Braema Mathi is a Singaporean researcher and activist. She believes in justice and tries her darnest to apply human rights to all that she gets involved in. She is the founder of NGOs Transient Workers Count Too and MARUAH (Singapore Working Group for ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism). Previously, Mathi was a Member of Parliament, a two-term President of the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), and the Vice-President of Action for AIDS. She has published book chapters and articles, for both academic and non-academic audiences, and she has written reports for organizations that included think-tanks in Southeast Asia and the United Nations. She is also an award-winning journalist, who worked for the national newspaper for almost 8 years. A sought-after public speaker, she draws from her research and activism in education, journalism, healthcare, gender equality, migrant worker rights, civil-society structures, and refugees. She is currently a tutor in a tertiary institution based in Singapore.
Read MoreA Singaporean filmmaker based in New York City, Eunice Lau draws on the power of the moving image to inspire transformative social change. Her feature documentary Accept The Call, set in Minnesota’s Somali community explores the impact of injustice and intergenerational trauma. Her films have appeared on Discovery Channel and PBS, and won support from eminent arts and media organizations such as Jerome Foundation, Tribeca Film Institute, Woodstock Film Festival, Chicken & Egg Pictures, and YouTube Impact Lab. She has been featured in many publications, including The New York Times, Variety, and Filmmaker Magazine. A former journalist at The Straits Times, and Al Jazeera, Lau produced a body of journalism that is often focused on social justice and human rights, including “The Lost Tribe: Secret Army of the CIA,” with Al Jazeera correspondent Tony Birtley, which was awarded “Best International Television” at the 2008 Amnesty International Media Awards.
Read MoreSalil Tripathi is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Bombay, India, he lived in Singapore from 1991-1999, and had a stint at Business Times, before moving to Asia, Inc., and later Far Eastern Economic Review, where he reported on the Asian economic crisis and Suharto's fall in Indonesia. He then moved to London, where he lived 20 years, before moving again, to New York, in 2019. He has studied at the University of Bombay and later at the Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College in the United States, and has reported extensively out of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and written about Africa and Europe. He is the author of three works of non-fiction: Offence: The Hindu Case (about Hindu nationalism and freedom of expression), The Colonel Who Would Not Repent (about the Bangladesh War of Liberation), and Detours: Songs of the Open Road, a collection of travel essays. With the artist Shilpa Gupta, he co-edited For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, an anthology of writings from prison. His journalism has won awards in the US, Hong Kong, and India. His next book, on the Gujaratis, will be published in 2024. He is on the board of PEN International and was the chair of its Writers in Prison Committee, 2015-2021. More about him: saliltripathi.
Read MoreJee Leong Koh is a Singaporean writer, editor, publisher, and activist based in New York City. A democratic socialist, Koh works for economic transformation, social justice, intercultural understanding, and open borders. As the founder and organizer of the socially conscious literary organization Singapore Unbound, Koh started the biennial Singapore Literature Festival in NYC, the monthly Second Saturdays Reading Series, the literary press Gaudy Boy, and the journal of Asian writing and art SUSPECT. The festival has featured Gina Apostol, Cherian George, PJ Thum, and Jackie Wang, among others. Koh’s books of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction have been published in Japan, Singapore, the UK, and the US, and they have won the Singapore Literature Prize, been named a Financial Times’ Best Book of the Year, and been shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Awards in the US.
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