Jon Pineda is the author of the poetry collections The Translator's Diary, winner of the Green Rose Prize, and Birthmark, winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series Open Competition. His memoir Sleep In Me is due out in September from the University of Nebraska Press.
Jai Arun Ravine is a transgender-identified, multi-disciplinary writer, dancer, visual and performing artist of mixed Thai and white American heritage. Jai received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University and a BA in Interdisciplinary Asian Studies from Hollins University. A Kundiman Fellow, Jai's first chapbook, Is This January, is available from Corollary Press.
Bushra Rehman is a vagabond poet who traveled for years with nothing more than a greyhound ticket and a book bag full of poems. She is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Seal Press) and has been featured on BBC Radio 4, KPFA, the Brian Lehrer Show and in The New York Times, India Currents and NY Newsday. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Sepia Mutiny, Color Lines, Mizna, Curve, SAMAR and in numerous anthologies.
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), and Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010). She is an adjunct professor in Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco. Visit her online at barbarajanereyes.com
Melissa Roxas is a poet, writer, and activist. She was a 2004 PEN USA Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow and a Kundiman Fellow in 2005 and 2006. For the past 15 years, she has done community work in Southern California and in the Philippines. While conducting community health work in May of 2009, she was abducted and tortured by the Philippine military. This experience has deepened her commitment to human rights work and to continue writing for truth and justice.
Sankar Roy, originally from India, is a poet, translator, activist and multimedia artist living near Pittsburgh, PA. He is a winner of PEN USA Emerging Voices, a Rosenthal Fellow, a finalist for Benjamin Franklin Award, winner of Skipping Stone Award and author of three chapbooks of poetry. Sankar’s poems have appeared and forthcoming in over eighty journals and anthologies. Moon Country, a full-length book is forthcoming from Tebot Bach.
Eileen Tabios' books include 18 poetry collections, most recently including The Thorn Rosary: Selected Prose Poems (1998-2010), edited with an introduction by poet-critic-painter-scholar Thomas Fink and with an afterword by poet-scholar Joi Barrios-Leblanc. Visit her blog at http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com.
Vanni Taing studied English at Cal Poly, San Luis Obipso. She will be pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University in the fall and is looking forward to starting the Chia Pet farm she has always wanted in Kalamazoo.