By Cristina DC Pastor Filipina immigrant, Marissa Bañez is a Princeton University graduate and an attorney licensed in New York, New Jersey, and California, and an award-winning author of two children’s books, “Hope and Fortune” and “Hues and Harmony (How the Rainbow Butterfly Got Her Colors).” She was featured in The FilAm in 2022 after […]
By Tricia J. Capistrano David Remnick, editor of the The New Yorker calls Patricia Evangelista’s book, “Some People Need Killing,” “one of the most remarkable pieces of narrative nonfiction I have read in a long, long time.” Evangelista, who was born in 1985, was a reporter and then executive producer for ANC, the English language […]
By Lynn Topel There have been claims that in 1763, in a little-known fishing village on Lake Borgne in Louisiana called St. Malo, Filipino fishermen built houses on stilts, learned to live with the elements, and energized the local shrimp industry. Nearly 9,000 miles away, Filipinos in Louisiana were a long way from home. However, […]
By Allen Gaborro Philip Bowring, a longtime journalist well-versed in Asia-Pacific affairs, puts forth his study of the history of the Philippines up to the advent of the post-Duterte period, “The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State.” In reading Bowring’s book, we discern that the past can be retroactively instructive to […]
By Selen Ozturk PEN America reports 1,477 individual U.S. book bans during the first half of the 2022-2023 school year — 28% more than the prior six months. Forty percent of books banned from July 2021 to June 2022 had protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color; 21% had titles indicating race issues. Examples of such banned books […]
Why do Filipinos ask, Kumain ka na? (Have you eaten yet?) whenever they meet? This book, compiled and edited by UK-based Filipina editor Jacqueline Chio-Lauri, presents the extraordinary food culture of the Philippines in stories and recipes from 36 culinary trailblazers—award-winning chefs, food writers and social media stars from around the globe. They share not […]
By Loida Nicolas Lewis Since my memoir “Why Should Guys Have All the Fun? An Asian American Story of Love, Marriage, Motherhood and Running a Billion Dollar Empire”was launched in March, 2023 in time for the Women’s History Month, I have been receiving invitations to do book signing/interviews in various cities where FilAms are numerous and […]
By Allen Gaborro With the passage of time, the Filipino immigrant experience in America has developed into a paradigmatic theme for Filipino and Filipino American novelists. Prominent writers such as Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn, Bienvenido Santos, Elaine Castillo, and Mia Alvar have made it their literary missions to articulate the U.S.-Philippine relationship from the standpoint […]
One night Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino received a phone call from a stranger that changed her life. “You don’t know me, but your mother saved my life,” the caller said. That late-night conversation with an American World War II veteran and POW revealed to Elizabeth Ann Besa Quirino the untold stories of her mother’s remarkable wartime […]