Topaz Winters

Topaz Winters (born September 25, 1999) is the pen name of Singaporean writer Priyanka Balasubramanian Aiyer.^[1][2]

Biography[]

Winters was born in the United States and has lived in Singapore since she was seven years old.^[1] She attends Princeton University, where she has studied poetry under Danez Smith and Monica Youn.^[3] She writes on mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and hyperacusis, as well as her experiences of being a queer woman of color.

She is the author of the chapbook "Heaven or This" (2016), as well as the full-length poetry collections "poems for the sound of the sky before thunder" (2017)^[4] and "Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing" (2019).^[3] Her third full-length poetry collection "So, Stranger" is forthcoming with Button Poetry in 2022.^[5] She is the youngest author to be published by Math Paper Press and the youngest Singaporean nominee for the Pushcart Prize.^[1]

She is the editor-in-chief at the publishing house and literary journal Half Mystic.^[2] She also wrote and appeared in the 2017 short film SUPERNOVA (directed by Ishan Modi).^[6] With Crispin Rodrigues, she is the co-curator of the 2020 Singapore Writers Festival digital installation Letters From Home to Home.^[7]

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.^[8]

References[]