I am a Filipinx-American woman living in the Bronx. I write about working-class life, challenging the Model Minority Myth, Asian American experiences in the south and New York City, mental illness in AAPI community and family. This is a daring notion for a one time, high school dropout peddling her personal story of Asian Girl, Interrupted (except with guns, queer kids, and immigrant Filipinx families set in late 80's Texas). I told myself for years no one was going to care about that time told by people like me. For years I shelved books in bookstores and confirmed that assumption everyday. The nearly all-white writing workshops I attended in NYC in the late ’90s and early 2000s helped cement that belief.

Then, I snapped out of it. I went to a non-fiction writing workshop with every intention of writing a self help book to help my small business thrive and instead I wrote about a traumatic family scene that I had blocked out for thirty years. It was revelatory. Despite being painful to write and research this event led to writing about my experiences growing up in Houston, the fractures and strengths of our immigrant family experience in the United States.

For the next six years, I wrote whenever and wherever I could while still running my part time business, raising my two boys, catching up on all the contemporary memoirs, poetry and novels that I could get my hands on.

Putting aside all my notions of who gets to write and publish books in America, I thought, I’m going to have the book I want, even if I have to write the thing myself. Since then, I’ve found solid, nourishing writing community and friends in the N. Bronx Writing Group, at Catapult workshops, as a reader at Craft Literary Magazine, the Resort Writing Community in Queens, 2021 Lidia Yuknavitch’s book incubator, The Body of the Book through Corporeal Writing.

In 2021 I was awarded a 2021 City Artist Corp Grant from the New York Foundation of the Arts.

The current draft is a blend of memoir in objects/ short essays detailing a psychiatric hospital stay in the late 1980's, family gun violence, racism, generational traumas and the need for and consequences of silence.

Bio

Short Version:

Born in Chicago, raised in Houston, ran away to Los Angeles and landed in New York City in 1996. I write essays and memoir about life experiences that challenge the model minority myth.

Long Version:

After meandering in Los Angeles and San Francisco in my twenties, I made it to my dream city, NYC. I graduated Hunter College as a non-traditional undergraduate in 2006 then abruptly traveled to Planet Motherhood for a decade. I have worked as a personal organizer, bookseller, marketing manager (NYU), project coordinator (B&N), content writer and taken fiction writing classes at NYU, Catapult, Lighthouse, Grub Street, A Public Space, Hugo House, Story Studio Chicago, One Story, Shipman Studio, The Believer and independent writing partnerships. I hosted the North Bronx Writer's Group in my home and workshopped short fiction and essays online and in person for the past five years.