henry Literature Prize, nominated for the Pushcart, and included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 (very) short fiction of 2016.
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