I grew up in a few different countries, so I always felt like a half-outsider, half-insider in Kuala Lumpur. This made me hungry to understand the diverse ways that our city (and country) is experienced by different people. There are many important and untold narratives of KL, and being a UnR participant back in 2015 allowed me to uncover some of them - so I'm excited to help others in that process this year. I'm in love with poetry for its ability to speak to people in the ways that our daily language cannot. When we talk about social issues and justice, the language we use can often be politicised and divisive. Poetry offers a new way of talking about these issues. It can deconstruct the language we use in our daily lives to describe the world, and reconstruct it to reflect new realities or visions. I'm looking forward to work with this year's cohort to find new ways of experiencing and writing about the KL that matters to them.

Lily Jamaludin is interested in how art, poetry, and writing can expand and enrich social justice work. Her writing has been published in The Grinnell Review, Geometry Literary, Plain China, and Straits Eclectic (Gerakbudaya). Since coming back to Malaysia in 2014, she has worked with NGOs, been a student of the KL Writer's Workshop, written an award-winning piece for the Short+Sweet theatre festival, and helped run KL’s leading poetry open mic, If Walls Could Talk. She was featured as an emerging writer at the 2018 George Town Literary Festival, and was a member of UnRepresented: KL 3 (2015).

Poetry