Xi Chuan is a Chinese poet, essayist and translator, currently a distinguished professor of Beijing Normal University. He has published nine collections of poems, two books of essays and three books of critical writings, in addition to a play and numerous translations of Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, Czeslaw Milosz, Gary Snyder and others. His awards include National Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001), Swedish Cicada prize for poetry (2018), Japanese Tokyo Poetry Prize (2018). He was also one of the top ten winners of the 1999 Weimar International Essay Prize Contest, Germany. His work has been widely anthologized and translated and published in more than twenty countries. His book of poems in English translation Notes on the Mosquito: Xi Chuan /Selected Poems (tr. Lucas Klein) published by New Directions, New York, 2012, was awarded ALTA’s 2013 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and was shortlisted for American 2013 Best Translated Book Award.
Jeffrey C. Kinkley is a retired professor of history from St. John's University, New York City, where he has taught the modern history and literature of China. Currently he is a courtesy professor of history and of world languages and literatures at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, USA. A John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in the field of literature, he has translated works of fiction and autobiography from the Chinese and written four monographs on Chinese literary history of the twentieth century and beyond, with special emphasis on the works and times of Shen Congwen (1902-88), and modern and contemporary detective fiction.
Xia Zhao received her BA in Chinese Language and Literature and MA in Children’s Literature in 2003 and 2006, and her PhD in Literary Theory in 2013. She is now Associate Professor in the College of Creative Culture and Communication at Zhejiang Normal University and Director of the Children’s Literature Committee of Zhejiang Provincial Writers Association. Xia has been concentrating her study on children’s literature and culture for nearly two decades. She is the author of seven academic books including The Spirit of Childhood and the Redemption of Culture: Aesthetic Research of Contemporary Cultural Consumption of Childhood (2017), Poetics of the Tender Age: The Arts of Literature for Young Children(2016), The Journey of Thoughts: A Critical Study of Contemporary English Children’s Literature Theory (2015), and two prose books for children. She has also translated twelve books (English to Chinese) and edited or joined the editing board of a number of children’s literature selections and primary readings. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge between 2019.10-2020.10. In 2008, she received the fellowship from the International Youth Library in Munich and has since then been entrusted with the selecting and reviewing of Chinese children’s books for the annual White Ravens: A Selection of International Children’s and Youth Literature published by the IYL.
