The Bay Area's Hub for Asian Pacific American Community Arts Since 1972
APAture 2015: Future Tense
Literary Arts | Artist Bios
Kazumi Chin is a poet from El Cerrito. He earned his B.A. in creative writing from the U.C. Riverside and his M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. His most recent work can be found in Twelfth House, Barrelhouse magazine, Wu Wei Fashion Mag, and The Ilanot Review.
Yume Kim was born and raised in Northern Virginia before moving to San Francisco for her graduate studies. After getting settled on the West Coast, she obtained both an M.A. in English and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She self-identifies as a poet but hopes to one day achieve her childhood dream of publishing a novel about girls who can fight monsters while flying. Some of her works can be found in sPARKLE + bLINK, gesture, Sugared Water, West Wind Review, Writing Without Walls, and The East Bay Review (forthcoming).
Ari Laurel grew up in Oakland, and has lived near the ocean for most of her life. She has worked among a number of arts, literary, and advocacy nonprofits, including the National Institute for Art and Disabilities, NaNoWriMo, the YWCA, and Hyphen magazine, where she is currently a blog editor. Her work deals with Asian-American icons and youth identity in the ever-shifting Bay Area. She was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/USA Emerging Writers Fellowship, and her work has appeared in Bitch Media, The Toast, Quartz, Duende, Kweli Journal, and Hyphen. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Montana.
Quinn Leong is a queer, trans mixed-race Asian-American poet and musician duo. Their work often deals with themes of gender, race, memory, diaspora, language, family, and identity. In 2015, they completed the self-published and hand-bound poetry collection, Gesture, a book of poems centered on the possibilities of language for meaningful translation of identity. Having previously written and performed with poets and spoken word groups in Michigan and Massachusetts, they now live and write in San Francisco.
Michelle Lin earned her B.A. in creative writing from the U.C. Riverside and her M.F.A. from the University of Pittsburgh. She was a former Gluck Fellow and an editor of the journals Mosaic, B.E. Quarterly, and Hot Metal Bridge. She has taught poetry for the LEAPS summer program, the Young Writer’s Institute, and the University of Pittsburgh. Her latest poems can either be found or are forthcoming in Aster(ix), Quaint magazine, Apogee, and The Journal.
Originally from Strasbourg, France, François Luong is a poet, translator, book designer, and illustrator living in San Francisco. He has brought into English the works of Esther Tellermann, César Moro, François Turcot, Hector Ruiz, and other writers from France and Quebec, Canada. With Amish Trivedi, he co-edits the web magazine N/A (www.nalitjournal.com).
Ploi Pirapokin’s work is featured in the Griffith Review, Hyphen magazine, Asia Literary Review, the Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong, and Transfer magazine. Winner of the Leo Litwak Award in fiction, honorable mention for San Francisco State University’s Wilner Award, and a finalist for the SLS-Disquiet Literary Prize, she has also received fellowships from Kundiman and the Writers on Writing Workshop at Tomales Bay. She has been awarded creative writing residencies at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and the Vermont Studio Center, a scholarship at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and placements at many writer conferences.
Kanwalroop Kaur Singh was a recipient of the Yoshiko Uchida Prize in Writing at U.C. Berkeley; has participated in the VONA/Voices workshop for writers of color; and has been published on the popular website Black Girl Dangerous. She hopes to one day be an artolarist (artist-scholar-activist).
Shelley Wong lives in Oakland. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Vinyl, The Normal School, Linebreak, Ninth Letter Online, and Devil’s Lake. She is the recipient of the 2014 Normal Prize for poetry in addition to fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, Fine Arts Work Center, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.