Belle Etage (2003) Drawing by Inara Cedrins

I am an American artist, writer and translator who went to China in 1998 to learn to paint on silk, and remained for five years to teach writing and lecture on art at universities including Tsinghua University and Peking University in Beijing, as well as to the People's Liberation Army and students at the Central Academy of Fine Art. In 2003 I went to Nepal to study the technique of thangka painting. After the king’s coup d’etat in 2005, I relocated to Riga, Latvia, started a literary agency called The Baltic Edge, and taught Creative Writing at the University of Latvia. I returned to the U.S. in 2006 to live in the Santa Fe/Albuquerque area. The Chicago Artists Coalition awarded me an artist’s residency at the Merchandise Mart in 2010, and I have stayed in Chicago.

My first anthology of contemporary Latvian poetry, featuring six poets in occupied Latvia and six in exile, was published by the University of Iowa Press; a new Baltic anthology, three books of poetry from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, was published by the University of New Orleans Press in 2013, with my prints as cover art. My translations of Latvian imagist poet Aleksandrs Caks is available as an e-book, as is my translation of Latvian writer Janis Einfeld’s novel The Feast of Liars. I edited a Baltic issue for World Literature Today in November 2008; my prints incorporating poetry were published in WLT in 2009; and I currently interview writers internationally for WLT. My anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, excerpted at , will be published by Ethos Books in Singapore in 2014 as an e-book.

Recent publications of my poetry include Hayden’s Ferry Review, Lumina, Ellipsis, Spillway, Askew, and New Mexico Poetry Review; online journals include Asian Cha, Other Voices International, Writers Connect, Deep Dish Poem-A-Month and Universe of Poetry. I edited a mini-anthology of Latvian poetry for The Malpais Review for Summer 2011 in which my poems also appeared. Two chapbooks of my poetry were published by the Chinese Literature Press in Beijing, about China and Egypt. A collection of poetry titled Fugitive Connections was published in 2006 by the Virtual Artists Collective. A collection of poetry written while teaching in China, titled Buried Wine, is available as an e-book, as is a collection of stories about the experience, and the first in a trilogy of novels, The Hotel Sunshine.

• Nationality: UNITED STATES
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary American Artists