This morning, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that The New Filipino Kitchen, where both my father and I appear, has been selected as a favorite cookbook of 2018 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Prior to this recognition, the anthology/cookbook has received some well-deserved buzz from Publisher's Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal, among other places. We have just received our complimentary copies in the mail, so I can personally attest that the book lives up to the hype! You can read the full review from SFChronicle ​here and get your own copy (which would also make the perfect Christmas present for a friend or loved one) here. 

I am pleased to announce that I will be an artist-in-residence for six weeks at the KHN Center for the Arts in Nebraska in the spring of 2019. They previously hosted me for four weeks in 2012, and I loved the experience (I wrote the beginnings of my first novel during that period) so I decided to reapply this year, after finishing my PhD. I plan to spend those six weeks writing more stories about Filipinos in New Zealand and Texas, and hopefully the beginnings of a new novel. More about my upcoming residency here, on their website. 

After experiencing victim-blaming and invalidation from a Filipino student club in New Zealand when I shared with them my essay entitled "My 'Get Out' moment as an overseas student", I decided to use my anger productively by writing about the incident, explaining how it's a perfect example of internalized racism and self-inflicted microaggression. Entitled "When One's Anger is Justified, but Silenced: Tone Policing in Filipino immigrant Groups", my essay has found a home in the ANGER issue of Brain Mill Press's Voices Series. The purpose of this issue, according to the editors, is "to showcase essays and poetry featuring well-aimed anger from femme writers, writers of color, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers". I'm honored to have my work included in such an important series. I would love to thank the editors for allowing my voice (and anger) to be heard! You can read the essay here, and the full issue here. 
*Update (November 13, 2018): This piece was reprinted in yomyomf.com, an Asian-American pop culture site. 

For New Naratif, I wrote an essay that's part journalism, part memoir, about a landslide in a village near my hometown of Baguio that took around 100 lives last month. Entitled "30 minutes and a World Apart", my essay is about the long-standing economic and cultural divide between Baguio City, where I grew up, and the mining villages that surround it, and how the indigenous peoples who find sustenance in the nearby mines remain invisible to the city's inhabitants. You can read the full essay here, but I highly recommend supporting New Naratif, which provides an important space for stories about Southeast Asia, by buying a subscription to the magazine. 

I have a new essay about the invisible Filipino maids of Crazy Rich Asians up on SBS Life! I'm so glad that this essay did well online (thanks to Filipinos who shared it), since it's an essay I'm quite proud of. 

What bothered me, however, was how the Filipino maids in the movie merely served to signify their masters’ outrageous (and oftentimes celebrated) wealth with their quiet, unobtrusive presence, and were otherwise rendered invisible, both by the camera and by the script.

You can read the piece in its entirety here. 

Since it's Father's Day on September 2 in Australia and New Zealand, I wrote about my late father and a teddy bear named Yadi we both loved for SBS Life. It's the second essay I wrote for the emerging Asian-Australian emerging writers series of SBS Life, and it's a piece I'm particularly proud of. Read it here. 

I recently had the opportunity to write about my "Get Out" experience with my first landlady in New Zealand for SBS Life in Australia. Many international students in New Zealand are forced to put up with exploitation and racism from their landlords just to keep a roof over their heads, and much of the bullying they experience takes place behind closed doors. Having experienced this first-hand, I felt I had to write this piece, and I'm grateful to have been given the opportunity to do so. I would like to thank Candice Chung for being a great editor to work with, as well as the team behind SBS. You can read the full article here. 

I have a new essay/short memoir in the latest volume of Aotearotica, New Zealand's journal of erotic literature and art. Writing this essay, I wanted to explore how being exiled from one's homeland makes every encounter all the more intimate and comforting. This is the very first prose piece I've ever written that's told backwards (from experience to innocence), and would love to know if the structure actually works. This is also my first publication after successfully defending my PhD dissertation in Creative Writing (yay, I'm a Doctor now!) which makes it all the more celebratory for me. 

I haven't received my copy in the mail yet, but every volume of Aotearotica that I own is beautiful, with great writing alongside outstanding artwork, and I'm sure this latest volume won't disappoint. It's available New Zealand bookshops (I'm sure VicBooks has it) as well as from their online shop. 

The third and final installment of my novella about young Filipinos falling in love in New Zealand, "Leaving Auckland", is finally up on failbetter. I'm particularly proud of this story, and I'm happy that all of it is finally online. In this installment, Paolo contemplates the future while looking back on his past, and wonders where home truly is. Parts 1 and 2 are still available on failbetter​'s landing page, with Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. Thanks again to failbetter ​for giving it a good home, and for being so great to work with!