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.
Poetry
Tender Machines by J. Mae Barizo
Tupelo Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-946482-84-6
The poems in Tender Machines “swing between the domestic and the surreal, charting motherhood, desire and an immigrant family’s haunted inheritance.”
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.”
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.’”
Karaoke at the End of the World by Genevieve DeGuzman
JackLeg Press | 2026
ISBN: 978-1956907247
DeGuzman’s collection “delves into the complexities of grief, loss, and transformation, with poems that range from punk riot songs to computer programs.”
Noemi Press | 2026
ISBN: 9781955992732
Beauty Talk “addresses the (im)possibility of talking about beauty in America without addressing whiteness.”
A Moth Collection by Anna Ojascastro Guzon
Finishing Line Press | 2026
ISBN: 979-8899904554
These poems “converse with Charles Darwin, Tina Turner, Sylvia Plath, Sacagawea, Walt Whitman, Kendrick Lamar, and the author’s family members who survived World War II in the Philippines.”
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.”
Threshold by Joseph O. Legaspi
CavanKerry Press | 2017
ISBN: 978-1-933880-63-1
Legaspi’s collection “celebrates various courageous outsets across boundaries—bodily, filial, marital, even biblical.”
Alternatives for Succulents by John Paul Martinez
Bull City Press | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-949344-69-1
“Sprawling from the rural soil of Wisconsin to the unreachable pockets of space,” these poems “sift through what it means to want, to lose, and to remain tender.”
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.”
Marcelina: A meditation on the murder of Cecilia “Celing” Navarro by Jean Vengua
Paloma Press | 2020
ISBN: 9781734496505
According to Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Vengua’s chapbook “braids history, geography, gender, ethnicity and race to illumine why we must now dig up those discarded in the levees of our past.”
Nonfiction & Multi-Genre Works
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.”
Kelsey Street Press | 2026
ISBN: 0932716938
This hybrid collection is an “experimental text that fuses the speaker’s transcontinental and matrilineal lines with the discourses of the speaker’s own reproductive body alongside the bodies of her daughters.”
Mud on the Moon by Nita Noveno
Red Hen Press | 2026
ISBN: 9781636284910
Mud on the Moon is “a hybrid memoir that intertwines a daughter’s exploration of her Filipino immigrant father’s obscured past with a reimagined version of his untold story.”
Wendy’s Subway | 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9909878-9-0
“Through film stills, photographs, family archives, and a rapt, first-person narrative,” this memoir “excavates the amnesias and silences that shape personal and historical memory in the exilic, diasporic impasse.”
The Body Papers by Grace Talusan
Restless Books | 2019
ISBN: 9781632061836
Talusan’s memoir “powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse.”
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.”
We Could’ve Been Happy Here by Keith Pilapil Lesmeister
EastOver Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-958094-46-4
The second edition of Lesmeister’s short fiction collection set in the Midwest features “a new story and an introduction by Midwestern Gothic co-founder Robert James Russell.”
Rolling the R’s: 20th Anniversary Edition by R. Zamora Linmark
Kaya Press | 2016
ISBN: 978-1885030511
This twentieth-anniversary edition of the novel set 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.”
Red Hen Press | 2026
ISBN: 9781636285153
According to Jose Dalisay Jr., in this novel Soliven “takes us back to the dancehalls of Depression-era California where Filipino men descend to slake their thirst for liquor and companionship.”
The Ruin of Everything by Lara Stapleton
Paloma Press | 2021
ISBN: 9781734496550
According to Laurel Flores Fantauzzo, in these short stories Stapleton “brings us the comic turmoil of characters steeped in the sorrows and absurdities of modern life; reaching for connection and erring, reaching for home and missing.”
Literary Magazines
“The Tale of the Flat-Nosed Family, or The First Filipino and the Last” by Daniel Abiva Hunt
New England Review | 2023
This essay begins, “Once upon a time, there was a girl named Purita and a boy named Nepo, and according to legend, they would be married three times…”
ALOCASIA | 2026
This hybrid work begins, “EXPLANATORY NOTE: the people know, you were first. you were okay not being the only. you are best as a highly lucrative business.”
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.”
“Hinahanap-Hanap” by Aldrin Badiola
The Hopkins Review | 2025
This story begins, “The fisherman has normally seen kataws in their more monstrous forms: pristine cool-colored gills, intricate fins stretching from their heads to their torso to their feet…”
“Notes on a Dream” by Sebastian Barros
beestung | 2022
This poem begins, “skin sheens sweat / thru dark a man stares at me / & why this fear / manifests itself as fixation / I don’t mean I’m afraid I mean it hurts every time…”
“Wild Onion” by Caroliena Cabada
ALOCASIA | 2025
This poem begins, “This morning is my favorite morning so far: / an east wind rustling through wild onion blossoms / just coming up, pale purple and thin.”
New England Review | 2019
This poem begins, “balsam pear. wrinkled gourd. / leafy thing raised from seed. / pungent goya, ampalaya: cut / & salt at the sink.”
“A History of Skin” by K. Degala-Paraíso
ANMLY | 2022
This poem begins, “PALANGGA / Mama [grandmother] started coming to me in my dreams before she was even dead. Before all of her body’s organs failed at once…”
“What Migration Will Do To You” by Asa Drake
Adi Magazine | 2025
This poem begins, “This is the most she has ever said / about the year she left. (I point / to what I can’t say.)”
“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…”
“World Without End” by Hannah Keziah Agustin
Adi Magazine | 2025
This essay begins, “On Christmas Day, my family and I wrapped our warm bodies against the arbitrary demarcations of the Canada-U.S. border.”
“Saint Malo, Louisiana” by Isabel Christina Legarda
West Trestle Review | 2023
This poem begins, “Salt waters have always been our home, our blood. In the time of myths and heroes’ songs, whale sharks and manta rays guided our boats.”
“Show You Matter” by Christian Lozada
Oyster River Pages | 2025
This poem begins, “My union representative asks me: / Take a selfie with a sign about / why you matter.’ I say, ‘Yes.’”
Four Poems by Pamela K. Santos
ANMLY | 2025
The poem “Hey Siri, Define: An·i·me Gen·e·sis Req·ui·em” begins, “You retcon the canon of your father’s / Adultery with Schrodinger’s cat eyes : / Blue blinks once for truth…”
“What I Did This Summer” by Elinor Serumgard
Philly Chapbook Review | 2025
This poem begins, “Stars crash into the sea / silent explosions as the earth sighs / I grew tomatoes this summer…”
“The Freak Winds Up Again” by Jenn Alandy Trahan
One Story | 2020
Trahan’s story appears in Issue 271 of One Story.
