MIGRANT WORKER
POETRY
COMPETITION 2023
About the Judges
DR. CHEONG YUN YEE
Dr. Cheong Yun Yee is a dreamer, educator and avid reader who writes to express her
feelings and opinions. Educated in Singapore, China, the UK and the USA, she is a curious
blend of various cultures. Yun Yee holds a PhD in Educational Testing from University
College London and was a Visiting Predoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education. Her poems Deconstructing Myself at Thirty, Recollections of Poems by Khoo Seok Wan: Legacies and Creation and Outliers have won the Singapore National Poetry
Competition (Chinese Open Category) in 2016, 2020 and 2021 respectively. Yun Yee spends
her free time travelling, contemplating and withering into the truth.
JENNIFER ANNE CHAMPION
Jennifer Anne Champion is best known as a spoken word poet. She is also an educator, archivist and textile artist. Author of two collections of poetry and co-founder of poetry.sg, Jennifer enjoys all forms of storytelling but has a short attention span, hence the love for poetry.
ERIC TINSAY VALLES
Eric Tinsay VALLES recreates home in exile, whether physical or spiritual. He has won a Goh Sin Tub Creative Writing prize for poems in his second collection, After the Fall (dirges among ruins). His first poetry book was A World in Transit. He has won Illumination and ELit awards for his co-edited A Given Grace anthology. He co-edited also the Get Lucky and Get Luckier anthologies of Singapore and Filipino writings, Sg Poems 2015-2016, Anima Methodi, The Nature of Poetry, The Atelier of Healing and Finding God in All Things. He has been featured in & Words, Reflecting on the Merlion, Southeast Asian Review of English, Straits Times, Routledge’s New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing and other journals. His critical essays have appeared in The Asiatic and Writing Diaspora. He has been invited to read poetry or commentaries at Baylor, Melbourne and Oxford Universities as well as Kistrech Poetry Festival. He is a director of Poetry Festival (Singapore).
JUDGES INVOLVED ONLY DURING SHORTLISTING STAGE
DENVER EJEM TORRES
Denver Ejem Torres is a poet, essayist and risk management professional. He is author of Hate-eating birds (2018) published by Xavier University Press. His works have been published in the Philippines and elsewhere, most recently in Australia's 27 year-old Cordite Poetry Review. His essays have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Kritika Kultura's special section on The Contemporary Philippine Essay, and most recently in The Lives of a Filipino/a High School Student and Tinubdan: New Voices from Northern Mindanao. He has been granted fellowship for poetry and literary translation to several writers workshops including the UP (University of the Philippines) National Writers Workshop. He is a lead panelist for poetry in the 29th Iligan National Writers Workshop.
LOOI SIEW TEIP
Looi Siew Teip has been teaching English literature at the University of Malaya for the past 20 years. He currently also teaches the guqin and has previously worked as a journalist and music critic in Singapore. Outside of his current professional interest in English poetry and medieval English, he also takes a keen interest in environmental issues and Taoist philosophy and practice.