December 2025/ January 2026: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho 何麗明
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is a Hong Kong-born scholar, poet, translator, and editor. She is editor-in-chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and a founding co-editor of Hong Kong Studies, the English editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and the translation editor of The Shanghai Literary Review. Her own poetry collections include Hula Hooping (2015), winner of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s Young Artist Award, and If I Do Not Reply (2024). To date, her work has been translated into and published in Chinese, Filipino, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese (x2) (x3), while her translations of other writers can be found in Chinese Literature Today, Drunken Boat, Pathlight, World Literature Today, among other places, and published by the Chinese University Press.
As well as her creative work, Dr Ho is an active researcher, and until 2022 was tenured Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, where she taught fiction and poetics. Her BA and Masters were from Hong Kong University and her PhD, which she published as a monograph entitled Neo-Victorian Cannibalism Neo-Victorian Cannibalism: A Theory of Contemporary Adaptations (2019), is from Kings College London.
She is a poet and researcher of international renown. She has held residencies at the University of Iowa, the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation, and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Formerly a tenured associate professor in Hong Kong, she is an Honorary Researcher at the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library, University of Toronto, and lives in Europe.
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We're very happy to be featuring Dr Tammy Lai-Ming Ho as our author of the month for both December 2025 and January 2026, with a bumper selection of her work, to encompass both her poetry and prose. Tammy is currently a Cheney Fellow at the University of Leeds, co-hosted by our Centre and Poetry@Leeds, which means that we're lucky enough to have her visiting Leeds over the next year, so keep an eye out for upcoming events in 2026!
We include a selection of her poems from her most recent collection, If I Do Not Reply, published by Shearsman Books in 2024, as well as a short story, 'An Extra-Terrestrial in Hong Kong', first published in English in Chinese Literature Today in 2020, and subsequently as the title piece in a collection from Musical Stone, with support from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. You can read the poems here, and the short story here.
To find out more about Tammy's recent work, you can read more about If I Do Not Reply on the Cha blog:
Ho’s work brims with names. She names the joys, the streets, the corners—she names the dishes, the dangers, the tyrants. Above all, the name at the heart of her book is Hong Kong—a city, a place, a people bursting with names, often doubly so, in both English and Cantonese. What are all these names good for? What purpose do they serve in her writing? While some poets are deliberately vague about the place and time of their work, Ho is emphatically precise—situating us firmly within the city: three sparrows lined up neatly on a swing in Yuen Long, a goldfish bought in Mong Kok, stray dogs in Tin Shui Wai.