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2012 Shaolin Temple Day
Art • Poetry • Essay Contest
Shaolin In My Heart
Judges
• In alphabetic order of last name •
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A r t
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Daniel Galvez
Bay Area artist Daniel Galvez lives in Oakland and has more than three decades experience painting large-scale public murals. Some of his mural projects in Alameda County have included the early murals in Oakland, Oakland’s Portrait (1980), Street Tattoo (1981), and Grand Performance (1984), as well as Journey of Promise (2003) at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland and Historical Crossroads (2003), a series of four murals in Dublin. More recently, he completed two projects with collaborating artist Jos Sances, a digital tile mural Youthful Transformation (2006) for the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center in San Leandro and Splash (2010) a 30 x 200’ brightly painted epoxy on aluminum sunscreen mural for the new East Oakland Sports Center.
From neighborhoods to museums, Galvez creates public works that are both accessible and enriching to the communities they serve. Many of his projects, such as the Crosswinds mural in Cambridge, MA, the two murals for the Health Care Financing Administration in Baltimore, and the Grand Performance mural in Oakland, involved community workshops or meetings to develop concepts and images that resulted in the success of the site-specific work.
Other projects have included such national commissions as a mural at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City honoring the life of Malcolm X, and a pair of murals installed at the U.S. Department of the Interior’s historic building in Washington DC which were commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Department.
Daniel was born in Calexico, CA and grew up in Sacramento. He has a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and an MA in Painting from San Francisco State University.
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Liqing Liang
Liqing Liang graduated from Central Fine Arts Academy in China. He is a member of Chinese Fine Arts Artist Society with a title of National Sr. Artist.
Mr. Liang’s works were selected for the 7th, 8th, and 9th Chinese National Fine Arts Exhibitions and many works were awarded and collected. He wrote a book titled Deco Art Design in the United States. he teaches painting, sculpture and calligraphy. He was included into the records of Contempory Chinese Artists and world Famous Chinese artists.
After he came to the U.S., Liang founded "West America Arts Studio." In three short years, he has mentored many award-winning students. Some were admitted into superb art universities, while others have won National Education Association’s (NEA) art awards. On October 2007, Liang and his students successfully held an Art Exhibit. About 70 art pieces were exhibited. Many California Chinese mainstream media have reported his achievements.
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L i t e r a t u r e
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Chitra Divakaruni
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Indonesian and Japanese, and several of them have been bestsellers both nationally and internationally.
Born in Kolkata, India, she came to the United States for her graduate studies, receiving a Master’s degree in English from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Education did not come easily to Divakaruni. In order to pay for college, she held many odd jobs, including babysitting, selling merchandise in an Indian boutique, slicing bread in a bakery, and washing instruments in a science lab. At Berkeley, she lived in the International House and worked in the dining hall.
Divakaruni teaches in the nationally ranked Creative Writing program at the University of Houston, where she is the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Creative Writing.
Divakaruni has judged several prestigious national awards, such as the National Book Award and the PEN Faulkner Award. She is, herself, the winner of an American Book Award, a Light of India Award, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, an Allen Ginsberg poetry prize and two Pushcart prizes, among others. Her latest novel, One Amazing Thing, was the 2011 choice for Gulf Coast Reads, a Houston Region One Book program, as well as several other Citywide Reads.
Two of her books, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been made into movies by filmmakers Gurinder Chadha and Paul Berges (an English film) and Suhasini Mani Ratnam (a Tamil TV serial) respectively. Mistress of Spices was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in England.
Divakaruni believes in the importance of giving back to her community. She serves on the Advisory Board of Maitri in the San Francisco Bay Area and of Daya in Houston. Both are organizations that help South Asian or South Asian American women who find themselves in abusive or domestic violence situations. She served on the board of Pratham, an organization that helps educate underprivileged children in India, for many years and is currently on their Emeritus Board.
For the last few years, Divakaruni has been living in Houston. She shares her home with her husband Murthy, her two sons Anand and Abhay (whose names she has used in her children’s novels) and Juno, the family dog. An enthusiastic user of social media, she invites people to her website and blog at www.chitradivakaruni.com and to her Facebook Author page at http://www.facebook.com/chitradivakaruni to join her in discussions about life and literature.
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Professor Frederick Hsia
Professor Frederick Hsia is currently teaching at National Tsing Hua University and National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. He is the only Ph.D. in Engineering to teach Literature as well as Cinema courses in Taiwan’s universities. Prof. Hsia, with the pen name Hsia Lieh, won the 1994 National Art and Literature Prize. In 2006 he was offered the “Science and Humanities Award” by the CIE/USA.
Professor Hsia graduated from National Cheng Kung University’s Engineering College and received his Ph.D. degree in Engineering from Michigan State University. He has been a Bridge Design Engineer, a Project Geotechnical Engineer and a Special Emphasis Program Manager.
He is a Member of the Board of CIE/USA, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter. His publications include a novel Summer Hunt, a collection of prose The Elapse of Light and the Flowing River and fiction The Last Red-Head Crow. His college textbook Introduction to Modern World Literature has been well adopted by various universities in Taiwan.
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Stephen M. Jones
Stephen Munn Jones was born in Palo Alto California, grew up in Louisville Kentucky, and graduated from Haverford College where he was awarded Honors in English Literature. Mr. Jones edited the Haverford-Bryn Mawr Literary Review during his junior and senior years, and was awarded the A Edward Newton Award for his graduation thesis. He then received an M.S. in Library Science and an M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the area of concentration for the latter degree was Warring States, Ch’in and Han Dynasty intellectual history.
Mr. Jones moved to Taiwan in 1974 for studies in Classical Chinese and to study the history of Chinese painting at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Mr. Jones lived in Taiwan from 1974 to 1978 and again from 1982 to 1991, where he studied Classical Chinese at National Taiwan Normal University and with private tutors, as well as Library Science at National Taiwan University. Mr. Jones’s Chinese studies included translating all of the works of Confucius, the Mencius, Lao-Tzu, the Inner Chapters of the Chuang-tzu, and historical and cultural documents from the Western and Eastern Han dynasties. As a librarian, Mr. Jones was especially interested in the history of Chinese bibliographical studies.
During his years in Taiwan Mr. Jones also taught English composition at National Taiwan University, the National Taiwan University of Technology, and the Taiwan Theological College. Mr. Jones speaks, reads and writes Mandarin Chinese. Mr. Jones now works for the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where he is Manager of Library Technology Operations. At UMBC Mr. Jones has served two years as the staff sponsor for the Chinese Student Association. Mr. Jones and his wife have two sons. Their older son has studied Kung Fu at the Shaolin Temple in China and is also currently studying Kung Fu at the Shaolin Temple Culture Center in Herndon, Virginia.
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