For Filipino American History Month, observed annually during the month of October, we asked our member presses and literary magazines to share some of the literature by Filipino American writers they recommend reading in celebration.
Nonfiction & Multi-Genre Works
Traceable Relation by Kimberly Alidio
Fonograf Editions | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964499-42-0
This collection of linked essays and poems conveys Alidio’s “practice within a lineage of aesthetic and practical sensibilities conveyed in the personal effects of her late father and the concrete tasks of communal mourning.”
Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers
Aunt Lute Books | 2000
ISBN: 9781879960596
This book edited by Nick Carbó and Eileen R. Tabios—the first international anthology of Filipina and Filipina American writers published in the United States—features poetry and prose by Gina Apostol, Lilledeshan Bose, Shirley Ancheta, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and more.
My Love Is Water by Rob Macaisa Colgate
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946604-34-7
In this hybrid drama and poetry collection, Colgate “writes in rigorous and experimental verse to upend our understandings of desire, race, disability, and care.”
Read Furiously | 2023
ISBN: 9798986119915
Based on Cruz’s webcomic Li Comics, First shares “the heartfelt, and often unplanned, moments of pregnancy and motherhood.”
Eye of the Fish by Luis H. Francia
Kaya Press | 2001
ISBN: 978-1885030313
Through stories and through “his own memories of estrangement and acceptance in the Philippines and in the US,” Francia’s memoir “reflects on the hybridity that is simultaneously the burden and the benediction of the Philippines.”
Burrow Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-941681-30-5
A “literary-architectural hybrid project,” this book “sketches fault lines within a Filipinx family, linking intimate harm to the forces of colonialism and labor migration.”
Because I Love You, I Become War by Eileen R. Tabios
Marsh Hawk Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-0998658261
According to E. San Juan, Jr., this collection of poetry and prose “weaves the semiotic subtleties of icon, index, and symbol into epiphanies and discoveries that are, indeed, new additions to our world as we know it so far.”
The Inventor: A Transcolonial Autobiography by Eileen R. Tabios
Marsh Hawk Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1732614192
According to Tabios, “In The Inventor, I show how Poetry is not mere words but a proactive approach to improving our relationships with each other and life on our planet.”
The Body Papers by Grace Talusan
Restless Books | 2019
ISBN: 9781632061836
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Talusan’s memoir “powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse.”
Poetry
Sundress Publications | 2025
ISBN: 978-1939675989
In Abonado’s debut collection, “America pulls a splinter out of a child’s hand, a man hides beneath a body to avoid Japanese soldiers, and God eats spam, white rice, and a fried egg.”
The Flayed City by Hari Alluri
Kaya Press | 2017
ISBN: 978-1885030474
The poems in this collection “sweep together ‘an archipelago song’ scored by memory and landscape, history and mythology, desire and loss.”
Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet by Rhoni Blankenhorn
Trio House Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949487-35-0
In Blankenhorn’s debut poetry collection, “the beauty and comedy of daily life becomes a provocation into nonlinearity, sexuality, family history, and multiracial selfhood.”
Alice James Books | 2023
ISBN: 9781948579315
According to Hilary Sun, this collection reminds readers that “to be eaten does not have to be othering; it can be a way of knowing and understanding.”
Leaving Biddle City by Marianne Chan
Sarabande Books | 2024
ISBN: 9781956046298
This coming-of-age collection “details one Filipina American speaker’s experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia mythologized as ‘Biddle City.’”
Nightboat Books | 2021
ISBN: 9781643620725
In O.B.B., Javier “deconstructs a post-9/11 Pilipinx identity, amid the lasting fog of the Philippine American War, to compose a far-out comic book awit.”
Decade of the Brain by Janine Joseph
Alice James Books | 2023
ISBN: 9781948579308
According to Aracelis Girmay, the speakers of these poems “articulate the strangeness of living in relation to other past and simultaneous selves changed by injury, intimacy, notions of citizenship, and nation.”
Trio House Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949487-36-7
Kim’s debut collection “evokes modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of family and self.”
Fahmidan Publishing & Co. | 2021
ISBN: 979-8485585099
According to Rachael Crosbie, this collection “commands language with a blend of love and sorrow” to examine “generational trauma and the passing of a family member” using English, Tagalog, and Cebuano.
Futurepoem | 2018
ISBN: 978-0996002561
According to Yasmin Adele Majeed, Marchan’s poems, which are drawn from her childhood experience of Hurricane Katrina, take in “the whole stretch of New Orleans on an intimate level—it’s people, it’s music, it’s idiom, and it’s bloat.”
American Inmate: The Album by Justin Rovillos Monson
Haymarket Books | 2024
ISBN: 9781642599732
Monson’s debut collection “subverts contemporary discourse and representations of incarceration, of hip-hop, and of Asian American culture and literature.”
At the Drive-in Volcano by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Tupelo Press | 2007
ISBN: 9781932195453
According to Naomi Shihab Nye, Nezhukumatathil’s second poetry collection “examines the full circle journey of desire, loss, and ultimately, an exuberant love—traveling around a world brimming with wild and delicious offerings such as iced waterfalls, jackfruit, and pistol shrimp.”
All Things Lose Thousands of Times by Angela Peñaredondo
Inlandia Institute | 2016
ISBN: 978-0997093216
The poems in Peñaredondo’s debut collection investigate “where fragments of the body’s memory, culture, gender and desire gather, then finally piece themselves together to form into new shapes.”
My Boyfriend Apocalypse by antmen pimentel mendoza
Nomadic Press & Black Lawrence Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-955239-38-7
According to Sanjana Bijlani, “the speculative tenderness at the heart of antmen pimentel mendoza’s poetry embraces life, not just survival, while the future is still ours to imagine.”
Baobab Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-936097-56-2
According to Marianne Chan, these poems examine “the layers of yearnings, confusions, and loves within the speaker’s hybrid history and intersectional identity.”
Particles of a Stranger Light by Anthony Sutton
Veliz Books | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-949776-13-3
“Circling around the trauma of a single night,” Sutton’s debut collection “employs a wide array of approaches and forms to obsessively dissect issues of memory, identity, culture, and history.”
What You Refuse to Remember by MT Vallarta
Small Harbor Publishing | 2023
ISBN: 978-1957248189
According to Angela Peñaredondo, this debut collection “transgresses narratives of second-generation immigrant g[x]rlhood by intimately positioning it against cultural histories of imperialism, gender violence, and femme subjugation.”
Proof of Stake: An Elegy by Charles Valle
Fonograf Editions | 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7344566-6-0
According to Joyelle McSweeney, in this debut poetry collection Valle “carries his lost loved one close against his chest as he soars through centuries, continents, climates, colonialisms and profit motives.”
Poems of the Black Object by Ronaldo V. Wilson
Futurepoem | 2009
ISBN: 978-0982279809
According to Tisa Bryant, this collection shifts “experience and reckoning from poem to essay, theory to epistle, these intuitive modes of a person in search of a particular poetics.”
Fiction
Tales from Manila Ave. by Patrick Joseph Caoile
Sundress Publications | 2025
ISBN: 9781951979843
In Caoile’s debut short fiction collection, “tenants gather to swap meals and stories, workers strive to prove their worth, sons and daughters revisit their relationships with faith, patriotism, and their own parents.”
Rolling the R’s by R. Zamora Linmark
Kaya Press | 2016
ISBN: 978-1885030511
This novel set in the 1970s in the town of Kalihi, Honolulu “animates the hilarious, disturbing, and chaotic misadventures of a group of Filipino, Vietnamese, Okinawan, and haole fifth graders.”
Akashic Books | 2013
ISBN: 9781617751608
According to Publishers Weekly, this anthology—featuring stories by Gina Apostol, R. Zamora Linmark, Sabina Murray, and more—“includes a liberal dose of the gothic and supernatural, with disappearance and loss being constants.”
A Professional Lola by E. P. Tuazon
Red Hen Press | 2024
ISBN: 9781636281186
Winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, this collection blends “literary fiction with the surreal to present the contemporary Filipino American experience and its universal themes of love, family, and identity.”
Residents of the Deep by Marianne Villanueva
Unsolicited Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-956692-93-8
According to Luis H. Francia, in these short stories “we meet fantastical beings—by turns charming and nightmarish—who, when examined unsparingly, turn out to be versions of ourselves.”
Literary Magazines
A Reading List for Filipino American History Month
The Common | 2023
This reading list from The Common includes poetry by Bino A. Realuyo and R. Zamora Linmark, an interview with Oliver de la Paz, an essay by Danielle Batalion Ola, and more.
“Letter to the Deity Who Told Me Arriving Here Is Difficult as Welcome” by Hari Alluri
Adi Magazine | 2023
This poem begins, “Dear Kabunian, I love you even though you gave your buhay to our bodies, / even though you shaped us from the soup of earth itself…”
Always Again: New Work from the Philippines and Philippine Diasporas
Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing | 2024
Edited by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo, this issue of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, and more brings readers “a living record of the historical forces and contemporary concerns that have shaped the Philippines and its diasporas.”
Slant’d | 2024
This set of Buenaventura’s poems was published in Slant’d Issue 6: Homecoming.
“Eli Plays Along” by Rob Macaisa Colgate
The Cincinnati Review | 2025
This poem begins, “I. Phone Call / Hey, where are you? Hey, breathe, it’s okay, I’m not upset. No, I’m not trying to make you come home, I just felt like hanging out with my boyfriend! Where are you…”
The Georgia Review | 2022
The poem “Now vs. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” begins, “Tonight, my mother leaves a voicemail asking I work back-of-house when I can. I haven’t had a / parent call afraid for my safety since 9/11.”
“In My Own Skin” by Camille Espiritu
Wellspringwords | 2024
This poem begins, “A painful amount of guilt has riddled my body for years.”
Filipino American History Month Playlist
Shō Poetry Journal | 2025
This playlist features six poems by poets recently published in Shō Poetry Journal, including Hannah Keziah Agustin, Karla Myn Khine, Akira Ritos, Elise Thi Tran, and MT Vallarta.
“but when” by Czaerra Galicinao Ucol
beestung | 2020
This poem begins, “1. the uptown 6 screeches as the mango poem / lodged in my throat beckons / to its brother…”
“Reflection” by Toni Garcia-Butler
beestung | 2025
This poem begins, “I treat Tuesday nights like / free voice training, and / Boy, do I practice– / every week / a new song, / every month / a new pitch…”
The Georgia Review | 2025
The poem “The Night Is a Clock Chiming” begins, “The night is a clock with eyes / chiming in another language. / Lonely husband, your eyes / remake my being…”
“Threads of Belonging” by Caitlyn Guarano
Slant’d | 2024
Guarano’s photo essay was published in Slant’d Issue 6: Homecoming.
“World Without End” by Hannah Keziah Agustin
Adi Magazine | 2024
This essay begins, “On Christmas Day, my family and I wrapped our warm bodies against the arbitrary demarcations of the Canada-U.S. border.”
“My Father and W. B. Yeats” by Monica Macansantos
The Hopkins Review | 2022
This essay begins, “My father was a regular listener of Jaime Licauco’s ‘Inner Mind on Radio,’ which aired in the evenings when I was growing up in the Philippines.”
“Maple Boyfriend” by Paula Mirando
Southeast Review | 2024
This story begins, “We’re outside the Time Temple waiting for a fourth to join our party when we meet NotButter. He’s a Level 67 Shadower, which is a good fit for our party.”
“Alam Ni Lola (Grandmother Knows)” by Shella Parcarey
ANMLY | 2024
This essay begins, “There is violence in food: getting it, cooking it, eating it. To crack open a coconut, hold it in one hand.”
“The Filipino Dragon” by Cole Pragides
Southeast Review | 2021
This essay begins, “My father is loud. He announces his presence. He talks deeper when we are around strange men, he chews loudly, he sneezes at Volume 11.”
“‘Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?’: A Walkthrough” by Lyn Rafil
ANMLY | 2023
This piece begins, “You’re sitting in the back of the car en route to the outlet malls a few towns over. In front of you is a GameBoy Color with a Pokemon Crystal cartridge inside.”
“The Body Otherwise” by Reni Roxas
Wellspringwords | 2024
This essay begins, “On my second night in the hospital, I had a dream. In my dream, I was waiting for an old friend. Instead, I found myself joining someone else, a new acquaintance, on a walk.”
The Hopkins Review | 2025
The poem “idiosyncratic kitchen” begins, “do not hold honey in our home like that. / sweet-hold, i tear my jaw / from the window. there’s a spasm / between your lips.”
“To the First-Time Porn Star” by Steven Tagle
Off Assignment | 2024
This essay begins, “You’d chosen a fitting alias—unique enough to stand out from Sean Cody’s stable of all-American jocks named Mark and Ken, but not laughable like Knox or Shamu.”
