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BRYN MAWR TO HOST AN EVENING WITH
POET AND JOURNALIST LUIS FRANCIA
On Monday, April 5, the Office of Institutional Diversity, the Center for Ethnicities, Communities and Social Policy, and Barkada, the Filipina students' association, will present "An Evening With Luis Francia" at 4:30 p.m. in Thomas 224. Francia, a Manila-born poet, critic, journalist and teacher, will read from his work and discuss Philippine-U.S. relations. The reading and lecture will be followed by a question-and-answer session.
Francia was born in Manila and now lives in New York, where he teaches in New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. He is the author of a book of essays and two poetry collections, and editor of two landmark anthologies of Filipino-American literature. His most recent published works are Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago and Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999, an anthology co-edited with Angel Velasco Shaw. He writes for The Village Voice and other popular periodicals and has published in numerous literary journals.
At Bryn Mawr, Francia will read from Eye of the Fish, a memoir of the Phillipines in which his reminiscences of childhood are interspersed with accounts of his travels in the Philippines over the past two decades.
"The Philippines that Francia explores is a country indelibly marked by both Spanish and American colonialism, a collection of over 7,000 islands where cultural alliances and political ideology have pushed aside identity politics and where traditional beliefs both mimic and subvert conventional Christian piety," says the publisher of Eye of the Fish. "Francia's odyssey takes him the length of the nation, from Batanes in the north to the Muslim Jolo and Marawi regions of the south, and from the rugged mountain hideaways of revolutionary freedom fighters to the well-appointed salons of the political and cultural elite. Painters and priests, island shamans and small-town politicians, cultists, feminists and infamous first ladies all make an appearance in this imaginative and idiosyncratic exploration of 'home.'"
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