Topaz Winters

Winters was born in the United States and has lived in Singapore since she was seven years old.[1] She graduated from Princeton University in 2023 with a B.A. in English and certificates in Creative Writing, Visual Art, and Italian. There, she studied poetry and fiction under Danez Smith, Monica Youn, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Joyce Carol Oates.[3] She writes on illnesses such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, dissociative amnesia and hyperacusis, as well as her experiences of being a queer and disabled woman of color and an immigrant.[4]

She is the author of the chapbook "Heaven or This" (2016) and the full-length poetry collections "poems for the sound of the sky before thunder" (2017)[5] and "Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing" (2019).[3] Her third poetry collection "So, Stranger" was released with Button Poetry in 2022.[6] She is the youngest author to be published by Math Paper Press, the youngest Singaporean nominee for the Pushcart Prize,[1] and the youngest visiting author at several MFA programs across the United States.[7]

She is the editor-in-chief at the publishing house and literary journal Half Mystic.[2] In 2023 she founded the online literary magazine Kopi Break with Max Pasakorn and Kendrick Loo, publishing new voices in Singaporean poetry.[8]

Winters wrote and appeared in the 2017 short film SUPERNOVA (directed by Ishan Modi).[9] With Crispin Rodrigues, she is the co-curator of the 2020 Singapore Writers Festival digital installation Letters From Home to Home.[10] She embarked on a book tour across the East Coast in celebration of "So, Stranger" in 2022, performing with musicians and writers in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.[11][12]

Her peer-reviewed scholarly paper "Queering Poetics: The Impact of Poetry on LGBT+ Identity in Singaporean Adolescents" was published in the Journal of Homosexuality when she was 19 years old. She is the youngest author to be published in this journal.[13]