About poetry.sg – its origins, and its future.
OUR HISTORY
poetry.sg is built upon a significant database of material from the Singapore Poetry Archive (SPARK), the brainchild of Jen Crawford. With the support of NTU and noted documenters of the literary scene like Alvin Pang, Jen and her NTU students and research assistants began putting together a sizable collection of poetry, biographies, critical introductions and audio-visual materials across four languages. When she departed Singapore, a small team comprising Alvin Pang, Koh Jee Leong, Jennifer Anne Champion and Joshua Ip inherited the project, renamed it poetry.sg, and widened its scope to be an initial database of 50 poets, complete with critical introductions, biographies, bibliographies, selected poems, and accompanied by videos from SPARK.
A group of young writers involved in a parallel project, The Field Guide, decided to merge their efforts, and when the dust settled, poetry.sg had expanded to a team of 10, and secured National Arts Council funding to cover operating costs for two years, beginning with a launch at Singapore Writers Festival ‘15. The 2015 team comprised Jennifer Anne Champion (Multimedia Editor), Amanda Chong (Web Editor), Tse Hao Guang (Critical Editor), Daryl Lim (Critical Team), Daryl Qilin Yam (Critical Team), David Wong (Text Editor), Samuel Lee (Text Team), Prabu Daveraj (Marketing), Joshua Ip (Chief Clerk), and Sara Ng (Clerk).
In 2016, we moved from receiving financial support through an annual project grant, to being fully supported by the newly-founded Sing Lit Station. The poetry.sg team has continued to evolve through the years as members of the original team left, bringing on a second generation of critical sub-editors like Hamid Roslan and Jerome Lim, and eventually to a whole new team mainly consisting of NIE trainees and teachers. Progressing from an archive focusing only on English-language poetry, we brought on Annaliza Bakri to lead the first wave of Malay-language poetry in 2018. Dr Tan Chee Lay, Chow Teck Seng and Ang Shuang also started working on Chinese-language poetry in 2019/2020. poetry.sg’s first feature ‘Track Changes’ was first published in 2020, followed by the HK-SG Digital Travel Bubble, a digital poetry experience between Hong Kong and Singapore. In 2019, we grew a sister project, prose.sg in 2019, also supported by Sing Lit Station; and in 2020, founded a new cousin, comix.sg, though it is now defunct.
The current poetry.sg team succeeded the previous team in 2023 with a refreshed roster of editors and revived social media presence. Led by Jonathan Chan as Managing Editor, the team includes the Critical Editors Joan Ang, Laetitia Keok, Leonard Yip, Andrew Devadason, and Claire Ion. In 2025, we welcomed Nicholas Yeo as Multimedia Editor and Alysia Lim as Critical Editor and in 2026, Wahid Al Mamun as Critical Editor, Shaik Aqeel Abbas as Multimedia Associate, and Tan Yuu Shane as Marketing Associate.
The team has overseen the publication of 10 profiles of Chinese-language poets, supported by the editorial and translation work of Jonathan and Laura Jane Lee. The archive has grown to over a hundred individual profiles, and also to include a slate of new features on nature poetry, migrant writer poetry, and children’s poetry. The team has also seen the publication of the first profile of a Tamil-language poet and hopes to build this out further. We hope to soon see a feature on Deaf poetry, more profiles of pioneering and contemporary poets, and an expanded multimedia slate.
We hope that there’s more to come in the short history of our little archive.
OUR MISSION
poetry.sg hopes to be the first online venue that people think of when they think of Singapore poetry – be they scholars seeking critical analysis, teachers looking for rich multimedia resources to engage their students, or just a curious lit-lover wanting to find out more about a poet they came across.
We want to gather in one space the best local verse, arranged and critically examined by author. Beyond just text, we also hope that our video repository will give viewers insights into how poetry is read and performed, adding another dimension to the work.
We have two editorial arms that manage our repository of content:
Critical: We aim to provide rich and timely critique, both in the form of critical introductions to the poets in our database, as well as wider analyses on topics such as spoken word and formal verse. We also provide accurate biodata and bibliographies of our local poets, and also curate a selection of their most notable and representative works, for accessible and convenient public access.
Multimedia: We want to enrich the experience of someone new to poetry by presenting poetry in audio/visual forms, inclusive of live performances, intimate personal recordings, and directed poetry-film collaborations.
We hope to increase the amount and quality of scholarship Singapore literature and poetry, in order to benefit both the general reader looking for a quick conceptual inroad to our poets, as well as teachers, scholars, and students.
poetry.sg further aspires to be a multilingual platform. We began featuring Malay poets in 2017, and want to include poets and poems from the other two national languages. Our desire is to see this platform represent all aspects of our poetry.
OUR LOGO
Our original logo from 2015 was created by the graphic designers Sarah and Schooling, who also designed our first website.
Sarah and Schooling is a two-woman graphic design studio based in Singapore. An ardent supporter of Singapore’s literary scene, the studio is actively involved in designing books and publications across multiple genres.
OUR SUPPORTERS
Sing Lit Station is a literary non-profit organisation based in Singapore. Through our programmes and initiatives, we want to be a platform where writers and readers can meet.
Our mission is to grow the local literary community. We aim to achieve this through three core lines:
providing professional development for both established and developing writers;
creating a one-stop portal for new and existing readers of Singaporean literature;
building a participative community within the literary scene and the general reading population.
We would like to recognise Dr. Jen Crawford, formerly of Nanyang Technological University, and her team of researchers involved in building the Singapore Poetry Archive (SPARK), without which poetry.sg would not exist.
English: Agape Liu, Nicholas Liu, Pan Huiting, Tissina George, Nuraliah bte Norasid, Esther Ng, Lee Ruo Xuan, Aw Ching Yi, Zhang Jieqiang, Hazel Tan, Goh Jiamin.
Malay: Muhammad Jailani Abu Talib.
Mandarin: Dr. Tan Chee Lay, Koh Xin Tian, Teo Eng Hao, Lee Ruo Xuan, Liz Ng.
Tamil: Tamilavel, Hemma Balakrishnan, Bhuvaneswary Narayanan.
poetry.sg is supported by Sing Lit Station under a Major Company Grant by the National Arts Council, Singapore.
