Yours truly is excited to be a part of two stellar literary events this October. Check out the line-ups, mark your calendars, and share with lovers of lit in your circles.
- Wednesday, October 9, 6:30pm – Pilipinx Writer’s Night with San Mateo County’s Poet Laureate Aileen Cassinetto, Jason Bayani, Beverly Parayno, Rashaan Alexis Meneses, & a surprise guest on Wednesday, October 9, 6:30pm, John Daly Branch Library, 134 Hillside Blvd, Daly City. Bios below.
- Saturday, October 19, PAWA Lit Crawl Event, Phase II, with Barbara Jane Reyes, Rachelle Cruz, Tony Robles, Beverly Parayno, and Rashaan Alexis Meneses at Holy Mountain on Valencia, San Francisco (to be confirmed).
Bios for Pilipinx Writer’s Night in Daly City, October 9, 6:30pm
ABIGAIL LICAD is a 1.5-generation Filipino American who immigrated to the U.S. with her family at age 13. She received her B.A. from University of California-Berkeley and her M.Phil in literature from Oxford University. Her work has been published in Calyx, Smartish Pace, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times, among others. She has served as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar to Senegal and as Hyphen magazine’s Editor-in-Chief. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
AILEEN CASSINETTO is the Poet Laureate of San Mateo County. Since she began her term in January 2019, she has visited 10 of the 32 communities in the county, launched her “Speak Poetry” campaign, and promoted events on NBC Bay Area and publications such as The Six Fifty, Half Moon Bay Review, and Redwood City Climate Magazine. She has also been a featured speaker at the College of San Mateo and at Skyline College, and collaborated with other poets to help raise awareness on issues such as immigration and social justice, prevention of cruelty to animals, gun control, rehabilitation of prisoners through poetry, and mental health and suicide prevention. Widely anthologized, Aileen is also the author of the poetry collections, Traje de Boda and The Pink House of Purple Yam Preserves & Other Poems, as well as three chapbooks through Moria Books’ acclaimed Locofo series.
BEVERLY PARAYNO is from San Jose, California. Her fiction, memoir, essays and author interviews appear or are forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Bellingham Review, The Rumpus, World Literature, Huizache, Warscapes, Southword: New Writing from Ireland, among others. Her writing has been translated into Chinese by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She has a BA in English from San Jose State University, an MA in English from University College Cork and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she received a Lynda Hull scholarship. She serves on the board of directors of PAWA – Phillppine American Writers and Artists. A resident of Oakland, she is a grants consultant for social justice nonprofits in the Bay Area.
IVY ALVAREZ is the author of verse novel Disturbance (Wales: Seren, 2013), which was adapted into a musical and premiered in Tokyo in July 2019. A MacDowell Colony, and Hawthornden Fellow, thrice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize, both Literature Wales and the Australia Council for the Arts awarded her grants towards the writing of Disturbance. Widely-published and anthologised, her poetry also appears on a mobile app The Disappearing, in Takahē, The Age / Sydney Morning Herald, and Best Australian Poems (2009, 2013), with several poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Her poetry collections include Mortal, Hollywood Starlet, and The Everyday English Dictionary. Her latest, Diaspora: Volume L, is available from Paloma Press.
JASON BAYANI is the author of Locus (Omnidawn Publishing 2019) and Amulet (Write Bloody Publishing 2013). He’s an MFA graduate from Saint Mary’s College, a Kundiman fellow, and works as the artistic director for Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest multi-disciplinary Asian Pacific American arts organization in the country. His publishing credits include World Literature Today, BOAAT Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Lantern Review, and other publications. Jason performs regularly around the country and debuted his solo theater show “Locus of Control” in 2016 with theatrical runs in San Francisco, New York, and Austin.
RASHAAN ALEXIS MENESES earned her MFA in Fiction, Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California, where she was named a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. Awarded a 2018 Author Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and an Ancinas Scholarship for the 47th Annual Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, she has earned fellowships at The MacDowell Colony and The International Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and was named a finalist for A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Gift of Freedom Award. A 2015 finalist for the Center for Women Writers International Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award and nominated for a Sundress Best of the Net Prize, her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Kartika Review, BorderSenses, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, Kurungabaa, Doveglion Press, UC Riverside’s The Coachella Review, University of North Carolina’s Pembroke Magazine, and the anthology Growing Up Filipino II: More Stories for Young Adults. She is currently a Visiting Liberal Arts Fellow for Saint Mary’s College of California.
REME GREFALDA is the founding curator of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Collection at the Library of Congress. She is also the founding editor of Our Own Voice Literary Ezine and Qbd ink theater group. The author of baring more than soul: poems and The Other Blue Book: On The High Seas of Discovery, she is also the co-author of a Ford Foundation report, Towards A Cultural Community: Identity, Education and Stewardship in Filipino American Performing Arts. She is the recipient of the Philippine Palanca Award for her full-length play, In the Matter of Willie Grayson, produced and staged at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
WALTER ANG is the author of Barangay to Broadway: Filipino American Theater History. He currently covers Filipino American theater for news site Inquirer.net and was a contributing writer for the Theater Volume for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Philippine Art recently published by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Before moving to the US, he covered the Manila theater industry for the newspaper Philippine Daily Inquirer. Ang was a juror for the Philstage organization’s Gawad Buhay theater awards from 2008 to 2009. He was a Fellow at the 2009 University of Santo Tomas Varsitarian-J. Elizalde Navarro National Workshop on Arts and Humanities Criticism Writing. Visit WordsOfWalter.blogspot.com.
Rashaan Alexis Meneses 