Hail our tribe of Fil-Am writers!

Congratulations to Regie Cabico of New York City for receiving, together with two other prominent writers – Bill Henderson and Anna Quindlen – the 2006 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Awards.

These were presented in NYC on Feb. 28 at the annual gala benefit, "In Celebration of Writers." Elliot Figman, executive director of Poets & Writers Inc., said the three honorees "exemplify the mission of Poets & Writers to provide opportunities for writers and assist them in their careers. Each in his or her own way has made lasting contributions to the well-being of their fellow writers."

A performance poet, Cabico has handled workshops at community centers and hospitals for teens facing terminal illnesses, extreme poverty, domestic abuse and emotional disabilities. He has encouraged many of them to publish and perform their writing.

The recipient of three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships for Poetry and Multi-Disciplinary Performance, Cabico also teaches writing and performance for Urban Word-NYC and hosts the Friday Night Series for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. A National Poetry Slam champion, he has appeared on two seasons of HBO’s "Def Poetry Jam" and MTV’s "Free Your Mind" Spoken Word Tour. His poems appear in over 30 anthologies, including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café and Spoken Word Revolution.

Cabico’s co-winners are established older writers. Bill Henderson founded, edits and publishes the annual Pushcart Prize and has authored four memoirs and a novel, The Kid That Could. Anna Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prize awardee for Journalism, established a fund to support students in the College Writing Fellows Program of Barnard College, where she chairs the Board of Trustees.

Past winners have included such "name" writers as James Michener, Arthur Miller, William Styron, Rita Dove, Stephen King, Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, Susan Sontag, Stanley Kunitz, Ishmael Reed, Amy Tan, Sharon Olds and Barbara Kingsolver.

Next in the order of congratulations is M. Evelina Galang, whose first novel, One Tribe (Western Michigan University), won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Award for the Novel. On March 10, she does a reading at the annual AWP Conference in Miami, where several other outstanding Fil-Am writers will be in attendance.

Evelina was last in Manila in 2001 as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, working on a project on comfort women: "Lola’s House: Women Living with War." Late last year, she sent an advanced reading copy of her novel, which already had praise blurbs from Maxine Hong Kingston and Ninotchka Rosca.

From Rosca: "This novel deftly navigates the tension over being American and yet not quite so; the conflict between the reality of history and that of the present. It adds to the growing body of literature about Filipino presence and experience on this continent."

Following are excerpts, starting with the jauntily fetching opening line, from One Tribe:

"On the seventh day of her new job. Isabel Manalo created the world.

"’Quietly,’ she whispered to her first grade class. They sat cross-legged in perfect rows, little cabbages planted on a brown area rug. Some sat on their heels and rocked to their own internal clock. Boys to the left. Girls to the right. They kept their hands to themselves. She held out her arms. ‘Let’s get into a circle.’

"No one moved. She crawled on the floor and looked into their faces. She was used to the Midwest, where Germans and Poles and Swiss had settled and everyone was a shade of beige and every head was a variation of blond – dishwater, strawberry, yellow flaxen, and gold. But today she didn’t see her students sitting in front of her; she saw versions of herself – brown children with apple cheeks, black moons for eyes, and wide smiles...."

Isa has moved to Virginia Beach to teach myth and history to Filipino-American youth. Her world is now colored by beauty pageants and drive-by shootings, community elders who question her ways, a boyfriend who thinks she acts too white. As a powerful hurricane hits the coast, she finds herself inspiring a local girl gang. In many ways, it is a Philippine microcosm in a different setting, with mores, manners and dialogue still beholden, however quirky, to the motherland.

"That night, the Tidewater community threw a Back to School party at the Philippine Cultural Center. Isabel was the guest of honor.

"A montage of hands flew at her like a dream, one after the other. She felt like a politician, smiling, uttering, yes, yes, yes. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and ‘I was aware of that.’ Faces faded one into the other….

"Everyone looked so familiar, like relatives in old photos. Every young man looked like her brother Frankie, every old lady like a version of her Lola Dee, her mother’s mother. And the way they talked to her, shooting words and hardly waiting for answers, reminded her of family gatherings.

"‘How old are you, hija?’ asked an old man.

"‘Thirty-two, po,’ she answered. He was an old-timer, a very little man with skin as dark as coffee, and thick white hair.

"‘And already a teacher! Naku! Your parents must be proud.’

"‘Ay, honey,’ said a woman with a face painted in powder and heavy red blush. She kissed Isabel’s cheek and asked, ‘Wala pang asawa?’"

The Tagalog isn’t in italics, the way Jessica Hagedorn introduced the fashion in Dogeaters, or how a Jewish American novelist would pepper both exposition and dialogue with terms already turned familiar in a place like New York.

Here, Galang’s characters have the Tito’s and Tita’s before their names, eat pansit, kiss-kiss everyone on the cheek, while the youths sport alibata tattoos and joke about "dope tinola."

It’s a superb follow-up to her first book, the remarkable short-fiction collection Her Wild American Self. Here it’s her spirited Filipina self that takes on a welter of contretemps and convulsions, including Hurricane Emilia, which batters but fails to dent the ever renewable spirit of a potentially powerful tribe.

M. Evelina Galang bids fair to become one of our strongest voices in fiction. She e-mailed recently: "Hope all is well there. My students are holding a prayer vigil for the mudslide victims. Evelina." Her voice always comes home.

Also at the AWP bash is Marianne Villanueva, who’s signing her latest book, The Mayor of the Roses, also on March 10. The next day, Marianne reads with Asian-American poet Marilyn Chin, whom I met in Iowa City decades ago. A week earlier, in fact tomorrow, she reads with Zack Linmark at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in an event that serves as the San Francisco launch of Linmark’s latest book, the poetry collection Primetime Apparitions (Hanging Loose Press).

Back at the AWP, the stellar poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil (whose work, like those of Galang and Linmark, has been reviewed in this space) joins a couple of panel discussions. Also initially expected were Luisa Igloria, Eileen Tabios and Barbara Jane Reyes, but they’ve all demurred, at the last minute, from attendance this year.

Instead, Igloria and Reyes are set to do a reading at Notre Dame de Namur University in California’s Bay Area on March 30, while pushing their new poetry books, Trill & Mordent and Poeta en San Francisco, respectively.

Reyes’ Poeta… (Tinfish Press) won the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. This second book by the San Francisco State graduate in Creative Writing has been described as a "linguistic tour de force, incorporating English, Spanish, and Tagalog in a book-length poem at once lush and experimentally rigorous. From the vantage of San Francisco, Reyes looks outward to the Philippines, Vietnam, and other colonized places with violent histories."

For its part, Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions) was a runner-up for the 2004 Editions Poetry Prize. This is the seventh collection from Igloria, a Palanca Hall of Famer and currently an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia.

It’s a terrific book I’ve long wanted to review in full, except that conditions haven’t permitted me to indulge much in poetry, even of the world-class variety. Unarguably Igloria’s best work, it’s solid from poem to poem, marrying ideas with language and such finessed technique that shows her at peak form.

This is the kind of poetry I show my students, and urge them to appreciate and emulate: where graphic image is always used to serve statement and/or feeling in peripheral, elliptical manner, in all subtlety of complementation. Idea and emotion aren’t so much held in check but extrapolated in unfolding layers of insight and wisdom, much like the musical variables she celebrates in the title poem: "… Ascending or descending/ they become appoggiatura – trills or mordents. The trills// are as random as birdsong strewn over a field. The mordents/ slip down, enough to remind me of their root in morbid// things, in falling, in death. The French, too, remind us/ how even in pleasure the body dies a little: la petite mort…"

Can’t help but share another poem from this full-bodied book, in full, titled "Regarding History":

"A pair of trees on one side of the walk, leaning/ now into the wind in a stance we’d call involuntary –/ I can see them from the kitchen window, as I take meat/ out of the oven and hold my palms above the crust, darkened/ with burnt sugar. Nailed with cloves, small earth of flesh/ still smoldering from its furnace. In truth I want to take it/ into the garden and bury it in soil. There are times/ I grow weary of coaxing music from silence, silence/ from the circularity of logic, logic from the artifact./ then, the possibilities of sunlight are less attractive/ than baying at the moon. I want to take your face/ in my hands, grow sweet from what it tells, tend/ how it leans and turns, trellis or vine of morning glory// I wish for limbs pared to muscle, to climb away from/ chance and all its missed appointments, its half-drunk/ cups of coffee. Tell me what I’ll find, in this/ early period at the beginning of a century./ Tell me what I’ll find, stumbling into a boat/ and pushing off into the year’s last dark hours."

Beautiful. Bravo!

Finally, a few more mentions of how our extended tribe of sisters and brothers are doing in the land of apparent plenitude.

Today Sarah Gambito, whose first poetry book, Matadora (Alice James Books), I reviewed last year, and for which she won the 2005 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry from the Our Own Voice e-journ, is featured in the penultimate Open Slam of the year at University Place in NYC.

Also this month, Bino Realuyo’s first poetry collection, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, the 2005 winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize for Poetry, will be released as part of the prize. Anvil Publishing intends to run a local edition. In the US, Bino’s book cover will feature an artwork by the late lamented Santi Bose. A few poems from the collection are included in the forthcoming March issue of TOMAS, UST’s exemplary literary journal. It will be recalled that Realuyo authored the acclaimed novel, The Umbrella Country (Random House, 1999), also reviewed in this space.

Patrick Rosal, another superb Fil-Am poet, comes out with a new poetry collection by October, titled My American Kundiman. His idea is to use a print by Rod Paras Perez, titled "Pintado Suite," for the cover.

Word is out, too, that Joseph O. Legaspi’s first poetry book will be published by Cavenkerry Press. I met Joseph at the AWP get-together in Chicago in 2004, along with Sarah, Barbara, Aimee, Patrick, Jon Pineda, Rodney Garcia, and old friends Luisa Igloria and Willie Sanchez.

Kumpadre Eric Gamalinda’s new collection of poems, Amigo Warfare, is due out in Spring 2007.

I’ll have to leave for a future column, perhaps next week’s, reviews of two poetry collections received from good friend Eileen Tabios in California. One is her nth and latest, Post Bling-Bling, while the other is The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young. Yes, I better write about those, too, else the rest of our beloved ka-tribo, our global natives, get restless.