Regional Chairs
Northeast
KEVIN CHANG BARNUM
Kevin Chang Barnum is a fiction writer, poet, and audio creator based in Connecticut. He has written for Podcast Review, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and his work has appeared on NPR. He has a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of California, Irvine.
ANGELA SIEW
Angela Siew is a multilingual poet with an MFA from Emerson College. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the City of Boston. Her chapbook, Coming Home, was awarded a 2025 Connecticut Artist Fellowship Grant and is available from Cut Bank. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Salamander, Meridian, and LEON Literary Review, among others. A former private tutor and English language teacher, she has also taught overseas in Chile and Italy.
Midwest
Helene Achanzar
Helene Achanzar is a Filipina Canadian poet and educator. Her writing can be found in Oxford American, jubilat, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Editor for Poetry Northwest and works as the Programs Manager at the Chicago Poetry Center.
South
Tiffany Mi
Tiffany Mi is a Chinese-American poet interested in collective memory and the archive. A Kundiman South Regional Co-Chair and Watering Hole Fellow, she has published work in Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence, where she is pursuing an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University.
Joshua Nguyen
Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021) and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body (Sundress Publications, 2023). He is a Vietnamese American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in Wildness, The Texas Review, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. He is a humor editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi. He currently teaches at Tufts University and Boston College.
Southwest
ELIZABETH EUNYOUNG LEE
Elizabeth Eunyoung Lee (she/her) is an award-winning Korean American fiction and nonfiction writer based out of Santa Fe, NM. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Georgia Review, Pleiades Magazine, Santa Fe Noir, Vestal Review and others, has received nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award, and support from Breadloaf, Tin House, Kenyon Writer’s Workshop, Storystudio Chicago and Storyknife. She’s a graduate of Brown University and Institute of Indian American Arts (IAIA) and a former Fulbright scholar, documentary filmmaker, TV producer and massage therapist. She’s currently working on a family saga and a hybrid memoir, both of which deal with themes of intergenerational trauma, addiction, memory in the body and womanhood. Her favorite things include eating, cooking, watching movies, belly laughing, mint tea, and the color blue. www.elizabethleewriting.com.
JANE LIN
Jane Lin is the author of Day of Clean Brightness (3: A Taos Press, 2017). She is a poet and a software engineer for an environmental consulting company. Jane received her MFA from New York University and fellowships from Kundiman and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Northern New Mexico where she taught creative writing for many years at UNM-Los Alamos.
MOUNTAIN WEST
JM Huck
JM Huck is a Creative Writing MFA student at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and reader for Witness. Huck is a member of the Nevada Arts Council Teaching Artist Roster for Literary Arts and occasionally leads workshops in visual arts. She has called Nevada “home” since 2022 and previously worked in Tokyo and NYC. Follow her on Instagram @bandittrl.
Pacific Northwest
Ching-In Chen
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They are also a Kelsey Street Press collective member and an Airlie Press editor. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as the Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond. www.chinginchen.com
Asela Lee Kemper
Asela Lee Kemper is a poet based in Southern Oregon. She is a poetry editor at Variety Pack magazine and has previously worked with presses and magazines including Timberline Review, and Copper Canyon Press. She also has published works in Silk Club: QUIET, Mag 20/20 and the anthology No Tender Fences. She is the author of the digital chapbook Cherry Blossom Festival and audio microchapbook Finally: The Mixtape. Asela is currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Pacific Northwest College of Arts. You can find Asela on Twitter @AselaLeeK and Instagram @thesakuraink.
Northern California
Isa Maloof
Isa Maloof was born in Hong Kong. She is a poet and current Teaching Fellow at St. Mary’s College of California.
Southern California
Jessica Abughattas
Jessica Abughattas is a Palestinian American poet and the author of Strip (University of Arkansas Press, 2020), which was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Her short poetry film “Dinner Party” premiered at Mizna Twin Cities Film Festival in 2021, was a finalist for Palette Poetry’s Brush and Lyre Prize, and appeared at RAWI Fest. From 2020 to 2022, she was the Poet Laureate of Altadena, California and editor of Altadena Poetry Review. A Kundiman fellow and current Regional Co-Chair for Kundiman in Southern California, her poems have appeared in The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Lit Hub, Waxwing, and other places. She lives in Los Angeles, where she’s writing a second poetry collection.
Kien Lam
Kien Lam is the author of EXTINCTION THEORY, winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, forthcoming from UGA Press (Fall 2022). Individual poems have been published in Poetry, The New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from Indiana University. He lives in Los Angeles and is currently working with Paramount+ and the creators of American Vandal on an esports mockumentary called PLAYERS, set to release Summer 2022.
Hawaiʻi
Joseph Han
Joseph Han is the author of Nuclear Family, named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a best book of the year by NPR and Time Magazine. He is a 2022 National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ honoree and a Kundiman fellow in fiction. His novel won the 2023 Asian/Pacific American Literature Award Adult Fiction Honor, the 2024 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. In 2023, he received the Elliot Cades Award for Literature for Emerging Artist from the Hawaiʻi Literary Arts Council. He is an editor for the West region of Joyland Magazine and an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury 2023), a USA Today national bestseller. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was a Fiction Fellow. Currently a Visiting Faculty in Fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program and a Fiction Editor for No Tokens journal, she lives in Honolulu.
international
Neil Aitken
Neil Aitken is a Chinese-Scottish Canadian writer, editor, translator, and programmer. He is the author of Babbage’s Dream (Sundress Publications, 2017) and The Lost Country of Sight (Anhinga Press, 2008), winner of the 2007 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. His chapbook Leviathan (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2016) won the Elgin Prize for Science Fiction Poetry Chapbook. He holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Southern California, an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, and has received fellowships from both Kundiman and Idyllwild. Neil is also the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, co-director of De-Canon: A Library Project, and creator of Have Book Will Travel, an author resource site. After spending over twenty years in the United States, he returned to Canada in 2019 and now lives in Regina, Saskatchewan where he works as a creative writing coach and manuscript consultant.