Writers
Mary Archer is a senior majoring in English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Until she was in her teens, she lived on Staten Island—the retirement island of sailors and firefighters; the little sister of Manhattan—where her grandfather had his auto-repair shop. She moved in her first month of high school to the land of lava rock. She then took flight from the Big Island to clear-sky O‘ahu and began her college years at Kapi‘olani Community College. She loves learning from her teachers and hopes to teach one day.
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Perle Besserman is a recipient of the Theodore Hoepfner Fiction Award and past writer-in-residence at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim Artists’ Colony in Jerusalem. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was praised by Isaac Bashevis Singer for the “clarity and feeling for mystic lore” of her writing and by Publisher’s Weekly for “wisdom [that] points to a universal practice of the heart.” Her autobiographical novel, Pilgrimage, was published by Houghton Mifflin; her latest novels, Kabuki Boy and Widow Zion, and Yeshiva Girl, a story collection, are available from Aqueous Books, Pinyon Publishing, and Homebound Publishing, respectively. Her short fiction has appeared in The Southern Humanities Review, Agni, Transatlantic Review, Nebraska Review, Southerly, North American Review, Bamboo Ridge, and many other publications, both online and in print. Her most recent books of creative nonfiction are A New Zen for Women (Palgrave Macmillan) and Zen Radicals, Rebels, and Reformers, coauthored with Manfred Steger (Wisdom Books). She holds a doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia University and has lectured, toured, taught, and appeared on television, radio, and in two documentary films about her work in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, China, and the Middle East. Her books have been recorded and released in both audio and e-book versions and translated into over ten languages.
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Sion Dayson is an American writer living in Paris, France. Her work has appeared in The Writer, The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, Utne Reader, The Wall Street Journal, Numero Cinq, and several anthologies, including Strangers in Paris and Seek It: Writers and Artists Do Sleep. She holds an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the founder of Write-in Paris (WIP). Sion has been awarded residencies and grants from the Kerouac House, the Barbara Deming / Money for Women Fund, and the Stone Court Writer-in-Residence program. Her debut novel, When Things Were Green, will be published by Queen’s Ferry Press in 2017. It also features a male protagonist.
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Astha Gupta’s poems have appeared in Muse India, TFQM, Madswirl, UCity Review, Asian Cha, and elsewhere. She was shortlisted for the Cha ‘Void’ poetry contest in 2014 and the All-India Poetry Competition in 2013. Her other big love is traveling, whenever and wherever she gets the opportunity.
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Sheyene Foster Heller teaches English at Barton Community College. Her work has appeared in W.W. Norton’s In Brief, Brevity, Nebraska Review, River Teeth, Clackamas Literary Review, Pennsylvania English, American Cowboy, Invisible Insurrections, and elsewhere. She was a recipient of the 2003 AWP Intro Journals Award in nonfiction, and the piece selected (based on a chapter of her memoir) appeared in issue 26 of Tampa Review.
Gerda Govine Ituarte is the author of two books of poetry. Alterations | Thread Light Through Eye of Storm appeared in 2015; the Spanish translation will be available fall 2016. Oh Where is My Candle Hat? was published in English and Spanish in 2012. Her third book will be published in 2017. Her poetry has appeared in the Altadena Poetry Review Anthology; Coiled Serpent (Tia Chucha Press); Zines: One Mind Body and Spirit; San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly; HomeTown Pasadena; Indefinite Space; Spectrum I & II; Dryland; World Enough Writers; and Frontera-Esquina Magazine in Mexico. She is a member of a writing workshop led by Kate Gale, of Red Hen Press; of International Black Writers and Artists Association; and of Public Address. Govine Ituarte has read her work in Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and the UK. She is also a columnist, a curator, and the CEO of G. Govine Consulting, a diversity inclusion firm. Born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, she lives in California with Luis Ituarte, her artist-husband.
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Kristiana Kahakauwila is a hapa writer of fiction and nonfiction. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, and the 2015–16 Lisa Goldberg Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first book, This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth, 2013), was a Barnes & Noble Discover selection. She is currently working on a multi-generational historical novel set on the island of Maui and trying to figure out where to surf in New England.Website
Sukrita Paul Kumar is a poet, translator, painter, and contributing editor of Muse India. Born in Kenya, she lives in Delhi, where she writes poetry and teaches literature. She has been an honorary fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa; a former fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; an invited poet-in-residence at Hong Kong Baptist University; and an honorary faculty member of the Durrell Centre in Corfu, Greece. Her books of poems in English include Without Margins, Folds of Silence, Dream Catcher, and Untitled; she also has two bilingual collections, Poems Come Home (with translations by Gulzar) and Rowing Together (with Savita Singh). Her poetry has been inspired in part by working with homeless people, tsunami victims, and street children. Her major critical works include Narrating Partition. In 2007, she guest-edited Crossing Over: Partition Literature from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (University of Hawai‘i Press; reprinted by Doaba Publications). Her other edited and coedited books include Speaking for Herself: Asian Women’s Writings (Penguin) and Cultural Diversity in India (Macmillan India).
Cassandra Lane is a former newspaper journalist and teacher who has published essays, columns, and articles in The Times-Picayune, The Source, TheScreamOnline, BET Magazine, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Bellingham Review, and Gambit, and in the anthologies Everything but the Burden and Daddy, Can I Tell You Something. She is a Voices of Our Nation (VONA) fellow and has performed readings at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, Beyond Baroque, and more. She received an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.
Pat Matsueda is the managing editor of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing and the author of Stray (El León Literary Arts, 2006). She is working on a novella, Bedeviled, an excerpt of which appeared in Eleven Eleven, the literary journal of the California College of the Arts.
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Adele Ne Jame lives in Hawai‘i and teaches poetry at Hawaii Pacific University. She has published four books of poems, including Poems, Land & Spirit (Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates and Bidoun Press) and The South Wind (Manoa Books and El León Literary Arts). Her work has appeared in American Nature Writing, Ploughshares, Nimrod, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Kanto, Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Hawaii Pacific Review, Mixed Nerve, and several Arab American anthologies, including Inclined to Speak. Her poems were recently exhibited as broadsides at the Sharjah, United Arab Emirates International Biennial. She has served as the poet-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and received numerous grants and prizes, including a Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, and an Elliott Cades Award for Literature.
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Angela Nishimoto was raised on the windward side of O‘ahu, teaches on the leeward side, and lives in Honolulu with her husband. She earned her master-of-science degree in botanical science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She has published fiction in Hawai‘i Pacific Review, Chaminade Literary Review, Kaimana, Hawai‘i Review, Bamboo Ridge, Writing Raw, and elsewhere.
Connie Pan is a fiction writer originally from Maui. She received a BA in creative writing from Grand Valley State University and an MFA in fiction from West Virginia University. Her writing has appeared in Rosebud Magazine, Hawai‘i Review, and Bamboo Ridge. “The Patron Saint of Exits,” an excerpt from her novel in progress, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives on O‘ahu, where she works as a freelance writer.
Eman Quotah‘s fiction has appeared in Pindeldyboz and Gargoyle. Her story “London Fog” was a top twenty-five finalist in Glimmer Train’s Short-Story Award for New Writers contest and appears in Amazing Graces: Yet Another Collection of Fiction by Washington Area Women (Paycock Press). She has been the John McClelland Historical Writing Resident at the Espy Foundation and received grants from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County and the Maryland State Arts Council.
Judith Roche has won two American Book Awards and has published three collections of poetry; a fourth, All Fire All Water, will appear in 2015. She has taught at all levels from elementary to university. She has poems installed in several Seattle-area public art installations and is widely published in magazines and journals. She is a Fellow in the Black Earth Institute, an organization dedicated to social justice, environmental issues, and spiritual awareness.
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Hope Wabuke is a California-based mom and writer. Her poetry has appeared in The North American Review, Ruminate Magazine, Salamander, Fjords Literary Journal, Literary Mama, Joint Literary, Kalyani Magazine, Weave Magazine, Cease Cows, and other publications. Her essays have appeared in Salon, Gawker, The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Magazine, The Feminist Wire, The Hairpin, Ozy, The Root, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Ms. Magazine online. She reviews books for The Kirkus Reviews and has won fellowships from The New York Times and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers.
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Phyllis Gray Young is a retired nurse. She lives and writes in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. “Joaquim” is an excerpt from her novel Sea Home.
Artists
Melissa Chimera is a conservationist and Honolulu native of Lebanese and Filipino ancestry. She studied natural resources management and painting at the University of Hawai‘i, a world epicenter for plant and animal extinction. Chimera’s paintings, installations, and mixed-media works prompt questions about extinction, globalization, and our role as humans in these processes. She juxtaposes the catastrophic implications of environmental change, war, and alienation with a method grounded in formal elements of painting and treatment of linen as textile. Chimera keeps a studio in Maui and exhibits in Hawai‘i and across the United States, Asia, and the Middle East. In 2009, she was commissioned with her mother, Adele Ne Jame, to create Inheritance: Reclaiming Land and Spirit, a joint poetry-painting project for the Sharjah Biennial.
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Naomi Long Eagleson is a book editor and writer in Los Angeles. She is the author of Radiant Field, a chapbook published by Tinfish Press. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA in English from the University of Hawai‘i. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Arts & Letters, Words without Borders, and Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, and in the anthology Century of the Tiger: One Hundred Years of Korean Culture in America. She is a former member of the artist group Orientity and has exhibited work at the Kyoto Art Center and the Fringe Club in Hong Kong.
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Kate Joyce is a visual artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she has exhibited nationally and internationally with photographs covering a diverse array of subjects. Throughout her developing career, she has valued her collaborations with writers, artists, designers, and community builders. She studied photojournalism and sociology at San Francisco State University; Spanish in Guatemala and Chile; and documentary photography at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She received a Lewis Hine Documentary Initiative Fellowship in 2004 and has had work published in The New Yorker, Manoa Journal, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, and Architect Magazine. Her work is held in the collections of The Museum of New Mexico, The J.P. Morgan Chase Art Collection, and Duke University Perkins Library Special Collections and Rare Archive. She is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art, New York.
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