Authors
Tony Kile is a Honolulu based writer, poet, artist, photographer, and a musician. In addition to being generally sarcastic and off-putting in the most passive way imaginable, he is universally cherished in the Honolulu Chinatown community.
S. K. Kruse grew up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, then left for Madison to earn her degree in English from the University of Wisconsin and launch her writing career. After making her big debut in The Onion, however, she found herself on a twenty-five-year sabbatical to raise eleven children. Since emerging from this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction period of her life, her writing has been longlisted for the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction and has won multiple awards in the National League of American Pen Women’s “Soul-making Keats Literary Competition.”
As the son of a newspaperman, Omer Kursat discovered photography at an early age as he observed journalists with cameras, typewriters and telex machines transforming the news into printed words and pictures on a daily basis. This influence also defines his current candid style for street and documentary photography.
After twenty years trembling on the brink of rock stardom and fifteen years working at record companies, Ted Myers left the music business—or perhaps it was the other way around—and took a job as a copywriter at an advertising agency. This cemented his determination to make his mark as an author. His short fiction has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. His epic and amusing memoir, Making It: Music, Sex & Drugs in the Golden Age of Rock was published in 2017. Fluffy’s Revolution (2019) was his first novel. His second novel, Paris Escapade, was published in December 2020.
George Tanabe earned a Ph.D. in Japanese religions (esp. Buddhism) from Columbia University and taught in the Department of Religion at the University of Hawai‘i. His academic books have been published by university presses at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and Hawai‘i. For promoting cultural understanding between Japan and the United States, he was awarded the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Award in 2007 and the Imperial Order of the Rising Sun in 2012.
Elsha Taya Travis (formerly Elsha Bohnert) creates art and poems from wandering around and reimagining things lost, forgotten and trashed. Born in Indonesia before World War II from Dutch-Indonesian parents, she came to the US via The Netherlands as a refugee. Hawaii is the closest she comes to heaven on earth.
Michael Sanders, a physician, scientist, writer and poet, received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Cornell University and his MD from New York University Medical School. His first book of poetry, Fun in Space, Love in a Violent World & Other Poems was published in 2014. Dr. Sanders currently lives with his wife Diane in southern Florida and is a professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Peter Shaindlin moves unpredictably between creative writing, music, photography, and the teaching of aesthetics. His primary poetic influences include Octavio Paz, Geoffrey Hill, Kenneth Rexroth, and Federico Garcia Lorca. An alumnus of the University of Oxford, he resides in Hawaii and prefers imaginary travel to that of the physical journey.
Lee Siegel, Emeritus Professor of Religion at the University of Hawaii, has published eight novels, four non-fiction books, and a translation of Sanskrit love poetry. Siegel’s writing has earned him a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, two Residency awards at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and the Elliot Cades Award for Literature.