About the Contributors
- About the Contributors
Note: Family names and single personal names appear in bold capital letters.
francoise benichou was a professional freelance writer in French and English. Her translation of Soth Polin's "Command Me to Exist" was her final work.
bunchan mol (1916–1975) came from a high-ranking family. He served as a monk for ten years, became a boxer, and joined the nationalist movement seeking independence from France. He was arrested in Phnom Penh in 1942 after joining five hundred monks in an anti-French demonstration and was sentenced to five years in Poulo Condor prison on Koh Tralach island (now Côn Sơn island) and fifteen years in exile. After the French colonial government fell to the Japanese in 1945, Mol was released. He later worked under Lon Nol as an undersecretary of propaganda and religion. In the early 1970s, he published Kuk Noyobay (Political Prison), describing his life in Poulo Condor, and Charet Khmae (The Khmer Mentality). He was executed by the Khmer Rouge in 1975.
chey chap was born in 1949 in Kratie and became one of Cambodia's most famous poets of the 1980s and 1990s. He taught at the Royal University of Phnom Penh for many years. In 2004, he received the S.E.A. Write Award for his book Pi Nih … Pi Nuh (From Here … From There). His other books of poetry include Ao Phtei Srok Khmae (O Khmer Land, 1994).
elizabeth chey works with international, community-based, and small nonprofits on communications, advocacy, strategic planning, and capacity building. She served as assistant regional director of Asia Programs for the American Friends Service Committee and program development officer for Cambodian Living Arts. She earned her MFA from New York University and a journalism degree from Northwestern.
theanly chov was born in Battambang province in 1985. He graduated in graphic design at the Vocational Training Center Battambang in 2007, then moved to Phnom Penh in 2011, graduating from Chamroeun University of Poly-Technology. His paintings have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Cambodia and abroad, including Phnom Penh, at the Musée de l'Hospice Comtesse de Lille, France (2015–2016), and Cambodia: Looking Back to the Future, at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut (2017).
erik w. davis studies and teaches Buddhism, ritual, and the theory of religion at Macalester College. In 2016, he published Deathpower: Buddhism's Ritual Imagination in Cambodia (Columbia UP). He was an advisor for research projects at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, and is coeditor of Sīmas: Foundations of Buddhist Religion (University of Hawai'i Press, 2022).
king ang duong (1796–1860) was the last pre-colonial king of Cambodia, reigning from the 1840s until his death. Celebrated today for his efforts to revive Khmer ritual, artistic, legal, and literary traditions, he was a prolific poet, translator, and Buddhist scholar. Trained in Siamese literature, he translated a number of works to and from Thai. He also composed traditional lakhaon plays in Khmer and a version of "Code for Girls" (cpāp' srī).
penny edwards teaches Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation (2008) and over twenty articles on the political and cultural history of Cambodia and Burma; she is the coeditor of six volumes, including Mediating Chineseness in Cambodia (2013). Her translations from Chinese and Khmer include A Short History of the Buddhist Institute (2005). She is collecting writing from Burma that will appear in Mānoa in winter 2022.
direk hongthong is a lecturer at the Department of Thai Language, Faculty of Humanities at Kasetsart University, Thailand. A specialist in Northern Khmer language and music, he received his Ph.D. in Thai literature from Chulalongkorn University in 2016.
queen indradevī (late twelfth–early thirteenth century) was the chief queen of Jayavarman VII, the most powerful monarch of the Angkorian period. A renowned teacher of Mahayana Buddhism, she is one of the earliest known female poets in Southeast Asia.
maria hach is a writer, researcher, and community worker living on the lands of the Boonwurrung People of the Kulin Nation. She holds a Ph.D. in cultural and gender studies from...
