In The Back of My Throat is an anthology about queer Indonesian experiences across borders and other stories told with no shame. Edited by Tatevik Sargsyan and Norman Erikson Pasaribu. With contributions from: Zar Mose, Khairani Barokka, JR Hadi, Kristal Firdaus, Anna Sulan Masing, Pear Nuallak, Ko Ko Thett, Kyi May Kaung, Ziggy Zezsyazeoviennazabrizkie, Pychita Julinanda, Prahara Amelia, Madina Malahayati Chumaera, Nurdiyansyah, Mak Lin, Caesar Abrisam. The title is taken from Prahara Amelia’s poem.
Authors
ko ko thett is a poet by choice and Burmese by chance. In between he is a poetry editor, literary translator, and anthologist of contemporary Burmese poetry. In 1995, whilst studying engineering at the Yangon Institute of Technology (YIT), thett began editing and publishing Old Gold, a campus samizdat in Burmese. In the aftermath of Funeral of Old Gold, his second chapbook, he was arrested and detained for his involvement in the December 1996 student uprising. After his release in April 1997, he left both YIT and Burma for Singapore and then Bangkok, where he spent three years working for the Jesuit Refugee Service Asia Pacific. In 2000, thett went to Finland where he took up peace and conflict studies at the University of Helsinki, before finally moving to Vienna to study with Wolfram Schaffar at the Institute for International Development at the University of Vienna. His poems have been published in literary journals worldwide (from Griffith Review to Granta), and translated into Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, German and Finnish. The Burden of Being Burmese (Zephyr, 2015), a collection of ko ko thett's poems that have appeared in literary journals worldwide, is listed on ‘‘Nota Benes’’ by World Literature Today. thett's poems are anthologised in Best American Experimental Writing 2016 [BAX 2016], CAPITALS: A Poetry Anthology, The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry, and Supplement among others. His work has been recognized with an English PEN Translation Award (2011) and an Honorary Fellowship in Writing at the University of Iowa (2016). After a whirlwind tour of Asia, Europe and North America for two decades, thett happily resettled in Sagaing in his native Burma-Myanmar in 2017. As of 2020 he is most likely to be spotted in the Golden Triangle area of Norwich, UK. thett writes in both Burmese and English.
Madina Malahayati Chumaera is constellation of multitudes from Jakarta, Indonesia. Her interests lie in the intersection between the humanities and sciences. CONTACT LIGHT: the void inside and out was published by Gramedia Pustaka Utama in October 2017. Originally written as her IB MYP Personal Project, it is a collection of prose and poetry revolving around the concept of the human brain, outer space, and connection between them. if i'm not a fire then what am i, a self-published chapbook, was released on June 2020. Her hands are ready.
