Foot binding, or footbinding, was the Chinese custom of breaking and tightly binding the feet of young girls in order to change their shape and size. Feet altered by footbinding were known as lotus feet, and the shoes made for these feet were known as lotus shoes. In late imperial China, bound feet were considered a status symbol and a mark of feminine beauty. However, footbinding was a painful practice that limited the mobility of women and resulted in lifelong disabilities.
Lu Ping, born in Kaohsiung in 1953, is a Taiwanese writer who writes under the pen name “Ping Lu”. Her writing encompasses a broad range of genres, including novels, essays, poems, commentary, and theater plays. She is also known in the Chinese-language world for her critique of social phenomenon, ranging from cultural development to gender issues and human rights. Over the past two decades, Ms. Lu has successfully established herself as a prominent novelist, columnist, and commentator in Taiwan.
Wang Anyi is a Chinese writer, vice-chair of the China Writers Association since 2006, and professor in Chinese Literature at Fudan University since 2004.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an American scholar, cultural critic, novelist, and poet whose works include historical novels and scholarly studies on Chicana/o art, culture and sexuality.
Bao Phi is a Vietnamese-American spoken word artist, writer and community activist living in Minnesota. Bao Phi's collection of poems, Sông I Sing, was published in 2011 and, Thousand Star Hotel, was published in 2017 by Coffee House Press. He has written three children’s books published by Capstone Press. First book, A Different Pond received multiple awards, including the Caldecott Award, Charlotte Zolotow Award, the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books.
Sun Yung Shin is a Korean American poet, writer, consultant, and educator living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer and author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir from Coffee House Press and The Song Poet from Metropolitan Press. Her work has appeared in the Paj Ntaub Voice Hmong literary journal, "Waterstone~Review," and other publications. She is a contributing writer to On Being's Public Theology Reimagined blog. Additionally, Yang wrote the lyric documentary, The Place Where We Were Born. Yang currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Graywolf Press is an independent, non-profit publisher located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Hualing Nieh Engle, née Nieh Hua-ling, is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa.
Joanie V. Mackowski is an American poet.
The Three Sui Quash the Demons' Revolt also translated as Quelling the Demons' Revolt and The Sorcerer's Revolt is a Chinese novel attributed to the 14th-century novelist Luo Guanzhong, although the earliest extant version was compiled between 1571 and 1589, possibly by Wang Shenxiu (王慎脩). In 1620 Feng Menglong expanded the novel to forty chapters from the original twenty. A work in the shenmo genre, the novel blends comedy with the supernatural, and is an early work of vernacular fiction.
M. Evelina Galang is an American novelist, short story writer, editor, essayist, educator, and activist of Filipina descent. Her novel One Tribe won the AWP Novel of the Year Prize in 2004.
Devon Jean Moore is an American poet and author.
Leung Ping-kwan, whose pen name was Yesi, was a Hong Kong poet, novelist, essayist, translator, teacher, and scholar who received the Hong Kong Medal of Honor (MH). He was an important long-time cultural figure in Hong Kong.
Brynne Rebele-Henry is an American writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
Linda LeGarde Grover is an Anishinaabe novelist and short story writer. An enrolled member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, she is a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, as well as a columnist for the Duluth News Tribune.
Rachel Levitsky is a feminist avant-garde poet, novelist, essayist, translator, editor, educator, and a founder of Belladonna* Collaborative. She was born in New York City and earned an MFA from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Her first poems were published in Clamour, a magazine edited by Renee Gladman in San Francisco during the late 1990s. Levitsky has since written three books, nine chapbooks, and been translated into five languages.
Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is currently housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
