Isabella Wai

Isabella Wai holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Wichita State University and a doctorate in English from McMaster University in Canada. Her prose and poetry have appeared in Heavenly Bread (Hong Kong), Daedalian quarterly (Texas), Brushfire (Nevada), Cumberlands (Kentucky), Wind Literary Journal (Kentucky), Origins (Ontario), New Directions: An International anthology of Poetry & Prose (New York), and WordRiver (University of Nevada, Las Vegas).

As literary editor for Asiaweek, she wrote and edited articles on emerging and established writers of Asian descent all over the world, for example, Brian Castro in Australia, Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro in the United Kingdom, and Nobel peace prize nominee Nieh Hualing in the United States. Some of these articles were reprinted in other publications such as The World Press Review. Her essay on potential Asian Nobel Prize winners was translated into German for press release by Horizonte '85, a cultural conference in Berlin.

As an academic, she has taught English composition and literature at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John campus, York University, Auburn University, and University of Massachusetts (Lowell). In October 2007 she delivered a paper on Richard Wilbur and Syliva Plath at a conference in Oxford, England, which was jointly sponsored by Oxford University, Indiana University, and Smith College. Her academic essays appear regularly in The Explicator. In 2005, she launched The Richard Wilbur Forum to publish interviews with scholars about this celebrated American poet, on whom she wrote her doctoral thesis.

The Richard Wilbur Forum is accessible at www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~tjconnol/wilburforum/wilburforum.htm