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 graduated from Princeton University in 2023 with a B.A. in English and certificates in Creative Writing, Visual Art, and Italian. There, she studied poetry and fiction under Danez Smith, Monica Youn, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Joyce Carol Oates. She writes on illnesses such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, dissociative amnesia and hyperacusis, as well as her experiences of being a queer and disabled woman of color and an immigrant.
She is the author of the chapbook "Heaven or This" (2016) and 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 poetry collection "So, Stranger" was released with Button Poetry in 2022. She is the youngest author to be published by Math Paper Press, the youngest Singaporean nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and the youngest visiting author at several MFA programs across the United States.
She is the editor-in-chief at the publishing house and literary journal Half Mystic. In 2023 she founded the online literary magazine Kopi Break with Max Pasakorn and Kendrick Loo, publishing new voices in Singaporean poetry.
Winters 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. She embarked on a book tour across the East Coast in celebration of "So, Stranger" in 2022, performing with musicians and writers in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
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.