strawberrygreen2

[strawberrygreen2]

Gina Lourdes Delgado Apostol

Apostol's debut novel Bibliolepsy, published by the University of the Philippines Press, won the 1997 Philippine National Book Award for Fiction. The novel is set in Manila in the 1980s, during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos up to the 1986 People Power Revolution. On its first run, the novel sold out and went out of print. It was republished in the United States by Soho Press in 2022.

Her second novel, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata won the 2010 Philippine National Book Award for Fiction, as well as the biannual Gintong Aklat Award. It was republished in the United States by Soho Press in 2021.

Her American debut, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book award and was shortlisted for the 2014 Saroyan International Prize.

Her 2018 novel, Insurrecto, was one of Publishers Weekly's 2018 Ten Best Books, and was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.[9] Portions of her short story, “The Unintended,” which was published in the Manila Noir anthology edited by Jessica Hagedorn, appear in the novel.

[strawberrygreen2]

Ellaine Castillo

Her first novel, America Is Not the Heart was published in 2018 and received widespread acclaim. Ligaya Mishan, writing for the New York Times Book Review, describes it as "hungrily ambitious in sweep and documentary in detail, and reads like a seismograph of the aftershocks from trading one life for another".

Maris Kreizman, wrote in Vulture that "the writing in America Is Not the Heart is tremendous, the descriptions evocative, and the characters will stay with you". Parts of the book take place in Milpitas, California, where Castillo grew up. The title of the novel is a reference to Carlos Bulosan's novel America Is in the Heart. Castillo is openly bisexual and has said it was important for her to write about bisexual women in her novel because of how rarely they are depicted. She is also of Filipino descent.

[strawberrygreen2]

Barbara Jane Reyes

Reyes 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, 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, with her husband poet Oscar Bermeo. Reyes currently resides in Oakland, California.

[strawberrygreen2]

Randy Ribay

Ribay is the author of the award-winning book Patron Saints of Nothing (2019). Although initially rejected by several editors, the book won the Freeman Award and was short-listed for the National Book Awards for Young People's Literature in 2019. The book was also nominated for the 2020 Edgar Awards chosen by the Mystery Writers of America. Patron Saints of Nothing appeared on several Best of 2019 lists including those published by NPR, Kirkus, and the New York Public Library

The book is a coming-of-age story about Jay Reguero, a Filipino-American boy of high school age. Reguero travels to the Philippines to find out the story behind a cousin killed in an ongoing drug war based on the nonfictional drug war established by Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte. Once there, he must reevaluate his heritage and his status as a Filipino-American outsider.

[strawberrygreen2]

Carlos Sampayan Bulosan

Bulosan was born to Ilocano parents in the Philippines in Binalonan, Pangasinan. There is considerable debate around his actual birth date, as he himself used several dates.

1911 is generally considered to be the most reliable answer, based on his baptismal records, but according to the late Lorenzo Duyanen Sampayan, his childhood playmate and nephew, Carlos was born on November 2, 1913. Most of his youth was spent in the countryside as a farmer.

It is during his youth that he and his family were economically impoverished by the rich and political elite, which would become one of the main themes of his writing. His home town is also the starting point of his semi-autobiographical novel, America is in the Heart.

[strawberrygreen2]

José Rizal

Rizal is widely considered one of the greatest heroes of the Philippines and has been recommended to be so honored by an officially empaneled National Heroes Committee.

However, no law, executive order or proclamation has been enacted or issued officially proclaiming any Filipino historical figure as a national hero.

He wrote the novels Noli Me Tángere (1887) and El filibusterismo (1891), which together are taken as a national epic, in addition to numerous poems and essays.