This is my website – the repository of all my works and thoughts that I can share with the public. Since I am a bilingual writer, this website is in Filipino and English. Access to previous works such as my books, plays, and published essays and short stories will be available on this website.

This site contains my works as a playwright, short story writer, essayist, novelist, cultural worker, human rights activist, and researcher on nationalist tensions and ethnic conflicts in Southeast Asia.

I was an international fellow of the Asian Cultural Council (Rockefeller Foundation, New York) for research on the theatre of the marginalized communities, stateless peoples, and the narratives of resistance on both mainland and archipelagic Southeast Asia in 2016 and a Chevening scholar for my postgraduate studies on Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict at the Department of Politics, Birkbeck, the University of London in 2018. I founded ATISA, a theatre company based in Manila and the Balangiga Press, an independent publishing house in the Philippines.

I am pursuing my MPhil/Phd English and Humanities at the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London. I worked as a Project Manager for Kanlungan Filipino Consortium and co-chaired Status Now 4 All Network, a coalition of migrant organisations, community groups, and labour unions asking for regularisation of all undocumented migrants and those in the legal process living in the UK today. I also volunteer for Campaigns for Human Rights in the Philippines – UK.

In March 2023, I moved Balangiga Press to London. I established this small publishing house in 2015 in Manila to provide a space for my works in the Philippines outside the influence of the Philippine literary establishment. As a writer and playwright, I am always wary of the influence and pressure of the market, nationalist identity formations (including that of Filipino Nationalism), the ideology of the nation-state (and the border violence and the various versions of rigid nationalist identity formations that come with it), and the classist and patriarchal literary establishment in the Philipines to my writing. Balangiga Press is the space of autonomy, the place where I collaborate and negotiate with writers, playwrights, artists, academics, community organisers, and institutions across Southeast Asia that share the vision of my works.

I am currently exiled living, writing, and publishing in London, England.

*The photo on this page was taken by Rio Otara at the London Centre for Books Arts in 2019. I delivered a presentation on independent publishing and writing in the Philippines and the Balangiga Press. The invitation was from the London-based artist collective Daikon.