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The Association of Stories in Macao ASM is a non-profit NGO, founded in 2005, and which over the last eight years has published around a hundred volumes, in the genres of poetry, fiction, theory, life writing and pedagogy. As a community publisher, ASM is dependent on sales, subscriptions and arts body funding for budgets for printing and various publishing and translation-related activities. Many of ASM’s titles are first volumes of poetry or fiction by young Macao authors. ASM’s brief is to promote writing and other artistic expression in and about Macao. Today, an important part of the ASM’s ongoing activity is poetry translation by Macao poets, involving English, Chinese and Portuguese languages and in all possible directions, as well as publishing works of Macao established authors. The function of ASM’s various poetry translation projects is to facilitate the East-West cultural crossing entailed in bringing poetry to the non-native reader; equally important is the goal of providing Macao poets with a cross-cultural apprenticeship in poetry, through the vehicle of translation practice. ASM’s ethos is democratic and inclusive. Seeing writing and publishing as empowering cultural processes, ASM aims to teach and encourage new Macao authors, translators, publishers, artists, cover and book designers, event organisers and others involved in the business of publishing, through hands-on cooperative experience. Working largely in (and to and from) English in a non-English speaking environment, ASM’s counter-intuitive goal is to build a culture of reading for a new literature, through the creation of a circle of new writers.