JOHN WHALEN-BRIDGE is a poet, essayist, and teacher based in Singapore. His writing moves between literature, philosophy, religion, and cultural criticism, with a longstanding interest in the ways stories shape both private and public life. He teaches at the National University of Singapore and is the author of Political Fiction and the American Self and Tibet on Fire: Buddhism, Rhetoric, and Self-Immolation. He is currently writing a biography of the novelist and memoirist Maxine Hong Kingston.

His poems and essays have appeared in POETRY, Witcraft, The Opiate, Gypsophila, Tender Masculinities, and other publications.