Mario Eric Gamalinda is a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and experimental filmmaker. His work has been described as “luminous” and “wonderful and vibrant”. “Gamalinda is a marvelous poet,” wrote D. Nurkse, poet laureate of Brooklyn. “His wistful, fierce, enthralled voice seems to speak the true language, the sotto voce language we can’t hear in our world of binary and mutually destructive opposites.” Recognition for his work includes a New York State Council of the Arts grant for film and media , the Cultural Center of the Philippines Independent Film and Video Awards , the Asian American Literary Award and the Alice James Books New York/New England Selection for Zero Gravity , the New York Foundation for the Arts , the Philippine Centennial Literary Prize for My Sad Republic , the Philippine National Book Award twice for Planet Waves and My Sad Republic , and the Asiaweek Short Story Competition . He has also won the Philippines’ top literary prize, the Palanca Memorial Awards, several times for poetry, fiction, non-fiction and playwriting. He was a featured poet in The Dodge Festival's Poets Among Us program in 1996. In 2009, his novel, The Descartes Highlands, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize. In 2010, his three-act play, Resurrection, was staged off-Broadway at the Clurman Theater on 42nd Street by Diverse City Inc. He has been in residence at Civitella Ranieri , Association d’Art de La Napoule , Chateau de Lavigny Residence pour Ecrivains , Fundacion Valparaiso , The Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio , Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers , and The Corporation of Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ledig House International Writers Colony . In 2013 he returned to Fundacion Valparaiso to work on a new novel. He was a publications director of the Asian American Writers Workshop until 1997, Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawaii in Manoain 1999, and Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Asia Pacific American Studies Program in 2002-2003. He currently teaches at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.
Works
Publications Poetry—Amigo Warfare , Zero Gravity ; Lyrics from a Dead Language Novels—The Descartes Highlands ; My Sad Republic ; Empire of Memory, Confessions of a Volcano ; Planet Waves Short fiction—People Are Strange Black Lawrence Press, New York, 2012]; Peripheral Vision Anthology—Flippin': Filipinos on America His stories have been published in Harper's Magazine and anthologized in Manila Noir ; Charlie Chan is Dead 2: At Home in the World ; The Thirdest World ; Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing ; Juncture: New Experimental Writing ; In My Life: Encounters with the Beatles ; Balikbayan: Racconti filippini contemporanei . A new story will soon appear in Manila Noir . His poems have been anthologized in Language for a New Century ; Structure & Surprise ; Stranger at Home ; Saints of Hysteria ; Poetry Daily ; Sweet Jesus ; Returning a Borrowed Tongue ; Brown River, White Ocean ; Lo Ultimo de Filipinas: Antologia Poetica . His essays have been anthologized in Vestiges of War: The Philippine–American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream and Pinoy Poetics .
