ABOUT THE BOOK

The idea for this collection came a few months into the author’s tenure as director of the University of the Philippines Press. Garcia realized the required speeches and remarks could be occasions to reflect on literacy in the country and our national character. The title reflects Garcia’s foremost realization—Filipinos remain transitionally literate, with our orality permeating and inflecting our reading and writing. As the publishing house of our national university, these ruminations speak to the truths of our situation as an archipelagic nation. By the end of his term, UP Press had published 1,065 titles, representing a significant contribution to our national corpus and becoming.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Neil C. Garcia teaches creative writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where he serves as a Fellow for Poetry in the Likhaan: UP Institute of Creative Writing. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and works in literary and cultural criticism. He coedited the famous Ladlad series of Philippine gay writing and has edited several other significant anthologies on LGBTQ themes. He served as the lead academic investigator for the Philippines for Project GlobalGRACE, a worldwide research consortium on gender and cultures of equality. His The Burden of the Oral & Other Reviews: Philippine Film & Theater, 2011-2019 and Kumustahan: Creative Writing in the Philippines are recent titles of the Philippine Writers Series of the Likhaan. He is currently working on an anthology of critical essays in Philippine Queer Studies.