Junjun Sta. Ana is a Filipino artist, photographer and digital artist residing in the United States. He is a new member of the Banggaan e-group of artists, photographers and writers from the Philippines and from the Filipino diaspora.
Jim Pascual Agustin spent his early years in rural Marikina in a large communal house where he struggled to keep count of numerous cousins (pinsang buo and others) until his family was forced out of the land to make way for the construction of Marcos Highway. Through the kindness of Fr. James O’Brien, SJ, Jim attended the Ateneo de Manila High School and University. He is a fellow of the UP Writers Workshop in Diliman and the Iligan Writers Workshop. In October 1994 he moved to Cape Town, South Africa where he now lives with his wife and their twin daughters. His two books are Beneath an Angry Star (Anvil, 1990) and Salimbayan (with Argee Guevarra and Neal Imperial; Sipat, 1994)
Luisa A. Igloria (previously published as Maria Luisa Aguilar-Cariño) is an Associate Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program and Department of English, Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Virginia). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry East, Smartish Pace, The Asian Pacific American Journal, and TriQuarterly. Various national and international literary awards include the 2007 49th Parallel Poetry Prize (Bellingham Review, selected by Carolyne Wright); the 2007 James Hearst Poetry Prize (selected by former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser for the North American Review); the 2006 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize (Crab Orchard Review); and the 2006 Stephen Dunn Award for Poetry. Formerly of Baguio City, Luisa has been inducted in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature Hall of Fame, being an eleven-time recipient of prizes in three genres (poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction). She has published nine books in the Philippines and America.
Cesar Ruiz Aquino belongs to the brilliant generation of young writers in the 60s that included Jose Lansang, Jr., Ernesto Manalo, Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez, Erwin E. Castillo, Ninotchka Rosca, & Perfecto Tera, Jr. among others. He presently teaches at Silliman University where he obtained his doctoral degree. He has won the Palanca four times for his fiction and his poetry, the Free Press poetry prize and the Graphic short-story prize. In 2004 he received the SEAWRITE award from the Prince of Thailand in Bangkok for Checkmeta, a personal anthology of poems & prose pieces both in fiction and non-fiction.
Issue 7 Contributors
Rod Samonte, a Filipino painter and photographer and master of the macro shot, resides in Burbank, California. He is also a pioneering member of the e-group, Banggaan, an informal and lively collective of Filipino photographers, artists and writers exchanging all sorts of creative production (mutually and digitally altered by each member in a sort of collision or interaction, "Bangga" in their terms), as well as artistic discussion, insights, and gossip, from home or the Diaspora.
Maurice Oliver. After almost a decade of working as a freelance photographer in Europe, Maurice Oliver returned to America in 1990. Then, in 1995, he made a life-long dream reality by traveling around the world for eight months. But instead of taking pictures, he recorded the experience in a journal which eventually became poems. And so began his desire to be a poet. His poetry has appeared in numerous national and international publications and literary websites including Potomac Journal, Pebble Lake Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), Dandelion Magazine (Canada), Stride Magazine (UK), and online at thievesjargon.com, interpoetry.com (UK), kritya.com (India), blueprintreview.de (Germany), and is forthcoming in The Arabesques Review (Algeria). His forth chapbook, "One Remedy Is Travel" was published in August '07 at Origami Condom. The editor of the ezine Concelebratory Shoehorn Review (www.concelebratory.blogspot.com) he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works as a private tutor.
Kristian Sendon Cordero. Author of two previous collections of award-winning poetry, Kristian has won several local and national literary awards including the 2004 Premio Tomas Arejola Para sa Literaturang Bikolnon, Homelife Poetry Contest (Second Prize for the years 1999, 2005, 2007 and Grand Prize Winner for 2004), Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature (for short fiction) and the Madrigal-Gonzales Best First Book Award in 2006. He also received the Outstanding Alumni Award by the University of Saint Anthony, a special citation from the local government of Iriga City and the Melchor Villanueva Centennial Awards for Bikol Literature in 2007.
Melissa Nolledo, artist and photographer from the States, who recently exhibited her works at the Philippine Center in New York, is also a member of Banggaan. She is the proud daughter of the lateWilfido D. Nolledo, one of the Philippines' foremost novelists writing in the 1960s and 70s, whose early and apparently unpublished poem Melissa is featuring here with her digital art.
Paul Gomez is a 35-year old all-around creative in an advertising firm. His work entails taking and retouching photographs, writing copy, and burning the midnight oil to come up with jingles and marketing ploys. He graduated with a degree in Advertising at the University of Santo Tomas in the 1990s. In his free time, he enjoys experimenting with different art media such as oil and encaustic painting, watercolors, egg tempera painting, pen and ink illustration, and manipulation of photographs. He loves to read 19 th century literature and has just finished most of the available Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels, and he is currently attempting to read Benito Perez-Galdos' Fortunata and Jacinta. He also loves to read poetry, and enjoys spending quiet time with his young daughter Joanna, and playing with his two dogs.
Issue 6 Contributors
(first full issue imported from the old site)Alfred A. Yuson. If there is a Filipino literary gypsy, it should be Alfred “Krip” Yuson, but gypsy not in the sense of somehow strangely uncouth, but in being magical, or in being a magician, a fortune-teller and one unable to resist his native wanderlust, and Filipino. One of our foremost writers in English, Krip is a poet, novelist, newspaper columnist, and writer of screenplays, all of which he does with, to say the least, amazing, masterfulness. He was one of the first to win the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Literary Awards for at least five first prizes for his poetry, novel and essays. He has 12 books of poetry, fiction, essays, children’s literature. His poetry collections are Sea Serpent, Dream of Knives, Trading in Mermaids, and the selection, Mothers Like Elephants. Yuson’s novel, The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, described by Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo in her exhaustive essay “Fabulists & Chroniclers” as a “mock epic… a crazy fiesta in a café in the sky” with irrevent Pinoy laughter at is core, is a tour-de-force of “re-imagin[ing] the nation.” Apart from wearing various writers’ hats, Yuson serves as the Philippine editor of MANOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing (University of Hawaii), a member of the Manila Critics Circle, a founding member of the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC), and teaches poetry and fiction at the Ateneo de Manila University, where he held the Henry Lee Irwin Professorial Chair in 1999.
Marjorie Evasco’s two books of poems, Dreamweavers: Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1986) and Ochre Tones: Poems in English and Cebuano (1999) both won the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award for Poetry, Her two other books, Six Women Poets: Inter/Views (1996), co-authored with Edna Manlapaz, and A Life Shaped by Music: Andrea Veneracion and the Philippine Madrigal Singers, also won National Book Awards for Oral History and Biography respectively. In 2006 her book Ani: The Life and Art of Hermogena Borja Lungay won the A. Ongpin National Book Award on Art from the Manila Critics Circle. Marj has received various writing residencies and grants, including the Rockefeller Foundation writing residency in Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy (1992), the International Writers’ Retreat residency in Hawthornden Castle in Midlothian, Scotland (1991), and the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, U.S.A. (2002). She finished her Ph.D. in Literature at De La Salle University, where she is a full professor at the the Department of Literature, and has also held the Julia Vargas professorial chair for Philippine Literature.
