about
Joshua Ip is the author of five volumes of poetry from Math Paper Press: sonnets from the singlish (2012), making love with scrabble tiles (2013), sonnets from the singlish upsize edition (威力加强版) (2015), footnotes on falling (2018), and translations to the tanglish (2021). He has co-edited eleven poetry anthologies: the SingPoWriMo series from 2014-2016; the A Luxury We Cannot Afford (2014) and A Luxury We Must Afford (2016) sister anthologies; Unfree Verse (2016), a historical anthology of formal writing in Singapore; Twin Cities (2017) an anthology of Hong Kong and Singapore twin cinema poetry; Call and Response (2018) and Call and Response 2 (2021), Singaporean migrant anthologies with local and migrant writers responding to each other in poetry and prose; 11 x 9 (2019), an anthology of collaborative poetry between Singapore and the Philippines; and to let the light in (2021), an anthology on life and death and palliative care in partnership with the Asia Pacific Hospice Network.
His debut collection won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014. He also won the Golden Point Award for English Prose in 2013 for the short story 'The Man Who Turned Into a Photocopier', was runner-up for English Poetry in 2011, and received an Honorable Mention for Chinese Poetry in 2015. He was the recipient of the Young Artist Award for Singapore in 2017. He was a WrICE fellow in 2018.
His poetry has been published in numerous print and online publications including Esquire, Monocle, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Jakarta Post, and The Straits Times. His short stories have been anthologized in From the Belly of the Cat (2013) and Balik Kampung 2A (2013). He used to write a regular satirical poetry column, Ipster Cafe for The Middle Ground. He has represented Singapore at international literary festivals from Goa, Guangzhou, London, and New York City. He was selected as one of "20 New Asian Voices Under 40" by Griffith Review.
He co-founded the inaugural Singapore Poetry Writing Month in April 2014, drawing more than 500 published and unpublished poets to write a poem a day for 30 days. The latest edition in April 2018 gathered more than five thousand poets. He helped to found poetry.sg, a digital archive of Singapore poets with critical introductions, videos, selected works, bibliographies and biographies. He has facilitated emerging writers in multiple regular writing workshops, and is the editor of Ten Year Series, an imprint of Math Paper Press.
In 2016, he co-founded Sing Lit Station, a literary non-profit to develop the Singapore writing scene. It is supported by the NAC Major Company Grant for 2020-2022. SLS has staged hour-long poetry readings in MRT trains, public buses and ferries; painted invisible poems on Singaporean sidewalks that appear in the rain, organised the first Manuscript Bootcamp in South-east Asia, and administers the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian poetry. It reaches thousands of students in dozens of schools via its Book-A-Writer programme, and stages the only performance poetry / professional wrestling hybrid performance in the world, Sing Lit Body Slam.
As an undergraduate, he was the music director of the first collegiate Chinese acappella group in the US, PennYo, and produced more than 50 acapella cover arrangements for the group from 2005-2011, many of which were recorded across four studio albums. On exchange in China in 2006, he founded the first Chinese acapella group in Peking University, Sing Song, which is still active today. His arrangements have been widely used by choral groups from Harvard to Duke, Taipei to Hong Kong, and numerous Chinese universities. He has written three original musicals – Sing City 1 (2007), Sing City 2 (2009), A Baby Changes Everything (2011), and is working on a fourth, Found: The Musical.
You can contact him via email, facebook, or instagram.
His debut collection won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014. He also won the Golden Point Award for English Prose in 2013 for the short story 'The Man Who Turned Into a Photocopier', was runner-up for English Poetry in 2011, and received an Honorable Mention for Chinese Poetry in 2015. He was the recipient of the Young Artist Award for Singapore in 2017. He was a WrICE fellow in 2018.
His poetry has been published in numerous print and online publications including Esquire, Monocle, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Jakarta Post, and The Straits Times. His short stories have been anthologized in From the Belly of the Cat (2013) and Balik Kampung 2A (2013). He used to write a regular satirical poetry column, Ipster Cafe for The Middle Ground. He has represented Singapore at international literary festivals from Goa, Guangzhou, London, and New York City. He was selected as one of "20 New Asian Voices Under 40" by Griffith Review.
He co-founded the inaugural Singapore Poetry Writing Month in April 2014, drawing more than 500 published and unpublished poets to write a poem a day for 30 days. The latest edition in April 2018 gathered more than five thousand poets. He helped to found poetry.sg, a digital archive of Singapore poets with critical introductions, videos, selected works, bibliographies and biographies. He has facilitated emerging writers in multiple regular writing workshops, and is the editor of Ten Year Series, an imprint of Math Paper Press.
In 2016, he co-founded Sing Lit Station, a literary non-profit to develop the Singapore writing scene. It is supported by the NAC Major Company Grant for 2020-2022. SLS has staged hour-long poetry readings in MRT trains, public buses and ferries; painted invisible poems on Singaporean sidewalks that appear in the rain, organised the first Manuscript Bootcamp in South-east Asia, and administers the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian poetry. It reaches thousands of students in dozens of schools via its Book-A-Writer programme, and stages the only performance poetry / professional wrestling hybrid performance in the world, Sing Lit Body Slam.
As an undergraduate, he was the music director of the first collegiate Chinese acappella group in the US, PennYo, and produced more than 50 acapella cover arrangements for the group from 2005-2011, many of which were recorded across four studio albums. On exchange in China in 2006, he founded the first Chinese acapella group in Peking University, Sing Song, which is still active today. His arrangements have been widely used by choral groups from Harvard to Duke, Taipei to Hong Kong, and numerous Chinese universities. He has written three original musicals – Sing City 1 (2007), Sing City 2 (2009), A Baby Changes Everything (2011), and is working on a fourth, Found: The Musical.
You can contact him via email, facebook, or instagram.