Issue 16 Contributors

Ben Cabrera (Bencab), painter, printmaker and friend of younger and other artists, is widely hailed as a master of Philippine contemporary art. A graduate Fine Arts graduate of the University of the Philippines, he has exhibited widely in the Philippines and in Asia, Europe, and the United States, and has been the subject of several art books and conferred awards here and abroad. He was visiting artist and artist-in-residenced at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute 1n 2005, and in 1997
 he received the ASEAN Achievement Award for Visual & Performing Arts, in Jakarta. In 1992, he received the Gawad CCP Para sa Sining (Cultural Center of the Philippines Award for the Arts), and in 2006 was conferred the Order of National Artist for Visual Arts, the Philippines’ highest artistic achievement award.

Edd Aragon, the Filipino editorial cartoonist of the Sydney Morning Herald, recently completed a triple homecoming show in Manila called Tres Kantos (Three Corners), last April. The series of shows featured his ultra-violet reactive paintings, his digital art, and his editorial cartoons in three separate venues each. A famous cartoonist of the defunct Philippine Daily Express during the Martial Law years, Edd migrated to Australia in the 1970s and has thrice bagged the prestigious Artist of the Year award from the Australian Black and White Artists Society.

Cirilo F. Bautista, one of our foremost poets in English, is also a fiction writer, painter, and educator. 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 Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, whose last volume, “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.

Gémino H. Abad, eminent poet, fictionist, literary critic and historian, and anthologist, at present Centennial Fellow and Professor Emeritus at the University of the Philipines, is well known for his two sets of important critical and historical anthologies of Philippine writing in English. The first, consisting of Man of Earth, A Native Clearing, and A Habit of Shores, traces all poems produced from the 1905 to the present; while the second set gathers the Philippine short story from 1925 to the present, in two-volume compilations, Upon Our Own Ground and Underground Spirit. Dr. Abad obtained his Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Chicago, held various fellowships and visiting professorships, including those at Trinity College, Iowa Writers Program, Manoa University, the Oxford Conference, and Singapore Management University. Together with poets Cirilo F. Bautista, the late Alfrredo Navarro Salanga, Ricardo M. de Ungria, and Alfred A. Yuson, Dr. Abad helped found the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC).

Luisa A. Igloria (previously published as Maria Luisa Aguilar-Cariño) recently won the 2009 Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize for Juan Luna’s Revolver (forthcoming, the University of Notre Dame Press, November 2008). She is a tenured Associate Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program and Department of English, Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Her work has appeared or will be forthcoming in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Poetry East, Smartish Pace, Rattle, The North American Review, Bellingham Review, Shearsman (UK), PRISM International (Canada), Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria), The Asian Pacific American Journal, and TriQuarterly. Among her numerous national and international awards are the 2007 49th Parallel Poetry Prize, the 2007 James Hearst Poetry Prize, the 2006 Stephen Dunn Award for Poetry, the Philippine National Book Awards, eleven Palanca Awards, and the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Awards (poetry category). She is originally from Baguio City.

Kristian Cordero is the 2008 winner of the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Writers Prize for Poetry. The prize is a grant for a proposed book project and Kristian’s is a new collection of his Bikol poems. A literature teacher at the Ateneo de Naga University who writes his poetry both in Filipino and the Bikol language, Kristian is one of the young poets spearheading a renaissance in Bikol writing and realizing its possibilities in reflecting a modern consciousness. The author of three award-winning books of poetry, he has attended the University of the Philippines National Writers Workshop and has won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards and the Premio Tomas Arejola for Bikol Literature, among many others.

Joi Barrios, who has taught in the United States and Japan, is one of today’s leading feminist and activist poets and playwrights writing in both the protest mode and the fine lyric. Joi obtained her PhD in Literature from the University of the Philippines (2003) and served once as assistant dean at the UP College of Arts and Letters. Among her publications are Ang Pagiging Babae ay Pamumuhay sa Panahon ng Digma (1990), Bailaya: Mga Dula Para sa Kababaihan (1997), and Prince Charming at Iba Pang Nobelang Romantiko (2001). She resides at present in the United States.

Edgar Talusan Fernandez, who signs his works simply as “Egai,” is one of the Philippines’ leading artists comfortable in both representational art and abstractions, as well as the involved form of social realism. An advertising graduate of Philippine Women’s University, Egai began his professional career as an artist at 19, through his first solo as well as group exhibit in 1974, and went on to gain a reputation in local and international art exhibitions. Also an award-winning watercolorist and a sculptor, he was a recipient the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ “13 Artists Award.” An Unfinished Painting of the Present was exhibited at Singapore Art Museum’s The Bic Picture Show of Asia murals in conjuction with the ASEAN Ministerial Form in 2007.

Rio Alma, or Virgilio S. Almario, presently the Dean of the College of Art and Letters of the University of the Philippines, was conferred the Order of National Artist for Literature in 2003. Perhaps the foremost living Filipino poet writing in the National Language, Rio Alma is also, as eminently, literary historian and critic, publisher, cultural administrator, mentor and academic. A prolific author, he has a little less than 30 books to his name, almost in equal parts poetry and literary criticism, all written in Filipino. His poetry books deeply explore Filipino life, mind, and history, using traditional as well modern and formalist forms and modes of writing, while his critical works encompass vital studies of the national language. He founded the Children's Communication Center, the Philippine pioneer in children's book publishing, and publisher of Adarna Books, conducts the long-running poetry clinic, Linangan sa Retorika at Arte (LIRA), and has been Executive Director of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).