BULOSAN's LAUGHTER
Carlos Bulosan was born in The Philippines in a rural village of Mangusmana, in the town of Binalonan, Pangasinan. There is considerable debate around his actual birthdate, as he himself used several dates. but according to the late Lorenzo Duyanen Sampayan, his childhood playmate and nephew, Carlos was born on November 2, 1913.Carlos Bulosan was, and foremost, a poet and a writer. As such, he himself was constantly in the process of inventing and re-inventing himself. Much as he used his art as a way to grasp the history and future of Filipino Americans, Filipinos, the Philippines, and the world, Bulosan wrote and re-wrote accounts of his life in order to explore more fully its potential, its possibilities. He wrote the American is in the heart for giving a post-colonial, Asian immigrant perspective to the labor movement in America and for telling the experience of Filipinos working in the U.S. during the 1930s and '40s. In the 1970s, with a resurgence in Asian/Pacific Islander American activism, his unpublished writings were discovered in a library in the University of Washington leading to posthumous releases of several unfinished works and anthologies of his poetry.
Sources: (Bulosan's LaughterThe Making of Carlos Bulosan . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Bulosan; http://www.ourownvoice.com/essays/essay2006a-5.shtml; http://www.answers.com/topic/carlos-bulosan; pictures taken from yahoo images.)
F. Sionil Jose
National Artist for Literature, Foremost Novelist
Francisco Sionil Jose has been called a Philippine national treasure. Born on December 3, 1924 in Rosales, Philippines, he was introduced to literature in public school and later at the University of Santo Tomas. While working as a journalist in Manila, he moonlighted writing short stories and eventually novels. In the late fifties Jose founded the Philippine branch of PEN, an international organization of poets, playwrights, and novelists. In 1965 he started his own publishing house SOLIDARIDAD, and a year later he began publishing the remarkable Solidarity, a journal of current affairs, ideas, and arts, still going strong today. The only writer who had produced a series of novels that constitutes an epic creation of a century of Philippine life...a rich, composite picture. His novels and short stories depict the social underpinnings of class struggles and colonialism in Filipino society. He has been awarded numerous fellowships and awards; two of which were the 2004 Pablo Neruda Centennial Award from Chile and the notable and most prestigious award of its kind in Asia, the 1980 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts. On June 11, 2001, Mr. Jose was awarded the prestigious title of National Artist for Literature in an official ceremony at Malacañang.
Sources: (Francisco Sionil Jose/WISH YOU WERE HERE.25 June 2009.
http://www.me.uvic.ca/~art/afsj.html; http://senorenrique.blogspot.com/2008/10/national-artist-f-sionil-jose.html)
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