Advisor Profile: Cat Chong

The Caring Imagination

The Caring Imagination was established by AngelHousePress in 2022, to be a hub of resources for creators and cultural workers who wish to create, produce and distribute art with compassion.

I have been working with the following advisors on this project since early last year: Cat Chong (they/them), UK; Jacqueline Valencia (she/they), Canada; Rae White (they/them), Australia; and Terri Witek (she/they), USA.

As part of the promotion for the crowd funding campaign, I am trying to offer a close up of the work of AngelHousePress, including its contributors. My hope is that these insights into the work we do, what we are trying to achieve overall and specifically with the crowd funding campaign will offer reasons why you will support the campaign.

So far I’ve shared a profile of Red Mare, one of the presses donating to the crowd funding campaign; Dona Mayoora, a contributor to the publications that are being funded by the campaign. Now I’d like to tell you about one of our advisors for the Caring Imagination site: Cat Chong.

Cat Chong (they/them) is a poet, publisher, lecturer and proud queer crip, whose durational work flails wildly between conceptual and confessional tendencies. They’re a graduate of the Poetic Practice MA at Royal Holloway, co-founder of the Crested Tit Collective, and a current PhD student at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Their work has been published internationally by contemporary presses such as Bad Betty, Flint Books, Ache Magazine, Permeable Barrier, Stride Coven, Vessel, Singapore Unbound, dis/content, Experiment-O, The Babel Tower Notice Board and Broken Sleep Books. Their debut collection 712 stanza homes for the sun is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books.  

I first read their work in the former online experimental literary journal, the Babel Tower Notice Board run by Richard Capener, who is editor of UK’s Hem Press.

I found out more about them when I engaged with the members of the Crested Tit Collective an international community of poets interested in innovative, feminist, and ecological poetics.

I had the great joy of reading with them and Matthew Haigh as part of BTNB’s reading in January, 2021. Cat read from a new work, Dear Lettera, part of which was published by BTNB. I enjoyed their engagement with citations and the way these quotations inspired responses in the form of philosophical explorations and experience.

From there I had the pleasure of publishing them as part of their multi-disciplinary art collective, dis/content in Experiment-O Issue 14.

I am absolutely fascinated by the intersections that Cat explores in their work. There’s strength, lyricism, explorations of softness, ars poetica, language, typewriting, and more within the contexts of genre, disability, and gender noncomformity.

I am also quietly envious of their collaborations with others, such as CTC and dis/content or their work with Briony Hughes and EP Jenkins in Offering[s] (Osmosis Press, 2022).

Cat has work in the forthcoming anthology, “Not Without Us,  Perspectives on Disability and Inclusion in Singapore,”  edited by Kuansong Victor Zhuang, Meng Ee Wong, Dan Goodley and published by Ethos Press.

I am grateful that Cat is part of the Caring Imagination and one of the contributors to AngelHousePress publications.

I am also grateful that last year’s successful crowd funding campaign enabled us to pay our contributors. I’m hoping for the same result this year.

If you’d like to be among the first to know when the campaign launches so that you can get early access to the limited edition perks, please sign up via this link.

And stay tuned for the launch of the AngelHousePress 2023 Caring Imagination Crowd Funding Campaign soon!

A reminder too that submissions for NationalPoetryMonth.ca are open until February 28, 2023. Read the guidelines here.

AngelHousePress is a defiant intersectional feminist press established in 2007 whose primary mission is to publish, promote, support and celebrate women and non-binary creators who are mad, crip, neurodiverse, chronically ill, BIPOC, and 2SLGBTQ.

I will be sharing more profiles throughout the campaign. Stay Tuned!