Philippine American Writers and Artists, Arkipelago Books, Filipino American International Book Festival present

PAWA Arkipelago Series

Saturday, February 19, 2011
5:00 PM
Bayanihan Community Center
1010 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA
FREE!

featuring:

Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, Oscar Bermeo is the author of four poetry chapbooks, most recently To the Break of Dawn. He has been a featured writer at a variety of institutions including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Kearny Street Workshop, Rikers Island Penitentiary, San Quentin Prison, UC Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill, NYU and many others. Recent poems appear in CrossBRONX, 580 Split, Milvia Street Journal, and phat’itude Literary Magazine. He has taught creative writing workshops to foster youth in San Jose, bilingual fourth graders in Oakland, and to adults through the Oakland Public Library’s Oakland Word program. Oscar makes his home in Oakland with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes, where they co-edit Doveglion Press. For more information, please visit: www.oscarbermeo.com.

Jennifer Cendaña Armas is a NYC performer/writer/teacher. Her work includes presentations at the Binational Center of Cuzco, Lincoln Center’s La Casita, Culture Project’s Women Center Stage Festival, London’s Ronnie Scott’s Upstairs, and choreographing reg e. gaines’s production of BLAK. She teaches performance and writing workshops stateside and abroad, and is a teaching artist with Brooklyn Academy of Music. her first show, skinimin12 featured at both the Downtown Urban Theater Fest and NYC Hip Hop Theater Festival at the Public Theatre. She is a member of the Blackout Arts Collective family. Her new piece, my mouth may not know all the words but everything else understands, will have an excerpted, work-in-progress presentation at La Peña Cultural Center Feb. 25th and 26th, with a workshop open to the community Feb. 27. www.junipersupadupa.com

Cecilia Gaerlan is a Bay Area playwright based in Berkeley, California. She is the founder of the multicultural theatre arts group Artis Mundi. She received an Honorable Mention in the Stage Play Script Category of the Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition in 2005 for The Hand of God and in 2010 for Magnus Laurent (Lorenzo the Magnificent). She is a recipient of a Theatre Bay Area CASH Award in 2002 for her play, Brilliance within the Darkness which is about the blind Spanish composer, Joaquin Rodrigo, the composer of the guitar masterpiece Concierto de Aranjuez. She is the author of several other plays on a wide variety of topics such as the United Nations (commissioned by City College of San Francisco for the U.N.’s 50th anniversary), child prostitution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, etc. In Her Mother’s Image is her debut novel.

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is associate professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the author of this is all i choose to tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American literature published by Temple University Press. Her academic work can be found in Mixed Race Literature, The New Face of Asian Pacific America, Amerasia Journal and Michigan Quarterly Review. Her creative works have been published in Making More Waves, Tilting the Continent, Vietnam Dialogue Inside/Out and The Perfume River. She is founder of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).