Luis Francia

In this episode, we present a conversation on poetry and language featuring personal and shared histories in and from the Philippines with Luis Francia. Our dialogue roams with the poet, playwright and nonfiction writer through the layered colonialism of his homeland to his evocative poems on identity and diaspora. The pod is a counterclockwise journey that takes us ultimately across the Pacific five centuries ago, arriving (back) on the eve of Magellan's death. Luis Francia is a Manileño and now a New Yorker. His first full-length play, The Strange Case of Citizen de la Cruz, had its world premiere at the Bindlestiff Theater, San Francisco, in 2012. In 2014, The Beauty of Ghosts, a theatre of poetry, was staged at Topaz Arts in Queens. And in April of 2021, his Black Henry, on Ferdinand Magellan’s 1521 ill-fated landfall in the Philippines, was virtually staged by the Atlantic Pacific Theatre Group and produced by the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center and Sulo: the Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU. His poetry collections include Thorn Grass (2021), Tattered Boat (2015), and The Beauty of Ghosts (2010). Nonfiction works include the memoir Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, winner of both the 2002 PEN Open Book Award and the 2002 Asian American Writers Award, and A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos. He is in the Library of America’s Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. He has had grants and fellowships from among others the Queens Council of the Arts, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Asian Cultural Council, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Arts Colony. He has taught writing workshops at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Yale, City University of Hong Kong, and Ateneo de Manila University. He teaches Filipino language and culture at New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.