Topaz Winters

Topaz Winters (born September 25, 1999) is the pen name of Singaporean writer Priyanka Balasubramanian Aiyer.
Biography.
Winters was born in the United States and has lived in Singapore since she was seven years old. She attends Princeton University, where she has studied poetry under Danez Smith and Monica Youn. She writes on mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and hyperacusis, as well as her experiences of being a queer woman of color.
She is the author of the chapbook "Heaven or This" (2016), as well as the full-length poetry collections "poems for the sound of the sky before thunder" (2017) and "Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing" (2019). Her third full-length poetry collection "So, Stranger" is forthcoming with Button Poetry in 2022. She is the youngest author to be published by Math Paper Press and the youngest Singaporean nominee for the Pushcart Prize.
She is the editor-in-chief at the publishing house and literary journal Half Mystic. She also wrote and appeared in the 2017 short film "SUPERNOVA" (directed by Ishan Modi). With Crispin Rodrigues, she is the co-curator of the 2020 Singapore Writers Festival digital installation "Letters From Home to Home."
Her peer-reviewed scholarly paper "Queering Poetics: The Impact of Poetry on LGBT+ Identity in Singaporean Adolescents" was published in the "Journal of Homosexuality" when she was 19 years old. She is the youngest author to be published in this journal.