On May 4th, I gave a presentation and a reading from my novel, A Village in the Fields, for City College of San Francisco’s East Meets West program at the Rosenberg Library. Two classes and their professors were in attendance, and many of the students were Filipino American. My PPT presentation focused on my journey to […]
2016 Saroyan Prize shortlist released
Today Stanford University Libraries announced its shortlist for the seventh William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. You can read the press release here. For the fiction category, 15 books were named, which includes critically acclaimed books and authors. I am honored to say that my novel, A Village in the Fields, was nominated. I should […]
SFSU students’ thank you
The students in Kei Fischer’s Asians in U.S. class under the Asian American Studies program at San Francisco State University sent a card thanking me for taking the time out to talk to them about the Filipino-American contributions to our country’s farm labor history. Many didn’t know that the Filipino-American manongs, who came in the […]
Hyphen Magazine – Asian America Unabridged reviews A Village in the Fields
Hyphen Magazine – Asian America Unabridged, which was founded in 2003, published a review of my novel, A Village in the Fields, on Thursday, March 24th. You can read Jenn Lee Smith’s review here.
Asians in the U.S.: sharing buried history stories at SFSU
This past Thursday, I attended two sections of History of Asians in the U.S. class, under San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies, College of Ethnic Studies. Lecturer Kei Fischer had her students, who were mostly freshmen, read Chapter 11 of A Village in the Fields, which chronicles the beginning of the Delano Grape Strike, and […]
Posting short stories from long ago
I finally found time this past weekend to format two short stories that were originally published many years ago in literary journals and are now up in the Stories section of my website. “We are thinking of you,” my “latest” short story – and I say that with a toss of a laugh – was […]
Book review in Amerasia Journal, winter issue 41:3
Elaine Elinson’s review of my novel, A Village in the Fields, was published in the recent winter issue of Amerasia Journal (41:3). You can access information on the issue here.
Berkeley and El Cerrito library readings in December
I’ll be the first to say that having a reading in December is likely not a good month to lure people to the local libraries. That said, the handful of people who showed up at two events came with thoughtful questions and comments during the Q&A portion of the event. I read on a Sunday […]
Positively Filipino review of A Village in the Fields
Elaine Elinson, coauthor with Stan Yogi of Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California and the United Farm Workers representative for the grape boycott in Europe, wrote a “thorough and insightful” – quoting my good friend Kimi – review, which was posted on Positively Filipino, […]
The process of writing through grief
Although on the surface this post doesn’t have anything to do with the novel, I wanted to share a poem that I wrote about our family dog, Rex, whom we said goodbye to this past Friday evening, November 20th. I will be the first to admit that I am not a poet, though every once […]