Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry

Contributor Bios

Joseph Marconi Calindas is an accomplished Filipino painter, writer, singer, and composer. He is currently a correspondent for GMA News TV, an online major news organization in the Philippines. Marconi has chosen to focus his talents on his painting career. He has been called the "Britto of Micronesia," a moniker that describes his vibrant use of color and lines to convey his commitment to socially and environmentally relevant issues. His works have been displayed and exhibited in several venues such as the Newpark Mall Cultural Center, Newark (2011), Artists Alley San Francisco (2011), Cantina Lounge Gallery San Francisco (2011), Billy De Frank LGBT Center San Jose (2011), San Francisco City Hall Office of the Supervisors (2010), A-Forest Gallery, New York City (2010), Aspect Gallery San Francisco (2009), among many others.

Michelle Chandra is a San Francisco-based photographer who enjoys the meditative process of film photography. Never far from a camera, Michelle enjoys documenting the natural beauty of the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2010, Michelle exhibited artwork at CellSpace as part of SF Open Studios. Her photographs have been featured on local San Francisco blogs including Muni Diaries and SFist. Michelle is the Volunteer Coordinator for the Red Poppy Art House and has worked for the Stern Grove Festival Association and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. Michelle is a first generation Indian-Irish American.

Issue 3 | Summer 2011

Jen Y. Cheng is of Chinese/Taiwanese descent, born in Massachusetts, with roots and shoots in the SF Bay Area, and in Paraguay, where she served in the Peace Corps. She works as a freelance translator and grant writer, volunteers in development and fundraising at Kearny Street Workshop, participates in the San Francisco Zen Center Sunday Writing Studio, and has been working toward a first chapbook with assistance from Green Fuse Press.

Wendy Chin-Tanner's poetry has appeared in such journals as The Raintown Review, The Saint Ann's Review, Praxilla, Melusine, The Nervous Breakdown, and the May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge. Her first collection has been selected as a finalist for several book prizes including the 2010 Washington Prize. Wendy serves as a poetry editor at the online journal The Nervous Breakdown and as an academic supervisor in sociology for Cambridge University, UK.

Shayok (Misha) Chowdhury is a queer Bengali poet, singer and performer. He received his mantra, "Story comes first," from an unlikely medicine man in a suburban high school theater rehearsal; he has been living his responsibility to story ever since. Misha is a Kundiman Fellow, and he recently returned from a Fulbright Creative Writing Fellowship in Calcutta, his city of origin, under the auspices of which a collection of new poems was born. His poems have been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review and The Portland Review. Currently, he teaches humanities and theater at a small progressive school in Boston, while working more or less diligently on his own poetry and performance projects.