Title: Writing from the Philippine Diaspora
Speakers: Professor Luis H. Francia, New York University

Date: July 13 (Mon.), 2015, 16:00 – 18:00
Place: Tonan-tei Room No. 201, Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Abstract:
In this talk, interspersed with readings, the Manila-born, New York-based noted poet, nonfiction writer and journalist Luis H. Francia reflects on how living in the Filipino diaspora for several decades has inevitably influenced his writing. Among other perspectives, he examines what it means to be a postcolonial subject in a world where identity is both a fluid and fixed notion. He will read from Tattered Boat, his 2014 volume of poetry and his latest collection of nonfiction, RE: Recollections, Reviews, Reflections that has just been issued. Both are from the University of the Philippines Press.

About the speaker:
Born and raised in Manila, Luis H. Francia is a poet and a nonfiction writer. His several volumes of poetry include Tattered Boat, The Beauty of Ghosts, and Museum of Absences. His poems have been translated into several languages. He has read at numerous literary festivals and most recently read at the XIth International Festival of Poetry (2015) held annually in Granada, Nicaragua.

His nonfiction works include Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, winner of both the 2002 PEN Open Book Award and the 2002 Asian American Writers Award; Memories of Overdevelopment: Reviews and Essays of Two Decades; and A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos. He is in the Library of America’s Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. A collection of his most recent nonfiction, RE: Recollections, Reviews, Reflections, will be released in the summer of 2015.

He is the editor of Brown River, White Ocean: A Twentieth Century Anthology of Philippine Literature in English, and co-editor of Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999, as well as the literary anthology, Flippin’: Filipinos on America. He writes a column, “The Artist Abroad,” for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Philippines’ largest English-language newspaper. He is on the faculty of Asian American Studies at New York University and Hunter College. He teaches creative writing at the City University of Hong Kong.

Moderator: Caroline Hau, CSEAS, Kyoto University