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SOUTHEAST ASIAN

LITERATURE
CONTEMPORARY WRITERS IN THE PHILIPPINES

Submitted by: APRIL AIRA C. COMIA


BEED I- A

Submitted to: MRS. ARLENE A. BONDAD


Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in
the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies at UC
Berkeley. As an undergraduate, Reyes "served as editor in
chief for maganda magazine, and witnessed the emergence of Filipino
American literary figures."[2]

Reyes received her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University. She


is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003), Poeta en
San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James
Laughlin Award of the Academy of American
Poets,[3] and Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010).

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including 2nd Avenue
Poetry, Asian Pacific American Journal, Boxcar Poetry Review, Chain, Crate, Interlope, New
American Writing, Nocturnes Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Parthenon
West Review, as well as in the anthologies Babaylan (Aunt Lute Books, 2000), Eros
Pinoy (Anvil, 2001), InvAsian: Asian Sisters Represent (Study Center Press, 2003), Going Home
to a Landscape (Calyx, 2003), Coloring Book (Rattlecat, 2003), Not Home But Here (Anvil,
2003), Pinoy Poetics (Meritage, 2004), Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area (Avalon
Publishing, 2004), 100 Love Poems: Philippine Love Poetry Since 1905(University of the
Philippines Press, 2004), Red Light: Superheroes, Saints and Sluts (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005),
and Graphic Poetry (Victionary, 2005).

Reyes is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco’s Yuchengco Philippine Studies


Program. She has previously taught Creative Writing at Mills College, and Philippine Studies
at University of San Francisco. She co-edits Doveglion Press, a publisher of political literature[4],
with her husband poet Oscar Bermeo. Reyes currently resides in Oakland, California.

The Night Manny Pacquiao KO’ed Oscar De La Hoya

The senator embraced his toddler’s yaya


& shared a San Miguel beer
in the spitshine polished banquet room.
How else could it have gone down?
They spit in our face, Filipinos.
They fuck us & when we come home,
They treat us like maids.
We stink of garlic and BBQ’ed dog.
Our dignity is as astig.
as the glaring eyes of our Pinoy boxers.
I am writing this poem because
I am you, you know. I am you
& pride makes necessary things
even more necessary, and beautiful.
Because the muscle of punches
has forced our presence into newspapers
& our anthem is amplified
by the glitz of Las Vegas.
Our culture is an advertisement for Nike
kneeling at the cornerpost
& the jeepney driver fist-pumping,
war cry reaching heaven,
hands clenched & rosaried
like the two saviors we worship.

Galleon Prayer
pilipinas to petatlán

she whispers desert trees, thorn-ridged, trickling yellow candles; roots spilling snakes’ blood
virgin of ribboned silk; virgin of gold filigree
one day’s walk westward, a crucifix of fisherman’s dinghy dimensions washes ashore
virgin adorned in robe of shark embryo and coconut husk
she fingers mollusks, wraps herself in sea vines
virgin of ocean voyage peril
she wills herself born
virgin of mud brick ruins; virgin of sandstorm echoes
she is saint of commonplaces; saint of badlands
virgin of jade, camphor, porcelain; virgin of barter for ghosts
penitents, earthdivers of forgotten names praying skyward
virgin of scars blossomed from open veins of fire
she slips across the pacific’s rivers of pearldiving children
virgin of copper coins
she is bloodletting words, painting unlikeness
virgin of anachronism
children stained with berries and rust, their skeletons bend, arrow-tipped; smoke blurs eyes’
edges
virgin of mineral depletion; virgin of mercury
at other altitudes she remembers to breathe; a monument scraping cloud
virgin of tin deposits extracted from mountains
these are not divinations; there is goldleaf about her skin
virgin of naming and renaming places in between.

Conchitina "Chingbee" R. Cruz is a Filipina poet[1] who teaches creative


writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines in Diliman.
Formerly an INTARMED student, Cruz shifted to the University of the Philippines' Creative
Writing program, from which she graduated magna cum laude and College of Arts and
Letters valedictorian in 1998.

While on a Fulbright grant, she studied and taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
where she received her MFA in Writing. She is currently taking her PhD in SUNY Albany.

Her works include Disappear, a chapbook published in 2005 by High Chair, Dark Hours,
published in 2005 by The University of the Philippines Press, elsewhere held and lingered,
published in 2008 by High Chair, A catalogue of clothes for sale from the closet of Christine
Abella: perpetual student, ukay fan, and compulsive traveler, published in 2012 by the Youth &
Beauty Brigade, and There is no emergency, published in 2015 by the Youth & Beauty Brigade.
She is also the youngest poet in the anthology A Habit of Shores, the third part in Gémino H.
Abad's three-volume collection of one hundred years of Philippine poetry and verse.

Some of her works have also appeared in Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, Philippine
Studies and the online journal High Chair. In September 2006, Dark Hours was reviewed by
Andy Brown, the creative writing program director at the University of Exeter.

Cruz has won two Palanca Awards to date, one in 1996 for "Second Skin" and another in 2001
for "The Shortest Distance". Her book Dark Hours won the 2006 National Book Awardfor
Poetry.
Signals
I took the amaretto to mean there was no beer in the house.

I took the bassline to mean a particular addressee was in the crowd.

I took the clairvoyant weather to mean I could dismiss your unappealing conclusions.

I took the dry run to mean the echo was unreliable.

I took the elevated appeal of allusions to mean the fever had no fangs.

I took your fury to mean there was grass in the basement.

I took the gelatinous substance to mean a diminished generosity toward herbivorous endeavors.

I took happiness to mean I had the right syllable in mind.

I took the initials to mean just leave the front door unlocked.

I took the jellyfish scuttling by the reef to mean the kleptomania was the least of my concerns.

I took the kiss to mean a potentially inconsequential lesson.

I took the lesion barely hidden by your sleeve to mean you had no wish to mimic the tragedies of
your flawed heroines.

I took the marionette on the clothesline to mean there was hope for the unsuspecting neighbor.

I took no to mean it was the only answer.

I took the oppressive serendipity to mean that panic might or might not send us straight into an
emergency.

I took the paprika to mean quiz the cook, not the gardener.

I took the imperious quill to mean the repetition was intentional.

I took the sly reference to mean the substitute had surpassed the preference.
I took the song to mean you took the necessary pill.

I took the tricky decimal to mean I should unsay the speech I made over dinner.

I took the unexpected unification to mean veer away from condescending middlemen.

I took the violinist’s lisp to mean it was imperative to wait in line.

I took the waiver to mean there was a xenophobe in the building.

I took the third x-ray to mean you had nothing more to lose.

I took the yapping from the room below to mean the token zorroing was a far more appropriate
gesture.

I took the zero dangling from the headline to mean the aphorism was a spell in disguise.

Half an hour in the house of indecision or procrastination


ants
The cotton buds are attracting ants by the hundreds, they are almost flowers.
blinds
The blinds are behaving like piano keys at the mercy of an inebriated player. Or: the blinds are
undulating like the sea on an uneventful summer day. Or: the blinds are shimmering like grass
skirt of a woman scavenging for keys in a cavernous purse.
conundrum
Are there three illegal puppies yelping without let up in the apartment next door or just two?
electric fan
The dust clinging to the spokes of the fan spans several eras: The Era of the Apartment
Devastated by Flood, The Era of Politically Incorrect yet Extremely Amusing Terms for
Informal Settlers, and The Era of Citrus-Scented Cleaning Agents to Cover Up the Accidents of
the Ailing Cat.
insight
Instant coffee with condensed milk is too pleasant to be thought of as making do.
history
There is nothing in the house that seems to have emerged from a grandmotherly chest inlaid with
mother-of-pearl save for the stereoscope and the box of slides of pastoral scenes in turn-of- the-
century India.
melodica
In lieu of the guitar left in the office. In lieu of the sorely missed cable subscription. In lieu of
mid-week nights at the bar with unexplainably cheap margaritas, now closed for renovation.
note
The term you mean to use when you say threshed out is fleshed out.
shameful vanity
The studio photograph taken years ago to commemorate the shamelessly literary tattoo is
languishing in a book bag from a forgettable conference.
wishful thinking
Today is hopefully not the day the landlady slips the electric bill under the door.
MARC GABA was born in Manila but grew
up in Tarlac from age 1 till 5, and then Bulacan
until his 13th year. He then studied in Philippine
Science High School, and has since then
considered himself a permanent resident of
Quezon City. In visual art, he first began with
photography while a medical student in UP-
PGH’s Integrated Liberal Arts-Medicine
program; he stopped doing photography when,
shooting Malate at night some time in 1997, he
was abducted by four men who turned out to be
undercover cops who mistook him for a narcotics dealer. Apart from continuing to work on
volumes of poetry and making conceptually nuanced visual art, he has been writing plays. His
first full length play is a meditative comedy set in New York called The Psychic’s Guide to the
Not So Supernatural World; it is about a 4th-generation Filipino-American editor hired by a
closet psychic in her late 40s to fix her odd manuscript: a self-help book intended to help her
fellow psychics navigate the world of normal people. The play tracks how a professional
relationship could turn into a profound, familial bond. He hopes that a theater company in the
States could produce it soon, as most of the characters are unhyphenated Americans.
Vanitas

at the speed of light he turned no further


were we once an inviolate sorrow,
an eyeful of apologies, too quick, or late enough in the instant
to recoil from absence the consensus of cells
that felt you
leave with them as I consent to owe you,
I owned who, I sang you my
listening my lyric my Eurydice—forge
the splash of my signature across any song any shade there mouths,
the old gods—silt-handed with gossip still and holding
their ends from the end as in the speed of sound she went free

Vanitas

“I was named so similar others


echo like yours spells through

back against the flash


of an origin that means

something, not a man


held it and instead

as a stain in a landscape is

shallow, it was shallow


in the depth of the time it

was given, and it called.”


Vanitas
And when it had done explaining the dream—reached me,
wordless beside the morning.

what joy can error

disprove down to source


its long life in the mirror
To myself last night I said my own name
to hear my voice sound
like someone stripped of choice like a knife
agleam with a few eyes
Sheathe it now your body must do where I never thought to close,
could open the open mirror’ssingle eye
its radiant mouth listening to neither side of it equal
a lie, now where faces have no back
Francisco ‘Kokoy’ Guevara was born and raised in Manila. He
graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the USA in 2010,
where he was a Teaching-Writing fellow. He is currently teaching
at De La Salle University-Manila, where he co-curates Translating
Environments, a forum series with the Bienvenido N. Santos
Creative Writing Center. His recent creative and critical works
have been published in The Offending Adam and Jacket2.
There was the climate

lingering on: the business of bearing


mymy my myan original, drying leaf's

last flutter. What Adam swept during


a pretense of a rose is—or, my

rendered elastic what he had hoped


mym y to be another immovable hue.

For natural read his voted-on sense for


m y “what stays & away.” So far from

feigning Adam & a pavement, ever after


its symphony scored a crowd: do you

remember your peopled to a tree's? my


Do you remember the unaccounted,

braced-for apology ahead? my


In the humdrum ocean that stole you?

On the evenings of November

I harvested silence for an I that was


my voyeur after having looked out
of a skyscraper enough to feel at home
in the lie of falling for the ground

I couldn’t see. In the sense of storms


betrayed by their names’ passing,
I returned to transcribe a skyline
that was more a seabed upon a traffic

light’s sense of keeping time against


a street against the trial in every sentence
sighed as that storm struck, and her haze
misread for dusk rendered the guilt

I felt from looking away in order


to think myself into trafficking wherever
one was raised and therefore became
December in the spirit of a cigarette,

yet, perhaps, to begin without having to be


in a room trembling from trains passing,
nay, forging through and through a key
to praise forests there in the uppercase,

and every other page waiting for an ark


to sail a home away from the haunting I was
after I awoke drenched enough to mimic
newness by foot without doubling back

for every shadow caught inside another


shadow’s strain, and after hours soiled from
calling it work, the rot I incurred until
a flood’s current could finally return me.
Marjorie Evasco is an award- winning Filipino poet, born
in Maribojoc, Bohol on September 21, 1953. She writes in
two languages: English and Cebuano-Visayan and is a
supporter of women's rights, especially of women writers.
Marjorie Evasco is one of the earliest Filipinafeminist poets.
Born into a family of teachers who were "always talking
English", she was brought up and educated as a Roman Catholic and her formative years in
school were spent under the tutelage of German and Belgian nuns.Evasco and her family then
moved to Manila. She finished her B.A. in 1973 from Divine Word College of
Tagbilaran, Masteral Degree in Creative Writing in 1982 at Silliman University and her Doctor
of Philosophy in Literature (Ph.D. Litt.) at De La Salle University-Manila. She became a
member of the faculty at De La Salle University, while completing her doctoral degree in
1998.For many years, she was Director of DLSU's Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing
Center. She is currently a University Fellow at the same university.
For Maria Kodama’s Other Borges

'For the person that you will be,


whom perhaps I might not understand.'
- Jorge Luis Borges, Inscripción

I. Her labyrinth

A fortnight after you died,


I sang your black bones back
to shape.
In the silence I trusted
the dark from whence
you came.

Now, you are a figure conjured up


with light on this page,
mere trick
of shadows.
Who are you, Poet?
Whose god can breathe you back
to flesh?

II. Orpheus Falls

Who has not heard the Poet’s lament


for one descended into dream’s dark
stairs?
Who has not heard the gods’
admonition, given with knowing smile—
Do not look back—
last trick to play
on the body’s lighted book of memory?

Every single instance, the lover fails,


falls,
quick to usher the sought-after
back to the surface of time. He sings
to her, “Ascend with me!”—
yet in a
moment’s breathlessness, hers, he
looks back and she’s undone,
charred bones
and ash.

III. Dream of the Waterclock

'All those things were made perfectly clear


so that our hands could meet.'
-Jorge Luis Borges, Las Causas

This is the symphony’s last movement


dripping in the old waterclock.
For each drop of water—in the manner
of the blind poet—I offer you seven
dreams:
1) hush of bamboo leaves
before the onslaught of storm winds;
2) scent of a golden pollen’s flight after a wild
bee danced the yellow roses;
3) first sheaf of rice from the first season’s harvest after
the last typhoon;
4) fishing boats on the beach,
dawn silvering the catch in the nets;
5) threshold of sunset through which
my thoughts traverse to the morning
side of the world;
6) last drop of black ink
from the calligrapher’s brush on silk,
on which is completed the release
of the beloved from death;
7) two hands folded,
fingertips lightly touching my forehead
in timeless greeting, as if you’re here
with me. Palpable,
real.
Birds of Paradise
after Women with birds of paradise, by Anita Magsaysay-Ho, oil on canvas, 1982

Their eyes are black slits against


Gold of their burnished skin this side
of morning. They do not shatter silence
with chatter of the marketplace.

Only their hands speak of the task,


gathering the day’s burden of beauty:
birds of paradise singing in tongues,
wings spread over and between

their heads, a feast of burning angels.


The youngest among them bends down
deepest into herself, wrapping the green
stems in a second skin against breaking.
The night before, she had watched the sea
while the gravid moon rose red as her belly.
She tore off her white bandana and broke
into the waters, her black seagrass hair dis-

entangling, waves hissing low ‘let be, let go!’


Mabi David is a freelance writer and researcher. Her first full-
length book of poems, You Are Here, was published in 2009 by
High Chair. Her chapbook, Unto Thee, appeared in 2005. She is
also one of the authors of Rafflesia of the Philippines, a story about
the hunt for (and discovery of) this rare parasitic plant, and the
Filipino botanists involved in its conservation. She was a former
Deputy Director of the University of the Philippines Press and
Head of the Research Department of the Filipinas Heritage Library.
Sitting Poem, 18

Blinding light, cold


wind even in summer.
The lake below is still:
polish of cut glass, silver
nourish of indifference.

I have come here


to sit and wait
all day, years, sentinel
to any sly arrival.

Not scratching, not hungry


nor succumbing, not feeling,
not bereft, not longing, not moving.
Air and sun pressing against strain.

The hot sheet of noon


shivering into afternoons.

The world turning


white; no horizon.

Breeze catching voices from afar


chastens by subtle reminders. O

that my life may not always be this.


More time, looming shadows. Dusk
darkly yielding another setting, disfiguring
a landscape I’ve come to know, here
stooping, here gloaming, here indigo.

Toy

And because I’d gone ahead and done


the unthinkable, I want to know

what else I won’t ever do. I go ahead


and do that too. I think of a thing or two

the mere thought of which makes me


retch: I do it. And do it

until the idea of me and my turns


silly, toy, being built a certain way

has little truth, until I get to the bottom


of where I came undone and keep at it

until the hurt it gives gets good


and the good I give gets animal.
Ricardo M de Ungria has published seven books of
poetry and edited a number of anthologies, for which he
has won five National Book Awards. Through a Fulbright
Grant, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from
Washington University in St. Louis in 1989. He has also
received writing grants from the Hawthornden
International Retreat for Writers and Bellagio Study and
Conference Center. He is a founding member of the
Philippine Literary Arts Council, which
published Caracoa, the first and only poetry journal in the Philippines in the eighties. In 1999 he
founded the Davao Writers Guild that that publishes a literary journal called Dagmay and
features literary works in various languages by mostly young writers in the Davao region.
Ricardo has served as Chancellor of the University of the Philippines in Mindanao for two terms
(2001-2007) and as Commissioner for the Arts at the National Commission for Culture and the
Arts (2008-11).
Continuing Love
Written for the Agnes Locsin dance A Love Story, in honour of Carmen D. Locsin

1.
From thick vines hung from trees
let go by hands,
from rocks by the banks
crammed with coiled springs for wet feet—
it is all wings and arcs
cleaving wild air
into the cool waters of Mintal river.
Loose planks bridge here
to nowhere shakily.
Towers of unseen worlds rise,
built tale upon tall tale.
From treetops where footraces ended,
the earth is more than grass
and clods of dirt—instead, a wide bilao
of hills and mountains, rivers
and houses and trees trees trees!
The sky is more than a roof
if you pry the branches apart.
God lives also in the trees,
and the leaves breathe with him.
No other school teaches that.

2.
Of all the fruits and flowers
and fish and fowl
that take life from the land
and the waters and the air
from Mintal to Calinan
and beyond to Marilog,
and even to Silay and Iloilo,
none turns the day around quicker
to its point of lightness and heat
than the sweetness without
husk or shoreline that is
human love.
Love the leap in the air
without shadows
over walls and trees and craters
torn open by bombs.
Love the stroke of midnight and fire
announcing orchids
ahead of bicycles and breasts. Love
keeps the hands of dreams warm
in all directions. Love
the stillness that won’t stay still.
Or slip away
like a ship in the night. Love
be still.

3.
Caught in their own melodies of growth
and yearnings,
they move apart and out
to come into their own—
the living forms in the dance and the garden,
and the children, marking time
on a tightwire, eventually unheavened
under all kinds of weather
and sleep. Meanwhile,
they are flung open to receive
lessons pried out of the rock
of astonishments
and the words that pile up
without end
on the way to school and
later, work.

4.
The hues and slowburn of sweetness
flush in one durian fruit;
the sure sail and dip of
eagle wingtip, deadly swoop,
and rip and tug of beak;
surge of fish and leap of cat;
pull and push of root and treetop;
burst of sap spiraling
inside trees and leaves and shells;
ebb and tiderush, rot of bones
and stars—
so too
in the flex and swing,
bend, stretch, twist
to near cracking, slack and
spring and intimations of
the body pinned by pain
and drip of death,
or wet with anguished joy,
lurk of hope, laughter shared
and emptiness.
Surface
tensions bruised by beauty
brief.
Rippling.
Tingle
in the soul between
measure and
release.

Here shall be space


for spiriting forms
of loss and love and longings
into their human likeness
and reach,
to teach the body
praise, prayer, possibility.
Come, speak
the speech of the body,
and pass on the dance.

5.
Harder on the heart is
the going away than being gone.
Being gone has walked through walls
and changed the wine to water—and now
the wall can break itself down
to dust and spilled water
dry up without smoke.
Going away shrinks all windows and doors
to the size of the unspoken.
A life gathers into a face before us,
and starts to close its eyes.
In the dimming light
we stand as on a jolt
of tide-sucked sand,
our balance shifted,
our own face flush with the breath
slipped out of the one becalmed.
Then, the one thing left to do,
the only tender thing to do,
beyond the anger and consent,
moving to its own secret music and
not made smaller by pain,
is to climb up God’s tree
and nibble on her breath,
or get the broom and sweep
without thought
or excitation
the shadow rolled out
on the hospital floor
tile by square
white tile.

6.
God lives in trees and speaks
the languages of winds,
shadows, light, laughter.
Always the birds bring in new seeds
and the waves new water—as if
they have not done that before, as if
they had not always done that
as before, as if they were not here
in the beginning after all.
New buds flower, dry up, and drop
from their stems. Suddenly,
a big shadow is upon us, and in a snap
the truck moves on and light springs back
on old familiars.
Frisky little bodies plunge into the water
and the waters receive them.
The work of memories and affections
is the work of water, earth, and fire.
Were we where we were,
or will we be where we’ll be?
A hand takes us, and we take the hand.
We feel the earth push back our feet,
and we move on
to feed the birds, or watch
the goldfish breathe out ripples
on the surface of the dug-out pond.
A Kink of Burning

1.
Breath of wings. Sighing of lovers
lost to the winds. Sigh of the wind then.
Breath unspoken. About to speak.
No mouth to word dead loves,
only—listen!
A premonition taking wing
bigger than trees.
Through spires of skylight
—through treetops
—through bird tongues swimming on wakened leaves.
The dead cling to music and the rains come.
Breath on ears tingling. Supernal. Breath of dead loves.

2.
Water jets down bald mountains
and wraps the fevered earth with thick muddy blankets.

3.
Among the morning branches a kingfisher—
Is it? Was it? On a leaf a butterfly
Stunned by the wildest flowers
Of faith and desire. Therefore:
Feeling
is all that remains
at the back of the head when no one is looking.
Weightless with lost names
And the fish-breath of solitudes.

4.
Forgetting, then, the last ablution.
Prayers drift past the blooming lotuses
Like ashes from some unsmothered fire
Groping for various shapes of desire.
A wild river flows up past trees still standing,
past words that have given up on words.

5.
A pair of long-parted lovers
recovered to each other’s attentions,
breathe a nakedness and a body
to the moon in their minds.
They find the fullness of longing
shot through with holes,
and its emptiness filling up the scooping hands.
Shorn of old obligations and allegiance
that invaded romance not just once,
they lick each other’s thighs, nipples and breasts
without the faithful words I love I love I love.
Themselves unmoving like roots
In each other’s arms, yet
Moving past names and renamings
Of old resentments and judgments,
they cleave to each other without memory or hope,
creating without god a sweetness
inextinguishable and tender
the way a feather of fire holds on to fire
and takes wing, blazing with singing.
JOEY DALISAY JR.

Dalisay was born in Romblon in 1954. He completed his


primary education at La Salle Green Hills, Philippines in 1966 and his
secondary education at the Philippine Science High School in 1970. He
dropped out of college to work as a journalist after a period of
imprisonment when Philippine President Ferdinand
Marcos declaredMartial Law in 1972. After his release as a political
detainee, he also wrote scripts mostly for Lino Brocka, the National
Artist of the Philippines for Theater and Film. Dalisay returned to
school and earned his B.A. English degree, cum laude from the University of the Philippines in
1984. He later received an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan in 1988 and a Ph.D
in English from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1991 as a Fulbright scholar.

Dalisay has authored more than 20 books since 1984. Six of those books have
garnered National Book Awards from the Manila Critics Circle. In 1998, Dalisay made it to
the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Centennial Honors List as one of the 100 most
accomplished Filipino artists of the past century. He also won 16 Palanca Awards in five genres.
For winning at least five First Prize awards, he was elevated to the Palanca Hall of Fame in 2000.
He has also garnered five Cultural Center of the Philippines awards for playwriting;
and FAMAS, URIAN, Star and Catholic Mass Media awards and citations for his screenplays.
He also chaired the 1992 ASEAN Writers Conference/Workshop, in Penang, Malaysia. He was
named one of The Ten Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) of 1993 for his creative writing. In
2005, he received the PremioCervara di Roma in Italy for extensively promoting
Philippine literature overseas. In 2007, his second novel, Soledad's Sister, was shortlisted for the
inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize in Hong Kong.

He has received Hawthornden Castle, British Council, David T.K. Wong,


and Rockefeller (Bellagio) fellowships, and has held the Henry Lee Irwin Professorial Chair at
the Ateneo de Manila University; and the Jose Joya, Jorge Bocobo,
and ElpidioQuirino professorial chairs at U.P. Diliman. He has lectured on
Philippine culture andpolitics at the University of Michigan, University of Auckland, Australian
National University, UniversitiKebangsaan Malaysia, St. Norbert
College (Wisconsin,U.S.A.), University of East Anglia, University of Rome, London School of
Economics, and the University of California, San Diego.

After serving for three years as English and Comparative Literature Department Chair,
Dalisay assumed the post of Vice President for Public Affairs of the U.P. System from May 2003
to February 2005. He is currently a Professor of English and creative writing at the College of
Arts and Letters, U.P. Diliman, where he also coordinated the creative writing program. He is
also Director of the U.P. Institute of Creative Writing. Aside from his column for the Philippine
Star, he also writes political and social commentary for the newsmagazine Newsbreak and
the San Francisco-based Filipinas magazine.

Killing Time in a Warm Place

The story starts with the protagonist, Noel Bulaong, reminiscing about his childhood days
in his native land inKangleong, somewhere in the Visayas region. He is on a flight going home
from the US to bury his father. Hereminisces about how he and his friends would pick up
coconuts that fell from the tree and take these to a neighbor who would turn these into
coconut candies: bucayo.Fast-forward to college life in Manila where Noel decided to study. By
his 2nd year in school, Noel was alreadyamong the students staging protests against the Marcos
government and his martial law. This was introduced in thebook via a protest being dispersed by
the military,

In my second year of college, I ran across that field in a blind panic, hurried along by
gunfire. The university wasunder siege by the military; we had set up barricades of
commandeered tables, benches and chairs near the spot from where I had admired the study
horses. We camped behind this makeshift wall, students and professors alike,listening to
speeches and singing revolutionary songs. Our bones were cold, but our breath
was warm. Peopletalked of France and China and Vietnam. On the other side of the barricades
stood Marcos¶ assembled legions:truncheon-wielding riot police in khakis and cobalt-blue
helmets, the army in fatigues, riding armored jeeps. All through the morning emissaries had
crossed over from one side to the other.
Having survived this attack, Noel and his comrades settled in an apartment where they
talked about the movementwhile in hiding. Noel by this time has decided to quit school. Talk of
childhood days in their respective homes, familyanecdotes and planning for counter-attacks took
up most of Noel¶s days, hidden in this apartment.Fast-forward again to the future where Noel
now serves as assistant to the Deputy Minister and writes his speeches,among other things. He
has decided to leave the movement after being released from prison. He has lost contactwith his
other comrades.Laurie, a former comrade in their apartment-hidden days ran into Noel one day
and she has likewise decided to leavethe movement. Perhaps both feeling misplaced, and
disoriented, wanting to connect with each other in a way thatwould touch the persons that they
used to be, Noel and Laurie made love.But nothing came of this. They both decided it was too
much too handle« too overwhelming an emotion that theywouldn¶t be able to cope. They once
again lost touch and last Noel heard, Laurie had gone back to the movementand is hiding in the
mountains.

Soledad’s sister

The novel starts in a cloudy August night when a casket bearing the corpse of one who is
identified as Aurora V. Cabahug arrives in the Ninoy Aquino International Airport from Jeddah.
Mysteriously identified by Jeddah authorities as having died from drowning, she is one of 700
Filipino overseas workers who return as corpses to NAIA every year.[3] The corpse, however, is
not the real Aurora Cabahug but of her older sister, Soledad. The real Aurora Cabahug, called
Rory, has in fact never set foot beyond the small town of Paez and is a singer in the Flame Tree,
a KTV nightclub frequented by cops, the town’s vice-mayor and Koreans. Rory learns of her
sister's death and she claims the body with the help of a local police officer, Walter G. Zamora.
Along the way, their vehicle along with the casket is stolen by notorious carnapper known as
Boy Alambre. In the end, Soledad's casket, is discovered by Boy Alambre. He pushes the casket
into a murky river, but in an ironic twist of fate, the thief is taken along and drowns with the
corpse. Soledad remains as faceless as she was when she came home.

In a series of flashbacks and narrations, we learn of the stories in each of the main characters’
lives. Their mysteries are not fully unraveled however, left to the past or to events that have yet
to be told.
KATRINA TUVERA

She earned her BA in Humanities (Art History) and MA in Creative Writing from University
of the Philippines-Diliman. She resides in Manila and currently divides her time between
teaching literature and creative writing at De La Salle University-Taft and completing the sequel
to her first novel, The Jupiter Effect.

Her first novel, The Jupiter Effect, was published by Anvil Manila in 2006, and awarded the
Manila Critics Circle National Book Award that year. She received her first National Book
Award four years earlier with the publication of Testament and Other Stories, which included her
Palanca-winning story. Tuvera has received writing fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation,
Vermont Studio Center, Ledig House, Blue Mountain Center, Hedgebrook Retreat, and the
MacDowell Colony in the United States, and Hawthornden International Retreat in Scotland. A
former staff officer of the Philippine Senate’s electoral tribunal, she is a lecturer at the
Department of Literature, De La Salle University.

Books:

 The Jupiter Effect


 Testament and Other Story
Miguel Syjuco born on November 17, 1976 is a Filipino writer
from Iloilo, and the son of Augusto Syjuco Jr., the
current representative of the second district of Iloilo. His first
novel, Ilustrado, won the 2008 Palanca Awards Grand Prize for the
Novel in English, the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2010
QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. Miguel
Syjuco, from Manila, is the author of Ilustrado, the debut novel which won the 2008 Man Asian
Literary Prize as well as the Palanca Award, the Philippines' highest literary honour. The son of a
political family, Miguel ran away to become a writer and has made a living as a medical guinea
pig, B-movie extra, eBay power seller of ladies' handbags, and an assistant to a bookie at the
horseraces. More recently, he has worked as a copy editor, freelancer and reviewer at major
international publications. He has a master's degree in creative writing
from ColumbiaUniversity and is completing a PhD in English literature from
the University of Adelaide in Australia. Miguel's current literary writing explores the
possibilities of narrative fiction and examines the complexities of a Third World society involved
in reckless decay and hopeful progress. Some of his goals in life are to have everyone be able to
pronounce his surname properly (see-hoo-coh) and to introduce the world to the
storied Philippine culture that is far more than just domestic helpers, Imelda Marcos and the guy
who shot Versace. His second novel, I Was The President’s Mistress, is slated for release in
2012. Syjuco now lives in Montreal, where he hosts a weekly radio column on books on
CBC/Radio Canada.

Ilustrado

Exuberant and wise, wildly funny and deeply moving, Ilustrado explores the hidden truths
that haunt every family. It is a daring and inventive debut by a new writer of astonishing
talent.

It begins with a body. On a clear day in winter, the battered corpse of Crispin Salvador is pulled
from the Hudson River—taken from the world is the controversial lion of Philippine literature.
Gone, too, is the only manuscript of his final book, a work meant to rescue him from obscurity
by exposing the crimes of the Filipino ruling families. Miguel, his student and only remaining
friend, sets out for Manila to investigate.
To understand the death, Miguel scours the life, piecing together Salvador’s story through his
poetry, interviews, novels, polemics, and memoirs. The result is a rich and dramatic family saga
of four generations, tracing 150 years of Philippine history forged under the Spanish, the
Americans, and the Filipinos themselves. Finally, we are surprised to learn that this story belongs
to young Miguel as much as to his lost mentor, and we are treated to an unhindered view of a
society caught between reckless decay and hopeful progress.

Exuberant and wise, wildly funny and deeply moving, Ilustrado explores the hidden truths that
haunt every family. It is a daring and inventive debut by a new writer of astonishing talent.

POET, PLAYBOY, PERVERT, SON

by Miguel Syjuco

In hills,

Haunted hollow with blurs of bullets,

Burs of kris and bloodshot eyes,

As talks trip-falter on two feet too big,

And ransoms roar

For human life:

Poet playboy pervert, one

Single man hurt

In bomb blast

Half past the 11th hour before peacetime,

Echoes flown, thrown on walls, blown, rhyme

With ouch, kapow, kaboom,


Why is death standing in a mother’s living room,

Boy, the bebop jazzmataz fast on the bullets ass

Named nothing, that slug, thug, PSG bug,

Without within things like thoughts or profound snots,

Flung thither and non on pavement’s dawn

Rough like red, rough like yellow,

Fellow fiends, friends, kaibigan, kaputol

Ng diablo, well blow me downtown and shiver me

Timber, rape riot red, tight like homesteads

On the soothills of the south,

Bastards with sewn shut mouths,

Lackies luckless lost amongst

Soldiers, their pockets filled with holocaust,

And rebels with ideals as raw

As hunger in their bellies,

Claws, and AK47s slung, sleepily, on shoulders hung

With rust of race and allah’s word,

Fleeing upwards like an ebony bird,

Buzzard breath on toasted bread,

And Joyce Jimenez in that young boys head,

As he rubs gun hilt shiny gold,


Like hold on hope, like brown periscope,

Like barter trade of eye to eye,

And xyz,

I don’t know why

The abcs and 1,2,3s of graves

Dug there beneath the trees

Where monkeys scream and scraw

And barefeet walk,

And bananas stalk

The upwards sky, shone shiny

Gone with heat of dawn tossed gently

‘cross the steaming sky

Of shells, shrieks, shudders, shouts,

Splits heads, holes hearts, tears off mouths,

To end, abruptly, silence corruptly

Unreal, undone, the war’s unwon,

In the south of this place

Where the setting sun, sets strong, sets strong,

Sets blood and wrong,

On the poet, playboy, pervert, son of a gun,

Son of mother, son of sun,


Son of allah, son of god,

Son of greed gone green

On heaps of gold and cold hard cash

Of the folk on Polk street, thievery’s stash,

Temple tempered on celluloid dreams,

Pipe schemes, and ream of Captain badiding’s

Limp wristed blistered follies,

Fallen from power, fallen from grace,

Shamed the shame

Of our people’s race.

And poet, playboy, pervert,

Mother’s son, engraved in earth,

Battle done, and allah’s gone, and god is done,

And death’s door shut with leaves of grass,

Blown trembling in the south’s red sun.

BOOKS:

 Ilustrado
 I Was The President’s Mistress

LOUIE MAR GANGCUAGCO

Louie Mar Gangcuangco was born on March 26, 1987 in Mandaluyong City, Philippines.
He finished his primary education in Montessori de San Juan (MSJ) as the batch valedictorian in
1999. He represented MSJ in several competitions, most notably the Walt Disney Interschool
Leadership Competition where he won second runner-up.He graduated from Manila Science
High School (Masci) in 2003 as the First Honorable Mention, First Meritorious Awardee, Best in
English, and Best in Filipino. He has represented Masci in several interschool competitions,
notably: National Inventor’s Contest; Children’s Museum and Library Incorporated Impromptu
Speech Contest (second place); and The Philippine National Police Impromptu Speaking Contest
(third place). He was the Science editor of The Nucleus, the school paper of Manila Science,
which was awarded as the third best school paper in the Philippines during his editorship.He is
two years accelerated in college under the Integrated Liberal Arts & Medicine (Intarmed)
curriculum of the University of the Philippines College of Medicine. As a freshman, Louie Mar,
together with his teammates Lyle Gomez and AtrioLopez, won first place in the UP Manila
Intercollegiate Debate Tournament, toppling down seniors from different colleges in the
university.

Even as a medical student, Louie finds time to go out and socialize. His night-out’s has
inspired him to write his novel, Orosa-Nakpil, Malate, which he self-published in March 2006 at
age eighteen. His work was featured in the top-rating TV show, Sharon, in June of the same year.
In August 2006, Louie Mar was awarded the Y Idol Award (Youth Idol Award) by Studio 23’s Y
Speak. Later that month, the SentrongWikang Filipino conferred a SertipikongPagpapahalaga for
Orosa-Nakpil, Malate. His phenomenal novel is endorsed by prominent people and institutions
including the multi-awarded director, Jose Javier “Joey” Reyes, Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan (former
DOH secretary) and Dr. Raul Destura of the National Institutes of Health Philippines.

After one year of circulation, Orosa-Nakpil, Malate made it to the Best Sellers List
released by National Book Store in April 2007. With him in the list are authors Mitch Albom of
One More Day, James Patterson and Maxine Paetro of The Fifth Horseman, and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez of Memories of My Melancholy Whores. The book landed on the Top 8 spot,
overtaking international authors Steve Berry and Kiran Desai.

In 2008, Louie Mar Gangcuangco published his second book, Gee, My Grades Are
Terrific: A Student’s Guide to Academic Excellence, a self-help book for students.

Louie Mar passed the Straight Internal Medicine Internship in the Philippine General
Hospital. He will be graduating from the UP College of Medicine in 2010.
BOOKS:

 Orosa-Nakpil, Malate
 Gee, My Grades Are Terrific: A Student’s Guide to Academic Excellence

LUALHATI BAUTISTA

She was born in Tondo, Manila on December 2, 1946 to parents Esteban Bautista and
Gloria Torres. She studied in public schools, both in her elementary and high school years. She
graduated from the Emilio Jacinto Elementary School in 1964 and from Torres High School in
1968. While studying in the Lyceum of the Philippines, she took the course of which she had no
interest, and eventually stopped schooling. She started writing while she was still 16 years old,
and was mainly influenced by her parents who were into composing and poem-writing. Her first
stories were published in the magazine, Liwayway. She was the vice-president of the
Screenwriters Guild of the Philippines and the chair of the
KapisananngmgaManunulatngNobelang Popular. She became a national fellow for fiction of the
University of the Philippines Creative Writing Center in 1986.

Ms.Lualhati Bautista is known for her outstanding and award-winning novels. Among
these, are Gapo (1980), Dekada '70 (1983), and Bata, Bata, Pa'noKaGinawa? (1984). All of these
won the grand prize in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. Aside from this,
she has written numerous poems and short stories, some of which were compiled in an
anthology. In addition to being a novelist, Lualhati Bautista is also a movie and television
scriptwriter and a short story writer. Her first screenplay is Sakada (Seasonal Sugarcane
Workers), a story written in 1972 that exposed the plight of Filipino peasants. Copies of the
script were even confiscated by the military. As a writer, Lualhati Bautista received recognition
from the Philippine's Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and then the
SurianngWikangPambansa in 1987.

WORKS:
 Gapo
 Dekada ‘70
 Bata, Bata, Pa’noKaGinawa
 Bulaklaksa City Jail
 Kung Mahahawi Man angUlap

F. SIONIL JOSE

Born on December 3, 1924, F. Sionil Jose is one of the most widely-read Filipino writers
in the English language. His works have been translated into 22 languages including Korean,
Chinese, Indonesian, and Russian.

His works are usually replete with social underpinnings on the class struggles as well as
the colonialism in Philippine society. Even as a young kid, Jose already had a firm understanding
about justice, corruption, inequality, and other social issues. He learned much from growing up
in a somewhat destitute living condition in Barrio Cabugawan in Rosales, Pangasinan. Jose was
of Ilocano descent; his family migrated to Pangasinan before his birth. To flee from poverty, his
family traveled from Ilocos towards Cagayan Valley, through the Santa Fe Trail, bringing with
them their lifetime possessions including uprooted molave posts of their old houses and their
alsong, a stone mortar for pounding rice.

After World War II, Jose tried to further develop his writing by taking up classes at the
University of Santo Tomas, but he dropped out. Instead, he was swept by the whirlpool of the
journalism world in Manila. He edited various literary and journalistic publications, started a
publishing house, and founded the Philippine branch of PEN, an international organization for
writers.

Even though he has received numerous awards and recognitions such as the CCP
Centennial Honors for the Arts in 1999, the Outstanding Fulbrighters Award for Literature in
1988, and the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative
Communication Arts in 1980, and has been one of the most critically-acclaimed Filipino authors
internationally, Jose is somehow underrated in the Philippines because of his authentic Filipino
English and his anti-elite views.

NOVELS:

 Po-on
 The Pretenders
 My Brother, My Executioner
 Mass
 Tree
 Gagamba
 Sin

BOB ONG

This author is considered the mass-market mystery man, a publishing phenomenon whose
blockbuster book sales are equaled only by the anonymity he maintains. He is Bob Ong—not his
real name—the most unusual best-selling Filipino author you’ve never met.

His defunct BobongPinoy website received a People’s Choice Philippine Web Award for
Weird/Humor in 1998. His books are a favorite among Filipinos of all classes and among
students—even if they’re not required reading. He has never appeared at any book launching, not
even his own, nor on TV. That Ong has achieved such success in an age when celebrity is often a
requisite of effective marketing is indicative of his following. But the fact that he has
successfully kept his true identity a secret is even more astounding.
At one time, it was rumored that award-winning poet Paolo Manalo is the real Bob Ong.
The literary editor at the Philippines Free Press who teaches literature at the University of the
Philippines denies this. “I’m flattered that people think I’m Bob Ong but I’m not him,” he says.

BOOKS:

 ABNKKBSNPLAko?!
 BakitBaligtadMagbasangLibroangmga Filipino
 AngPaboritongLibroniHudas
 AlamatngGubat
 Stainless Longganisa
 Macarthur
 Kapitan Sino
 AngmgaKaibiganni Mama Susan

GINA APOSTOL

Gina Apostol studied at the University of the Philippines and at Johns Hopkins Universi-
ty. She was born in Manila, grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, and lives in New York. Her first novel,
Bibliolepsy, won the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award for Fiction in 1998. To write
her novels, she has received fellowships from Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for
Writers in Scotland; the George Bennett Fellowship of Phillips Exeter Academy; and the
CivitellaRanieriCenter in Umbria, Italy. In 2009, Anvil Manila published The Revolution
According to Raymundo Mata, the first of a projected trilogy of novels on the Philippine
revolutionary period. Apostol is currently working on Rizal’s Sucesos, a novel set in London
involving Jack the Ripper and a host of incubus-texts from the British Museum.

WORKS:
 Bibliolepsy
 Charlie Chan is Dead 2
 The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

LAKAMBINI A. SITOY

Lakambini A. Sitoy has published two collections of short stories: Mens Rea and Other
Stories, published by Anvil Manila in 1999 and winner of a Manila Critics Circle National Book
Award that year, and Jungle Planet, published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2006.
Her first novel, Sweet Haven, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008. She
received the David T.K. Wong fellowship from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United
Kingdom in 2003. Her short stories have appeared in Philippine magazines and anthologies, and
in Wake, an anthology published in Britain to benefit victims of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast
Asia, and Ansigter, an anthology of Southeast Asian short stories published by ForlagetHjulet in
Copenhagen in 2008. As a journalist, Sitoy served as lifestyle editor and columnist for the
Manila Times. She has won nine Palanca and Philippines Free Press awards.

WORKS:

 Sweet Haven
 Mens Rea and Other Stories
 Jungle Planet

FH BATACAN

The leading proponent of Philippine literary crime fiction, FH Batacan or Maria Felisa H.
Batacan is a Filipino journalist who has been based in Singapore since 2000. Before moving to
Singapore, she did current affairs work for Philippine television networks. Prior to a career in
journalism, she spent nearly a decade working in a government intelligence agency. Her first
novel Smaller and Smaller Circles won the Palanca Award for the Novel in 2001, was published
by the UP Press in 2002, and received both the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award and
the Madrigal-Gonzales Best First Book Award. Batacan studied classical guitar for seven years
at the University of the Philippines Conservatory of Music and the Asian Institute for Liturgy
and Music.

WORKS:

 Smaller and Smaller Circles

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