No. 18 • Contributors

Victor Peñaranda, our peripatetic poet and development worker, is recently doing the lecture circuit for NGOs, and lately spoke to a group of soldiers on the art of war and peace. He came home recently and maybe for good (or perhaps until work and wanderlust call him again). A Palanca Award winner and more recently of the Philippines Free Press Awards for poetry, he has traveled extensively in the Philippines for his development work, then to Bhutan and Macedonia on long assignments. Together with Alfred A. Yuson, he edited the now defunct but sorely missed broadsheet-format New Age and literary magazine called Ermita, which brought together the best Filipino literary and artistic talents during its existence of a little more than a year. But Bimboy, as he is known to friends, is first and foremost a poet of a broad consciousness that is however fully grounded on social realities. His many readers await the next to his first book, Voyage in Dry Season, which won the Manila Critics Circle’s National Book Award in 1996.

Eileen Tabios has, according to kultureflash: Headlines From London, “an enormous tonal range in her poetry. A breathless intensity may be her most characteristic mode.” An award-winning Filipino-American poet, fiction writer, conceptual/visual artist, editor, anthologist, critic, and publisher, Eileen is at present one of the most active in the Fil-Am literary movement in the U.S., having released fourteen print, four electronic, one CD poetry collections, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, and a short story book. She has created a unique body of work melding transcolonialism with ekphrasis, and is the inventor of the poetic form called "hay(na)ku.” Among Eileen’s books are Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole, Black Lightning, Beyond Life Sentences, Dredging for Atlantis, and I Take Thee, English, for My Beloved. Her numerous awards include the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, Philippine American Writers & Artists’ Catalagan Award, and recognition from the Academy of American Poets. She was born in the Philippines but has lived for over three decades in the United States.

Marjorie Evasco, one of our leading women poets, recently came back from travel as poet to a festival in Medillin, Colombia, and as tourist to parts of Europe, where she was a pilgrim to the birth place of Federico Garcia Lorca. Marj has two books of poems, Dreamweavers: Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1986) and Ochre Tones: Poems in English and Cebuano (1999) 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.

Nicolás Suescún, the translator of Marj Evasco’s “Sonnet O, Solving for X / Soneto O, Solución de X,” is a famous Colombian poet, short story writer, journalist, and translator. The translation was specially written for the prestigious Medellin International Poetry Festival, which Marj attended and Señor Suescún was paired with her as translator. Born in Bogotá, Suescún is the author of an “antinovel”, Los cuadernos de N (1994), which has become an underground cult book among Colombia’s young people. He has published four books of short stories—El retorno a casa (1971), El último escalón (1974), El extraño y otros cuentos (1980) and Oniromanía (1996)—and several collections of poetry, among them, La vida es, 3 A.M (1986) and Bag Bag (selección) (2003), of which he made a selection in La voz de nadie. His poems as well as his short stories have been included in many anthologies. Suescún is also a graphic designer and journalist—he regularly writes on world affairs, now in Cromos. The collages with which he illustrates his work in magazines have been displayed in various exhibitions.

Cirilo F. Bautista is one of our foremost poets in English and is also a fiction writer, painter, and educator. He received his degrees in AB Literature from the University of Santo Tomas (magna cum laude, 1963), MA Literature from St. Louis University, Baguio City (magna cum laude, 1968). Now Professor Emeritus of Literature at De La Salle University, where he also obtained his D.A. in Language and Literature, Dr. Bautista has written numerous poetry books, including the Cave and Other Poems, Charts, and Telex Moon. The last volume of his long work, The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, “Sunlight on Broken Stones,” won for him the Centennial Prize for the Epic in 1998. A bilingual writer, Dr. Baustista published his first Tagalog novel, Galaw ng Asoge in 1994 (UST Press), and has won the Makata ng Taon (Poet of the Year) Prize of the Commission on the Filipino Language. He was Honorary Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa in 1969, and was a visiting writer at Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1987. Dr. Bautista was elevated to the Hall of Fame of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature in 1995.