William Pei Shih

Novelist

Faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the New York University, MFA, Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa.

His stories have won numerous accolades, including the John Steinbeck Award in Fiction, Flannery O’Connor in Short Fiction and the Raymond Carver Short Story Award.

His works have appeared in 2020 American Best Short Stories Collection, Novels, Wilderness, Boston Review, Southern Review, and more.

Qian Jianan

Novelist

Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Southern California; MFA, Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa.

Jianan is a bilingual writer. She has published four novels in mandarin and her English stories have appeared on New York Times, Granta, Guernica, and Gulf Coast.

Her novels have won numerous awards both domestically and internationally. In 2021, she won the O. Henry Award, the oldest short story award in American history, for her short film novel “To the Dogs”.

Frances Leviston

Poet · Scholar

Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the
University of Manchester and tutor at the Arvon Foundation, the Poetry School, Oxford University and Cambridge WordFest.

Her poetry collection, Public Dream, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006.

Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Edinburgh Review, Granta, and British Council New Writing.

Herbert Tucker

Scholar · Editor

Professor of the Department of English at the University of Virginia.

He has published the books, Epic via Oxford in 2008, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism via Harvard University Press in 1988, and Browning’s Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure via Minnesota in 1981.

He is the associate editor of New Literature History and the series editor of Victorian Literature and Culture.

Paul Batchelor

Poet· Critics

Chair, Creative Writing Department, Durham University (#1 ranking in creative writing in the UK) .

Paul is a world-renowned poet who has published multiple collections of his poems. His work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Review, Times, The Guardian, and London Review of Books.

He has served as a judge in famous poetry contests such as Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Awards.

Lingyi Chen

Podcaster · Filmmaker

Lingyi studied broadcasting and television directing at Tongji University in Shanghai. She currently leads brand communication of PopSocket.

She runs a podcast channel named Bodengbodeng, with one episode attracting more than 179,000 listening. She has directed, filmed, and edited more than 20 commercials, vlogs, and documentaries.

She is passionate about topics including urbanspace, recycling economy, and sustainability.

Kia Natisse 

Co-Host, Invisibilia

Co-host of NPR‘s Invisibilia.A trained journalist turned artist, her love for storytelling is a driving creative force that led her to many unexpected places.

She has done numerous artist residencies,most notably, the Third Coast Radio Residency, which unarguably changed her life.

Since joining NPR, she’s has helped cover a summer camp that’s confronting race,co-produced a story about a woman who can smell disease, been the voice of Dorothy Height and revisited the legend of the most famous super-spreader in America.

Yowei Shaw

Host and Editorial Lead, Invisibilia

Her work has been featured in This American Life, Pop Up Magazine, and The World.

She has received numerous accolades, including Third Coast Documentary Award, United States Artists fellowship, Leeway Transformation Award, National Edward R. Murrow Award, and AAJA National Journalism Association Award.

She is a 2011 AIR New Voices scholar and proud daughter of Taiwanese-American immigrants. And, once upon a time, she made elevator music in Chinatown, Philadelphia.