 Thank you to the Likhaan: UP Institute of Creative Writing for inviting me to be on a panel featuring Filipino women writers with recently published books! This will take place on the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, and it will be a trip down memory lane as I haven't visited my undergraduate university in more than a decade. More information here.
0 Comments
 Thank you to the Black Mountain Institute for hosting this event and helping me launch my book in the grandest fashion! To watch the recording of my conversation with James Beard award-winning author, Kim Foster, at the Majestic Repertory Theater in Las Vegas last May 15, click here. We talked about food writing and the homes we carry with us wherever we go, while also tearing into my landlady from hell in New Zealand whom I wrote about in the book. It's a night I'll remember for a very long time.
 Grateful to Tony Robles for inviting me to guest on Listen & Be Heard, a radio program airing out of South Carolina and other parts of the US. We talked about the essay genre as a flexible form, writing as an act of resistance, and food writing, among other topics. Listen to the full episode here!   Also happy for the shout-out from Tito Krip Yuson of the Philippine Star!
 Forgot to get you all up to speed on this, but shortly before I left Las Vegas, I got to judge a children's writing contest for their local PBS station and I had so much fun! More about that here.
 Since Father's Day is coming up. Find the list here.
In today's book news, Returning to My Father's Kitchen gets positive reviews from Catherine Robertson on Radio New Zealand and from Patty Enrado for Positively Filipino.    Let me tell you about how a chance encounter with Paul Beatty in New Zealand taught me to fight for my work. More here.
book coverage on launch day: Electric Lit, literary hub, incidental noyes, and bmi las vegas launch5/16/2025  Really enjoyed doing this interview for Electric Literature with my good friend and fellow Baguio girl, Cherry Lou Sy!  Then thanks to Lit Hub, I got to write about how my father and I received our literary education in the Philippines from second-hand bookstores!  I'd also like to thank my publisher for featuring my short craft essay about weaving my father's poems into my work in their blog!  Finally tonight, I will be launching my book at the Majestic Repertory Theatre with the inimitable Kim Foster. I am so grateful to the Black Mountain Institute for helping me launch this book into the world in the grandest fashion, in keeping with the spirit of Las Vegas.
 Returning to My Father's Kitchen featured in Lit Hub's The Talk (News, Notes, Talk) in its weekly book roundup, together with new releases from Rebecca Solit and Ocean Vuong.  I also appreciate this short and sweet feature on my book in Las Vegas Weekly's Superguide!  Finally, I got to do a podcast episode with Paul delos Santos of the Delos Diaries.
 I've been sitting on this for a few weeks now, but getting this formal announcement yesterday in my inbox from Nick Norwood, Director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, still made me cry. When I read Carson McCullers's The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter as a lonely teenager in the Philippines, I felt that I had met the people McCullers was writing about in my own hometown of Baguio. She was a white woman from the American South, but she made me feel seen. If I could only tell fourteen year old Monica that she'd get to live and write in one of her favorite writer's childhood homes.
As recipient of the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers, I will live and work in Carson McCullers’s childhood home, the Smith-McCullers House, in Columbus, Georgia, for three months in the fall of 2025. Named in honor of Carson's parents, The Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers was inspired by McCullers's experience at the Breadloaf Writer's Conference in Vermont and, especially, the Yaddo Arts Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. To honor the contribution of these residency fellowships to McCullers's work, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians awards fellowships for writers to spend time in McCullers's childhood home in Columbus, Georgia. The fellowships are intended to afford the writers in residence uninterrupted time to dedicate to their work, free from the distractions of daily life and other professional responsibilities. |
Archives
June 2025
Categories |
RSS Feed