Inara Verzemnieks has written for The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The Atlantic, The Iowa Review, and Creative Nonfiction.
She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.
After working for thirteen years as a newspaper journalist, she received her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, where she now teaches as an assistant professor.
Daryl Qilin Yam (b. 1991) is a writer, editor and arts organiser from Singapore. Shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize and nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, he is the author of two novels, a novella and the bestselling short story collection Be Your Own Bae (2024). He co-founded the literary charity Sing Lit Station, where he presently serves as the managing editor of its publishing arm AFTERIMAGE.
His writing has appeared in periodicals and publications such as the Berlin Quarterly, the Sewanee Review, The Straits Times and The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singapore Short Stories anthology series. His first novel, Kappa Quartet (2016), was selected by The Business Times as one of the best novels of the
Nisha Mehraj left full-time teaching and became a private tutor so she could pursue writing. The only home she has ever known is Singapore, yet she lives vicariously through her characters and escapes into the safety of the worlds she creates. The many strong women she has met and read about, and her own grandmother’s determination to raise her three daughters as independent thinking women, taught her to have ambitions and gave her the courage to dream. Her short story “Chai” was published in Mascara Literary Review in 2012. We Do Not Make Love Here is her first novel.
Arlene J. Chai (b. 1955) is a Filipino-Chinese-Australian who migrated to Australia with her parents and sisters in 1982 because of the political upheaval. She became an advertising copywriter at George Patterson's advertising agency in 1972 and has been working there since. It is there that she met her mentor Bryce Courtney, who continuously inspires her to improve her work.
She won the Louis Braille Adult Audio Book of the year for her novel "On the Goddess Rock" in 1999.
