About the creators
Writer
Anne Giles, M.A., M.S., L.P.C., is a Licensed Professional Counselor in the Commonwealth of Virginia, U.S.A., and a student of Mandarin Chinese. She holds master’s degrees in curriculum and instruction and mental health counseling, and a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) certificate. She attended the virtual National Chinese Language Conference in 2021 and 2022. She has taught English at the middle school, high school, and college levels. She served as a support person for two visiting scholars from China to Virginia Tech, 1982-1983 and enjoys co-housing with international visiting scholars, 2020 to the present.
Anne’s articles, essays, reviews and poems have appeared in The Sun, Press, Tampa Review, CrossCurrents and others. She is listed in A Directory of American Poets & Fiction Writers from Poets & Writers.
Anne’s approach to creative writing is summarized here, her approach to thinking about individual lives is here, and her thinking about handling hardship is here. She was mentored as a writer by poet Peter Meinke. Since childhood, Anne has turned to novels to see how authors and characters handle what happens and how they work things out. Since 2020, she has preferred fantasy novels to other genres.
With the editing assistance of Hóu Huìyǐng, Anne wrote How Counseling Works: A Plain Language Summary in Simplified Chinese Characters and English. She does extensive literature reviews of the research on the learning of Mandarin Chinese by adults and updates her findings here: If I Were to Begin Learning Mandarin Chinese Today.
Editor
侯慧颖 Hóu Huìyǐng “Mary” is a graduate of Inner Mongolia University for Nationalities, majoring in Chinese Language and Literature, and a graduate of Beijing Language and Culture University, with a major in English. She has taught in-person and online language courses for adults around the globe, both individually and in group classes, since 2019. She designs curricula for teachers of Mandarin Chinese and offers teacher training workshops. Her specialties include spoken Chinese, business Chinese, medical Chinese, HSK preparation, and Chinese characters.
Illustrators
Lear is a freelance illustrator. She learned watercolor and sketching from a young age. She obtained the Level 7 certificate for watercolor from the China Academy of Fine Arts. She specializes in watercolor portrait illustration and poster illustration. She illustrated Chapters 20-51 in Twig 枝丫1，most of Twig 枝丫2, and multiple Microstories 微故事. She is currently illustrating 胡堡胡同 Huburg Hutong. Lear lives in Inner Mongolia.
Derek Zheng, 枝丫1，Chapters 1-19
Podcast
Frank, 枝丫1，Chapters 1-14
Benfang Wang, Chinese with Ben, Dashu Mandarin, italki instructor, 枝丫1，Chapters 15-51
Videos
Jiayi Wu, Queen Mandarin