Philippine PEN 50th Anniversary

I’ve updated the PEN website — http://libro.ph/pen/ — with book covers of and information about the special edition Philippine PEN anthologies. There are actually four of them and it seems that all of them will be launched during the conference.

At Home in Unhomeliness: An Anthology of Philippine Postcolonial Poetry in English edited by J. Neil Garcia

Featuring 82 poems by 29 of the Philippines’ best young poets in English.

From the Introduction: By subtitling this collection “An Anthology of Philippine Postcolonial Poetry, this is precisely what I wish to editorially endorse, what I wish the prospective reader (local or translocal) to remember, what I intend to announce at the outset: these poems, like the rest of Philippine literature in English, will in fact be largely incomprehensible when decontextualized from the histories that engendered them–particularly the violent histories of colonization that the Philippines, as a geopolitical and indeed national reality, has endured.

List of contributors.

A Different Voice: Fiction by Young Filipino Writers edited by Vicente Groyon

Published in the year of the 50th anniversary of Philippine PEN, this anthology gathers together twenty new pieces of fiction by Filipino writers born after 1962. It presents a composite image of contemporary Philippine fiction in English and suggests what the future of Philippine fiction in English could be.

List of contributors.

Stage Presence: The Philippine PEN Anthology of Drama edited by Jose Victor Torres.

The playwrights in this collection are a mix of budding and veteran writers of the stage. They each have their own political and cultural beliefs so different from another but common in the way of portraying them in the medium of the performing art of theater. The plays published here have also gathered awards or had been read and performed onstage with theater companies. They are befitting to be part of this anthology of drama in celebration of the 50th anniversary of PEN.