Azucena

About the Author

Born in the Philippines in 1895, M. de Gracia Concepción published two books of poetry, Azucena and The Bamboo Flute, and a co-authored biography of Philippine President Manuel Quezon. He was also a journalist and a newspaper editor in the United States and the Philippines. When he died suddenly in Los Angeles in 1952, he was under FBI surveillance for suspected ties to Communist organizations and for his participation in liberation movements in the Philippines. Patrick Rosal is an interdisciplinary artist and author of five previous books, most recently The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Willams Award, and Brooklyn Antediluvian, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. He has earned fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Senior Research Program. He is Professor of English and inaugural Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden. Emmanuel David is an interdisciplinary scholar of gender, sexuality, and globalization. His recent research on gender and sexuality in the Philippines has focused on a wide range of topics, including global call centers, the politics of beauty pageants, sex work and militarism, and contemporary art and performance.  He is author of Women of the Storm: Civic Activism after Hurricane Katrina (University of Illinois Press, 2017) and editor (with Elaine Enarson) of the interdisciplinary anthology The Women of Katrina: How Gender, Race, and Class Matter in an American Disaster (Vanderbilt University Press, 2012).