Sanghee Lee, a lawyer who loves the arts and listens to music all her waking hours (and adores Kim Min'gi), is a senior partner at Hankyul Law Firm and is a member of Minbyun Lawyers for Democracy. She specializes in litigation, fair trade, taxation, and international family law. She has traveled widely doing volunteer work in Thailand, Burma, West Papua, the Philippines, and in her native South Korea. Whenever her hectic schedule permits, Sanghee Lee plays the piano, reads a lot of poetry, occasionally does watercolors and nude sketches, indulges her love for photography, or climbs Mt. Jili simply to enjoy the breeze or watch the stars.
Jesus Manuel Santiago, to many of his poet friends, is first a poet before a singer-composer. He holds the distinction of being the only poet declared by the Institute of National Language as “Poet of the Year” twice in a row. But his familial and historical roots in Obando, Bulacan led him to what he had always wanted to do, sing his poems. He is also a scholar, having been a fellow for the Asian Public Intellectuals, and has traveled broadly, performing his songs in Europe and the Asia-Pacific. He has won the Palanca Awards and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Awards for his poetry, and was a National Fellow for Poetry of the University of the Philippines Institue of Creative Writing. His book of poetry, Gitara (1997), is a bilingual collection with translations by this author. Koyang Jess, as he is called by friends, is a prime mover of the people’s music movement in the Philippines. He has recorded two albums of his own compositions, Halina (1991) and Obando (1993). Recently he finished his third album of new and unrecorded songs, titled Puso at Isip (Hearts and Minds), which is to be released on CD in 2009.
Maryanne Moll, perhaps one of our most compelling storytellers, writes that her “life as a writer... is measured not so much in terms of weeks, days, and months as in number of pages written, number of people met, found, and lost, letters mailed, number of movies watched and books read.” She also seems one of our busiest, editing a military magazine, moderating an online club for Mac users, maintaining a blog and writing a novel, while being a graduate student of Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines. Maryanne has won the Palanca Awards for her fiction, has written two books, Awakenings (essays, New Day, 2001), and Little Freedoms (fiction, Giraffe Books, 2003). The latter was also published under the Ubud Writers Prize of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). She attended the University of Santo Tomas National Writers Workshop and the Dumaguete National Writers Workshop.
Jaime Jesus Borlagdan is another young, busy writer making his presence felt in the literary web, while being aware of tradition and form in his native language. He maintains two sites: a website for his works at www.jimplejimple.blogspot.com/ and Karangahan (Pagranga sa Pagsurat Bikolnon) at http://karangahan.multiply.com/, a site “honoring Bikol literature that has been written and still being written in contemporary times.” Of his own poetry, Jimple, as he his called by friends, says in Bikol (which I translate), “...all this is at the back of what I say, and it cannot be molded by words, it cannot be put within gun sight, but if in reading my work you run into a fugitive emotion that you can’t utter...” the rest is a passionate enumeration of possibilities. Bikol critic Tito Genova Valiente reacts to his poetry by saying that it is “heartbreaking to feel the forms.”
Pancho C. Villanueva is an architect, painter, and poet whose “negotiations” with his technical training and art, and his intense sensitivity that drives him to use both pigment and found object in his paintings, compel him to be a poet (he has long practiced his profession and art before attending the Silliman University Writers Workshop). While his spatial studies of bold color fields, textures, and surfaces make him popular among collectors, his realistic works are full of magical narratives that, as in his abstracts, underline his belief in and esthetic of what he calls in his poetry “the persistence of energy...” that he uses to address “the unnameable terror [that] hides behind the creases of the ground, among the fine, delicate debris of surrounding human ruins.”
