C O N T R I B U T O R S

Pollie Bith was born in the province of Battambang during the Pol Pot era and moved to the United States in 1980. She lives and works in Honolulu.

Nick Bozanic lives in Honolulu with his wife and two sons, Gabriel and Isaiah. His most recent book is This Once: Poems 1976–1996; selections from his work-in-progress, Devotion, are forthcoming in an anthology that will celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Anhinga Press.

David Chandler was a U.S. foreign service officer in Cambodia in the early 1960s, after which he took up an academic career. From 1972 to 1997, he taught history at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His books include A History of Cambodia, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, and Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. His books of translation include Favorite Stories from Cambodia. He lives in Melbourne.

Chuth Khay was born in 1940 in Koh Somrong, an island on the Mekong about one hundred kilometers north of the capital. The youngest son, he was the only one in a family with ten children to attend a Western school. He pursued primary and secondary studies in Kompong Cham. While working as a teacher of French, he attended classes at the University of Phnom Penh, and in 1968, he received his law degree. Opposed to the monarchy, he became a legal advisor to the ministry of defense after Sihanouk’s removal from power in 1970. From 1973 to 1974, he served as interim dean of the law school. In 1973, he published two successful collections of short stories: Ghouls, Ghosts, and Other Infernal Creatures and Widow of Five Husbands. He also wrote for Soth Polin’s newspaper, Nokor Thom, and published his books and translations through its publishing house. Forced into the countryside by the Khmer Rouge, he miraculously escaped death. Granted refuge in France in 1980, he obtained French citizenship and took the name Chuth Chance, naming himself so because he felt he had received a second chance in life.

Jeremy Colvin recently moved to Hawai‘i from England, where he received a graduate degree from Oxford University. A researcher and editor, he lives with his wife in Honolulu.

Catherine Filloux is the author of numerous plays, the holder of various distinctions—including Fulbright senior specialist and James Thurber playwright-in-residence—and the recipient of new-play commissions from Contemporary American Theater and Theatreworks/USA. From the Asian Cultural Council, she received an artist’s residency fellowship, which allowed her to go to Cambodia.

Marie-Christine Garneau is an associate professor of French language and literature at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

Theo Garneau has a master’s degree in French literature from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa and is a master’s-degree candidate in English.

Maha Ghosananda was elected Somteja (Supreme Patriarch) of Cambodian Buddhism in 1988 and has been nominated four times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hak Chhay Hok was born in 1944 in the province of Battambang. Between 1965 and 1975, he wrote thirty novels, collaborated with a number of journals, and occasionally worked for the cinema. His best-known works include O Smoke of Death, Drifting with Karma, The Lightning of the Magic Sword, In the Shadow of Angkor, and Oh, Pardon, Papa! A few months after the fall of Phnom Penh, he published Little Manual for the Dissipation of Misery. He was disappeared by the Khmer Rouge.

Alex Hinton is the author of three scholarly books on genocide: Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, Genocide: An Anthropological Reader, and Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. His essays on genocide have appeared in such journals as Anthropology Today, American Anthropologist, Journal of Asian Studies, and Ethos.

Daniela Hurezanu is a lecturer in French at Arizona State University and a specialist in translation. She has published several translations, most recently Phrase, a book of poetry by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and a book of literary criticism, Maurice Blanchot et la fin du mythe.

Keir Saramak was born shortly after Cambodia reclaimed its sovereignty from France. She left Phnom Penh in 1973, the year she finished high school. Since then, she has studied, worked, and lived in English-speaking societies.

Stephen Kessler is a well-known translator of Spanish and Latin American writers. His latest book is a translation of Luis Cernuda’s Written in Water: The Collected Prose Poems. He has also published six books of original poetry, including After Modigliani (2000). He lives in Northern California, where he is an editor for The Redwood Coast Review.

Khun Srun was born in 1945 in the province of Takeo. When he was eight, his father died, and he and his siblings were raised by his mother, a fervent Buddhist. A brilliant student, he studied Khmer literature and psychology at the university in Phnom Penh, becoming widely read in the sciences, mathematics, and European literature. Amid the political turmoil of the 1960s, he worked as a professor of mathematics and a journalist while writing novels and poetry. In less than four years, he published three collections composed of poems, short tales, and philosophical anecdotes; two collections of autobiographical short stories, The Last Residence and The Accused; and a final volume of poems, For a Woman. He was imprisoned twice by the right-wing Lon Nol government for refusing to collaborate, but refused to align himself with the extreme left. After 1973, he joined the revolution; but in 1978, he and his wife were assassinated by the Khmer Rouge.

Kong Bunchhoeun was born in 1939 in the province of Battambang and grew up during the French Occupation, the Japanese Occupation, and the fratricidal struggles following independence. After the death of his mother in 1957, he moved to Phnom Penh and published The River of Death, the first of many books in a long career as a popular novelist. His works often combine the romantic and the supernatural, and his satiric novels attack corruption, exploitation of the weak, and social injustice. After the Khmer Rouge regime ended, he returned to Phnom Penh in 1981 and worked in the Ministry of Culture. In 2000, however, he was forced to flee the country as a result of publishing The Destiny of Marina, a scathing diatribe against what he called “the culture of impunity” occurring in high places.

Lavonne Leong received her doctorate from Oxford University in 2002. She is an award-winning writer and editor living in Honolulu.

Christophe Macquet is a translator, teacher, and researcher. He was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in 1968. After receiving a master’s degree in literature, he taught French for two years in the Philippines. Since 1994, he has taught literature and translation at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, where he is the head of the French Translation Program. He has also published numerous articles on Khmer culture and language. In 2003, he published, in the French literary review Europe, a portfolio of Cambodian writing. His current research involves poetry of Cambodia (written and oral), Cambodian novels of the 1960s, and the history of Cambodian ideas from the 1920s to the present.

John Marston became interested in Cambodia when he worked in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in 1982. Since then, he has been heavily involved in research related to Cambodia; from 1992 to 1993, he worked for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia. After completing a doctorate in anthropology, he began teaching at the Center for Asian and African Studies of El Colegio de México in Mexico City. He is coeditor of History, Buddhism, and New Religious Movements in Cambodia.

Ken McCullough has received numerous awards for his poetry, including grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the Iowa Arts Council, and the Jerome Foundation. He translated Sacred Vows, a bilingual edition of U Sam Oeur’s poetry published in 1998. McCullough lives in Winona, Minnesota, with his wife and son.

Min Keth Or resides in Falls Church, Virginia, and is a language instructor in the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. She was born in Cambodia, where she and her husband were schoolteachers until the Khmer Rouge takeover. They escaped to Thailand with their two children in 1979 and immigrated to the United States in 1981.

Rithy Panh is a highly acclaimed Cambodian filmmaker living in France. His films include Site ii, Rice People, Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy, One Evening after the War, Land of Wandering Souls, Que la barque se brise que la jonque s’entrouve, and s-21, the Khmer Rouge Death Machine.

praCh was born in the farmland of Cambodia but raised in America. He received international attention with his first album, Dalama…the end’n is just the beginnin’, and his follow-up album, Dalama…the lost chapter. He is the CEO of Mujestic Records and in 2002 became the youngest coordinator of the Cambodian New Year.

Putsata Reang is a reporter for the Mercury News. Her book, Deadly Secrets: From High School to High Crime—The True Story of Two Teen Killers, was published by Avon Books in 2001.

Darina Siv was born in 1957 in Pursat Province. The daughter of a schoolteacher, she began writing early; when she was twelve, a story she had written was chosen for broadcast on Cambodian radio. During the Khmer Rouge regime, she worked on youth agricultural teams. Soon after the regime ended, she and her remaining family members fled as refugees and were resettled in the United States in 1981. Her Khmer-language novel was published in 1991; her English-language autobiography, Never Come Back: A Cambodian Woman’s Journey, appeared in 2000. In 1999, she became the director of the United Cambodian Association of Minnesota. She died of cancer in 2001.

Soth Polin was born in 1943 in Kompong Cham Province to a middle-class, intellectual family that spoke French and Khmer. His first novel, A Meaningless Life, was an enormous success. Numerous novels, short stories, and philosophical tales followed, among them The Adventurer, Whatever You Order Me...I Will Do It, and The Death of Love. In the late 1960s, he founded the newspaper and publishing house of Nokor Thom. In 1974, he left Cambodia and took refuge in France, where he published his French-Khmer dictionary and his novel The Anarchist, written in French. He later reestablished himself and his two sons on the U.S. West Coast.

Jean Toyama is the interim associate dean of the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

U Sam Oeur was born in Svay Rieng Province in 1936. In 1968, he received his master-of-fine-arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Upon returning to Cambodia, he served in the army. In 1972, he was elected to the National Assembly, and in 1973, he was appointed secretary general of the Khmer League for Freedom. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, he worked in various governmental positions, but he was asked to resign because of his pro-democracy leanings. In 1992, he returned to the United States as a fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa; his book of poetry, Sacred Vows, was translated with Ken McCullough. He now lives in Dallas with his wife, their son, and his son’s family.

Ranachith Ronnie Yimsut was born in Siem Reap City and came to the United States at the age of fifteen, after having lost almost all his family in a Khmer Rouge massacre in Cambodia. He has worked with the USAID- funded Cambodian American National Development Organization and other nongovernmental organizations in Cambodia. He is a cofounder of the Big Brother, Big Sister program in Cambodia, which supports orphans in the country, and also serves as an environmental consultant to the World Monuments Fund onconservation projects at Angkor World Heritage Site in Siem Reap Angkor Province. His work has been published in the book Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, compiled by Dith Pran, and at various internet websites.

Detail from the cover of Dalama…the lost chapter by praCh