S. Shankar (he/him)

S. Shankar is a novelist, literary and cultural critic, and translator. He is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa; Editor of Mānoa journal; and a member of the Board of External Experts appointed to advise the Swedish Academy in the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature (2022-2025). Shankar’s most recent book is his third novel Ghost in the Tamarind, published in September 2017.

Chandanie Somwaru (she/her)

Chandanie Somwaru is an Indo-Caribbean woman who was born and raised in Queens, New York. As a storyteller and experimental poet, her work is immersed in her mixed tongue, religious upbringings, superstitions, and cultural traditions that have made her into the red hibiscus she is. Her writing has been published in Angime, Honey Literary, Posit, Solstice, SWWIM, The Margins, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. In 2021, Somwaru published a chapbook with Ghostbird Press titled Urgent \\ Where The Mind Goes \\ Scattered. She received an MFA in poetry from Queens College and is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. 

Amanda Galvan Huynh (she/her)

Amanda Galvan Huynh is a Xicana writer and educator from Texas. She is the author of Where My Umbilical is Buried (Sundress Publications 2023), a chapbook, Songs of Brujería and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics. Amanda has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net. She was a 2016 AWP Intro Journal Project Award Winner, 2018 Best of the Net Winner, a finalist for the 2015 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poetry can be read in print and online journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, The Southampton Review, and others.

Amanda earned her MFA in Poetry at Old Dominion University, BA in English at the University of Texas at Arlington, and BA in Biology at the University of Texas at Dallas. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Audrey Beaton (they/them)

As a senior undergraduate student at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Audrey Beaton is studying English with a focus in creative writing, as well as Korean language and literature. Their creative interests lie in fiction, poetry, and a hybrid of the two.

Anna Kalabukhova (she/her)

Anna is an undergraduate senior studying English with a concentration in creative writing as well as pre-med. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of Ānuenue Review and sails for the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She has had two non-fiction pieces and one fiction piece published in The Foundationalist Journal and one fiction and one non-fiction piece published in The Horizons Undergraduate Journal.

Precy Pananganan (she/her)

Precy Pananganan is a senior undergraduate at the University of Hawaiʻi at UH Mānoa. Pursuing her bachelor of arts in English, she enjoys all sorts of genres of reading and writing. She hopes to learn and gain valuable experience at MĀNOA Journal.