Kartika_Issue15

ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she chairs the English department at
a faith-based college in southern California, where she is also a novice
harpist.
Henry W. Leung is a Kundiman Fellow and the author of Paradise Hunger,
which won the 2012 Swan Scythe Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. He is also
a columnist for the Lantern Review, a Soros Fellow, and working toward
completion of his MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan. His work
has appeared in such publications as Cerise Press, Memoir Journal, and
ZYZZYVA.
Purvi Shah believes in the miracle of poetry and the beauty of change.
Winner of the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award in 2008
for her work fighting violence against women, she also directed Together
We Are New York, a community-based poetry project to highlight the voices
of Asian Americans during the 10th anniversary of 9/11. She writes to plumb
migration and loss, including through her first book, Terrain Tracks (New
Rivers Press, 2006), which was nominated for the Asian American Writers’
Workshop Members’ Choice Award in 2007. In 2010 she received a Travel
& Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation to explore sound vibration and
meaning in Sanskrit and how sound energy can translate through poetry in
English. Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies
including Descant, Drunken Boat, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indivisible, The
Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, and Weber Studies.
You can find more of her work at http://purvipoets.net,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/purvi-shah, or @PurviPoets.
NONFICTION
Jackson Bliss earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame where he was the
Fiction Fellow and the 2007 Sparks Prize Winner. Now, he is finishing his PhD in
English and Creative at USC, working with TC Boyle, Viet Nguyen and Aimee
Bender. Jackson has work published in the Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Fiction,
Quarterly West, ZYZZYVA, Fiction International, Notre Dame Review, African
American Review, Quarter After Eight, Connecticut Review, Stand (UK), and 3:am
Magazine, among others.
Sean Labrador y Manzano lives on the island off the coast of Oakland. He edits the
anthology, Conversations at the Wartime Café. His chapbook, The Gulag
Arkipelago is published by Tinfish. Recent writing appears in Aufgabe, Eleven
Eleven, Generations, Conversations at a Wartime Café
(http://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/sean-labrador-y-manzano), Fag/Hag, Volt, The
Walrus, Tarpaulin Sky (http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/issue-17/index.html), The
Poetry of Yoga, Poetic Labor Project (http://labday2010.blogspot.com/2011/10/seanlabrador-y-manzano.html)
and elsewhere.
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