Aunt Lute Press is delighted to invite you to a New York celebration of Filipina Literature and Arts. The event will be moderated by BABAYLAN co-editor Eileen Tabios and act as the East Coast launching for Merlinda Bobis' new short story collection, THE KISSING, available for the first time in the United States.

FILIPINA LITERATURE AND ARTS IN THE DIASPORA

When: October 17, 2001, 7 p.m.
Where: 16 W. 32nd St., 10th Floor (AAWW space), New York City 10001
Sponsors: Arkipelago and Aunt Lute Press
Associate Sponsor: FORWARD

Featured Participants: Gina Apostol, Merlinda Bobis, Perla Daly, Angel Shaw, Lara Stapleton and Eileen Tabios.
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GINA APOSTOL is a fiction writer whose novel BIBLIOLEPSY received the Manila Critics Circle's National Book Award. Her short stories have been featured in a variety of well-respected publications. Recent work is included in THE THIRDEST WORLD, a chapbook of short stories with Lara Stapleton and Eric Gamalinda.

MERLINDA BOBIS is a Filipino-Australian author of four poetry books and four award-winning plays in addition to this short story collection. She received the Steele Rudd Award (for the Best Collection of Australian Short Stories, 2000) for White Turtle (The Kissing), the Prix Italia, the Australian Writers' Guild Award, the Ian Reed Radio Drama Prize, two Carlos Palanca awards and the Gawad Cultural Centre of the Philippines. Her writing has been called "politically conscious," "Stylistically innovative," and "simply beautiful," by the Pacific Examiner She is working on her first novel, FISH-HAIR WOMAN, which received the prestigious New South Wales Writers' Fellowship. She obtained her docorate in the Creative Arts at the
University of Wollongong, Australia where she currently teaches creative writing.

PERLA DALY is an at-home mom of three boys and wife in an inter-cultural union. In addition, she takes on many other roles, "as it is for all women," of being a friend, listener, advisor, laptop-activist, Seeker, idealist, webdiva, writer, web editor, head of a Filipino women’s org, and multi-media artist. Perla finished a Degree in Fine Arts at U.P. Diliman. This Marcos baby’s college research and work focused on student activism, colonial mentality and Filipino identity and awareness. During and after the Philippine presidential elections in 1986, she, her family and her friends participated in what became known as the first People Power movement. In 1996, she made her first web pages to commemorate the decade anniversary of People Power. In 1998, Perla, along with close friend and fellow U.P. Dil. graduate, Elke Aspillera, created the website of www.newfilipina.com (AKA BagongPinay) as a counter effort against www.Filipina.com which is a mail-order-bride site. The following year they founded NewFilipina, Inc. an organization for the empowerment of Filipina women through multimedia. Perla offers the following statement: "The Internet is the new media vehicle that encompasses graphics, text, audio and most importantly communication. Million dollar advertising tout it as a tool for commercial success. But I believe that the Internet's unmeasurable and real value lies in its exciting possibilities to connect and unite people with ideas and other people around the world, to bring human creativity to new frontiers, and ultimately to help advance humankind's evolution."

ANGEL VELASCO SHAW is a film/video maker, cultural activist, curator and educator. Her works which have screened nationally and internationally include "Umbilical Cord," "Asian Boys," "Nailed," and "Balikbayan/Return to Home." She is currently the Acting Executive Director of Asian CineVision. She has been teaching media, cultural, and community studies courses in the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program at New York University since 1995. Shaw is completing a documentary, "Excuse Me…Are You A Pilipino?" with writer, Jessica Hagedorn. The anthology, Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War & the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999 co-edited by Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis Francia is forthcoming. (NYU Press & Anvil Press December 2001)

LARA STAPLETON was born and raised in East Lansing, Michigan. Her short story collection, THE LOWEST BLUE FLAME BEFORE NOTHING, was a Pen Open Book Committee Selection of 1999 and an Independent Booksellers' Selection. She recently published THE THIRDEST WORLD, a chapbook of short stories with Gina Apostol and Eric Gamalinda. She is at work on a buncha stuff...and plans to discuss the American Immigrant novel.

EILEEN TABIOS is preparing for her wedding in May 2002 to Mr. Poetry. She is asking for wedding presents from poets around the world: a poem to be e-mailed to her at <PinoyPoetics@aol.com>. All poems will be accepted as the Poem should never be rejected. The poems will be pinned to her installation "Poem Tree," part of her forthcoming 2002 exhibition of sculptures, drawings, installations and poems, entitled "Poems Form/From The Six Directions," at Pusod in Berkeley, CA. She is also the founder and editor of a multidisciplinary literary and arts press, Meritage Press which includes an imprint dedicated to Filipino arts/literature, "Babaylan Series." Her website, www.MeritagePress.com, includes a monthly publishers' column that discusses developments in contemporary Filipino literature, with an emphasis on poetry.

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CRITICAL PRAISE ON THE WRITINGS OF MERLINDA BOBIS:

"Shrimp paste, papaya, gingered chicken, steak and peppercorns, coconut meat, sticky yams, McDonald's hamburgers, banana heart...To read Merlinda Bobis' collection of short fiction is to sample a riot of tastes indivisible from that other joy of the tongue --- language...Death, desire, joy, and grief are all revealed to the reader, and not with a comfortable objectivity -- all five senses are engaged, and raw to the experience...It would be hard to find a writer with more love and reverence for all the pleasures the tongue is capable of enduring." --EJ Patrick of MS Magazine

"How else could one describe this rare energy squeezed most of the time in short, short pieces brimming with a kind of surreal disassociativeness but with a logic of its own, spinning with an enchantment that is a shamanlike summoning up of experience within the reader?"--Ophelia A. Dimalanta, Philippine Daily Inquirer

"Merlinda Bobis writes like an angel. Her characters whisper to you long after they've told their bittersweet tales."--Arlene J. Chai

"In [Bobis's] work, the graceful use of metaphor becomes a formidable weapon, blasting escape routes out of stories of poverty and oppression. At turns comic, unsettling and beautiful, [THE KISSING] is a book to be enjoyed and treasured." --Rachel Cunneen, Amida Magazine