Three teaching staff from the Department of English, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (Assistant Professor), Jason S Polley (Associate Professor) and Lian-Hee Wee (Professor) have joined the Cha Writing Workshop Series as mentors to run workshops for local schoolchildren and economically disadvantaged groups in the city.
The series is supported by the English Departments at The Chinese University of Hong Kong 香港中文大學 and Hong Kong Baptist University 香港浸會大學 and will feature workshops conducted by writers, translators and educators affiliated with the Hong Kong-based international literary journal Cha. These writers, translators and educators may also give talks on literature, language, writing, craft, and more.
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is the founding co-editor of Cha, a vice president of PEN Hong Kong and an assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University with books forthcoming from Delere Press, Math Paper Press, Palgrave and Springer. She is also an editor of the academic journals Victorian Network and Hong Kong Studies and has edited or co-edited eight volumes of poetry, fiction and essays, including Desde Hong Kong (2014), Quixotica: Poems East of La Mancha (2016), We, Now, Here, There, Together (2017), and Twin Cities (2017). In 2015-2016, she co-directed the Hong Kong Budding Poets Award Programme (in collaboration with the Education Bureau and the Academy of Gifted Education). Tammy’s translations have been published in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, Drunken Boat and Pathlight and from the Chinese University Press. She is the winner of the 2015 Young Artist Award in Literary Arts, presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and her first poetry collection is Hula Hooping (2015). Visit her website for more information.
ABOUT JASON
Jason S Polley is associate professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include post-WWII comics, postmodern literature, Anglo-Indian fiction, Hong Kong Studies, and creative nonfiction. He has published on women in Banville, slum ideology in District 9, race in The Greenlanders, official narratives in Watchmen, and “everyday justice” in Smiley, Franzen, and DeLillo. Aside from a handful of Hong Kong-published playful experimental poems about power, promise, and protest, he has two creative nonfiction books: a collection of India travel-narratives-in-verse titled Refrain and a Hong Kong drug-underworld-novella-in-verse titled Cemetery Miss You. He is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong: Angles on a Coherent Imaginary (Palgrave, 2018), which contains his chapter on contemporary identity politics in Hong Kong as discursively reviewed through auteur director Wong Kar Wai’s early work.
Jason: My teaching career began almost two decades ago in primary school ESL classrooms both in Guangzhou and Hong Kong. I’d like to return to local early primary milieux. I hope to integrate the wordplay and jocoseriousness and care of verse and comics into local students’ early learning—and thinking and (self-)reflection.
ABOUT LIAN-HEE
Lian-Hee Wee is (co-)author or (co-)editor of eight books and numerous research articles. His most notable publications include the monograph Phonological Tone (Cambridge University Press, to appear) and the journal article “Tone Assignment in Hong Kong English” published in Language (2016). Lian-Hee’s work unravels patterns in Chinese languages as well as Asian varieties of English such as those spoken in Singapore and Hong Kong. He taught at the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore and is now Professor of Linguistics at the Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the founding director of Bilingual Improv Brigade which is probably the world’s first Chinese-English bilingual Improv Comedy Group. He dabbles with music, poetry, and animal activism.
Lian-Hee: I’m interested in teaching students of all ages, but I need to be told in advance so that I can prepare.
(December 2017)
Department of English, Hong Kong Baptist University 