Authors & Books

Renato Zosimo Evangelista is the first Mangyan lawyer from the Hanunuo-Mangyan Tribe in Mindoro. He obtained his Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree at Manuel L. Quezon University and passed the Bar Exam on May 3, 2002. Atty. Evangelista also holds a Master’s of Law (LLM) degree from the University of Essex, United Kingdom as a British Chevening scholar.

He is a practicing lawyer and a legal advocate for indigenous peoples’ rights in the Philippines. He is the Founding and Managing Partner of his law firm based in Manila, the capital of the Philippines.

He was a past President and Member of the Board of Trustees of the Mangyan Heritage Foundation, Inc., which preserves and compiles Mangyan literary works and indigenous knowledge.

SEAWRITE 2010 laureate (Southeast Asia Writer, Philippines) and National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Ani ng Dangal 2011 awardee, Marjorie Evasco has published several books, the latest of which is her omnibus book of poems, It Is Time To Come Home: New & Collected Poems (co-published by DLSU PH & Milflores Publishing, Inc., 2023), and Vital Signs: Philippine Short Stories on Healing, which she co-edited with Dr. Ronnie Baticulon (Milflores Publishing, Inc., 2025). Six of her books have won National Book Awards for poetry, oral history, biography, and art, and two have won the Gintong Aklat (Golden Book) award for poetry in English from the Book Development Association of the Philippines (BDAP). She received the UMPIL (Union of Filipino Writers) Gawad Alagad Balagtas in 2004, the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan (City of Manila) in 2005, the Outstanding Silliman University alumna for creative writing in 2008, and the 2011 Carlos P. Garcia award for literature from Bohol, her home- island. She is a University Fellow and Professor Emeritus (Literature) of De La Salle University and is currently its Writer-in-Residence. She sits in the teaching panel of the IYAS La Salle National Writers Workshop in the University of St. La Salle, Bacolod City, and in the Silliman University National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete City. She also directs the DLSU National Writers Creative Nonfiction Workshop for Medical Doctors and Healthcare Professionals. She advocates for writing and speaking in Binísayá or Cebuano-Visayan, the Philippine language of the communities she works with in the Visayas and Mindanao.

ROWENA P. FESTIN is a poet, fictionist, translator and editor. She is the author of the book of poetry Banayad which won the National Book Award for poetry in Filipino in 2017 and the book of short stories Ang Buang ng Bayan which won the National Book Award for fiction in Filipino in 2024. The two books are both published by the University of the Philippines Press. She was also the recipient of the 2023 Gawad SWF for her poems published in Agos Journal, a publication of UP Sentro ng Wikang Filipino. She translated to Filipino the novel Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) and was published by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino. She is also the co-translator of the novel Little Women (Louisa May Alcott). The translation was published by Southern Voices. Her poems, short stories and essays on Philippine literature and culture had been published in journals and anthologies. She is a professor of Filipino and Sociology courses in University of the Philippine Clark.

Danielle Florendo is an illustrator, picture book author, and visual artist based in Baguio City. After earning her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, she pursued a career in children’s book and media illustration.
She was one of the key illustrators for the Baybayin LRT Train Project by Turo Guro in 2019 and debuted in children’s picture books with Balitanay’s Laktob by Dr. Analyn Ikin Amores and Renalyn Albert (CordiText Project) and Pong Pong Ginatbong edited by Dr. Felicidad Prudente (Ilaw ng Tahanan Publishing Inc.) in 2020.
Her works have earned both local and international recognition. Maselan ang Tanong ng Batang si Usman (The Tricky Question of Young Usman) by Palanca awardee Doc Luis Gatmaitan (OMFLIT Hiyas Publishing, 2022) was a finalist at the 16th Cardinal Sin Book Awards for Children’s Book Category and received a Finalist Medal at the 1st Severino Reyes Medal in 2024. The Perfect Tree by Glory Moralidad (Oh Kids!) and Ang Bahay na Maraming Klasrum (The House with Many Classrooms) by Eugene Evasco (Johnny and Hansel Publishing) also earned Finalist medals at the 1st Severino Reyes Medal. The Perfect Tree was additionally recognized as a finalist at the 9th National Children’s Book Awards and featured in the 2023 White Ravens Catalogue. Her book A Whale in Prison by Mary Ann Ordinario won the 18th Cardinal Sin Book Award for Children’s Short Story.

Her latest book, Kaub-Ofuden Shin Lijang Uta (The Legend of Uta Cave), a collaboration with the Indigenous People of Balbalan, Kalinga, received the 2024 Translation Grant from the National Book Development Board. It will be featured at the 2025 Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy as part of the Illustrators Exhibition.

Danielle also served as a National Judge and Workshop facilitator for the 2023 and 2024 Gawad Teodora Alonso Story Writing Competition by the Department of Education. She was a Philippine delegate and key speaker at the 2024 Asian Festival for Children’s Content (AFCC) in Singapore, where she delivered multiple lectures on culture-focused children’s books during the Philippines’ Country of Focus showcase. She was the key visual illustrator for the AFCC-Philippine Circle under IBBY-Philippines and one of the lead illustrators for the 2025 Philippine Book Festival under the National Book Development Board. She is currently working as the lead illustrator for the Philippines’ publication materials for the upcoming 2025 Geneva Convention under the Department of Science and Technology–Technology Application and Promotion Institute.

Today, Danielle is a lecturer at the University of the Philippines Baguio. She is an advocate for promoting culture in children’s books and education. When not illustrating or teaching, she pursues research and writes stories inspired by communities across the country.

Liza Flores is one of the leading children’s book illustrators in the Philippines. Her books, “The Secret is in the Soil” (2012) and “Ang Maliit na Kalabaw” (2021), were included in the National Children’s Book Award Best Reads for 2012-2013 and 2020-2021 respectively. She has also written two books, “Sungit” (2020) and “Hiya” (2023). She mentors illustrators from different countries through Room to Read, an international nonprofit organization.

She is a member of Ang Ilustrador ng Kabataan (Ang INK), the Philippines’ first and only organization of illustrators for children. She serves as the sectoral representative for illustrators at the Philippine Board on Books for Young People (PBBY).

Liza is also a graphic designer. She art directed and designed “Karapat Dapat” (2018) and “The Amazing Beasts of Philippine Mythology” (2023), which were included in The White Ravens list in 2020 and 2024.

Patrick Flores is the Chief Curator at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS). He is concurrently a professor at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. In 2015, he curated the Philippine Pavilion at the 56th Venice Art Biennale. In 2022, he was the curator of the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Flores was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010); a member of the Advisory Board of the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 (2011), organized by the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe; and a member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011). 

He co-edited the Southeast Asian issue with Joan Kee for Third Text (2011). On behalf of the Clark Institute and the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines, Flores organized the conference, Histories of Art History in Southeast Asia in Manila. He serves as the curator of the Philippine Pavilion for the country’s role as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2025.

Tara Frejas has been writing and self-publishing romance books since 2015, and now has a total of 16 books (including collaboration work) in her backlist. An active member of the #RomanceClass creative team, she has helped the community maintain their visibility on social media and has also organized in-person and online events with them.

From 2020 to 2022, she has written, directed, and produced a number of online events for the community, including #RCReadathon2020 and Kilig Cafe, which featured conversations about various topics related to romance writing and publishing in talk show format. She also directed a mini web series called Hello, Ever After, which explored the ways we found comfort, kilig, and hope in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, starring Filipino actors as characters from previously published #RomanceClass books.

In 2024, she became part of the translation team for Tepai Pascual’s Duty Ka Ba? (Vol. 1), published and distributed by 19th Avenida Publishing House. She also shared valuable knowledge about writing and developing romance work as a panelist for the 21st Ateneo National Writers Workshop in October 2024.

In the same year, Komiket’s romance fiction imprint Blush Books acquired Tara’s book Scandalized for its Philippine print edition, and as of this writing, she is working with BoldMP in Los Angeles for its screen adaptation.

Blaise Campo Gacoscos was born in Candon, Ilocos Sur, in 1968. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature degree from the University of the Philippines Diliman. A fellow of the UP National Writers’ Summer Workshop, he won third prize at the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for his one-act play titled Taguan sa Ulan. He finished his Master of Arts in Creative Writing also in UP Diliman.

Eric Gamalinda was born and raised in Manila, the Philippines. He worked as an investigative journalist before immigrating to the United States in 1993. He is the author of numerous works of poetry and fiction, many first published in the Philippines. His novels Planet Waves (1990) and My Sad Republic (1998) both won Philippine National Book Awards, and My Sad Republic also won a Philippine Centennial Literary Prize. Gamalinda’s most recent novel, The Descartes Highlands (2009), was shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize and published in the United States by Akashic Books in 2014. He is also the author of the short story collections Peripheral Vision (1992) and People Are Strange (2012).

Gamalinda’s books of poetry include Lyrics from a Dead Language (1991); Zero Gravity (1999), which won an Asian-American Literary Award and was an Alice James Books New York/New England Selection; and Amigo Warfare (2007/2024). He has received numerous honors and awards for his work across media, including a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts for film and media and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Independent Film and Video Awards. He has won the top Philippine literary award, the Palanca Memorial Award, several times.

Gamalinda has held residencies at Civitella Ranieri; the Association d’Art de la Napoule; Château de Lavigny Residence pour Ecrivains; Fundación Valparaíso; the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy; Hawthornden Castle; Yaddo; and MacDowell, among others. He has been publications director of the Asian-American Writers’ Workshop, a distinguished visiting writer at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and a visiting scholar in New York University’s Asian-Pacific American Studies Program. Gamalinda currently teaches in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University in New York, the USA.

Kata Garcia is a writer, translator, and the Senior Editor of Anino Comics. She has edited award-winning picture books, young adult novels, and graphic novels, including Josefina, the winner of the 41st National Book Award for Best Graphic Novel and Comics in Filipino.

Luis P. Gatmaitan is a physician, an author of more than 70 books for children, and the current Chairperson of the National Council for Children’s Television (NCCT), an attached agency of the Department of Education. He pioneered the popularization of children’s stories with health and medical themes. He has published two children’s book series on health and hygiene for Hiyas Books of OMF Literature: Mga Kuwento ni Tito Dok and OkiDok. His children’s stories have been translated to Nihongo, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin, Bangla, and Danish. Some of these titles were mounted into musical plays, animation, apps, shadow puppetry, audio-drama, and other theater productions. His children’s story Sandosenang Sapatos was adapted into a musical and staged several times by the Tanghalang Pilipino of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

He won the Palanca Awards seven times for his children’s stories and essays in Filipino, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature in 2005. He is one of the ten recipients of The Oustanding Young Men of the Philippines (TOYM) award for his contributions in the field of Literature in 2003. He also received the Gawad Dangal ng Wikang Filipino by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino. In 2017, he was awarded the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas, a lifetime achievement award in literary writing given by the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas. In 2023, he was awarded the Gawad Dangal ng Lahi by the Carlos Palanca Foundation. A “Green and Gold Outstanding Alumni” awardee of the Far Eastern University, he is the First Filipino author to be accepted as an official nominee to the 2025 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for his body of work in children’s literature.

Candy Gourlay’s novel Wild Song has just been released in German, translated by Alexandra Rak. The novel is set in a little known historical moment, when indigenous Filipinos were put on display at the 1904 World Fair in St Louis Missouri. Wild Song won the National Children’s Book Award of the Philippines and was listed for the Carnegie Medal, the Caffe Nero Book Award and the Jhalak Prize. Candy was born in the Philippines, grew up under a dictatorship and met her husband during a revolution. She had many adventures as a journalist in Asia, including visiting North Korea in 1987. Then she moved to the UK and found herself writing news about toilet paper, toothpaste and bleach. She pivoted to writing books for children and young adults and was published after nine years of rejection. Her books have been nominated for major prizes in Europe and she has won the National Children’s Book Award of the Philippines twice. Her first novel Tall Story was selected as one of the ‘100 Best Books of the Last 100 Years’ and Bone Talk was listed as a White Ravens Book and is endorsed by Amnesty International.

She lives in London with her family, where she loves dogs, making comics and gardening, in that order.

PAOLO HERRAS is the Co-Founder of Komiket, a non-profit organisation that advocates for Filipino comics, and the Festival Director of the Philippine International Comics Festival (PICOF). His graphic novel, Strange Natives (German edition: Strange Natives – Die vergessenen Erinnerungen einer vergesslichen alten Dame, Dantes Verlag 2024), was a National Book Award Finalist and is currently translated in German, French, and Italian. Paolo directed the film adaptation of his graphic novel, Buhay Habangbuhay (Life Afterlife), for the 2nd CineFilipino Film Festival.

Annette Hug studied History in Zurich and Women and Development Studies at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. After working as a lecturer and trade union officer, she has been a freelance author since January 2015. Her novels Lady Berta and In Zelenys Zimmer were published by rotpunktverlag in 2008 and 2010, Wilhelm Tell in Manila (2016) and Tiefenlager (2021) by Das Wunderhorn in Heidelberg. Annette Hug was awarded a Swiss Literature Prize in 2017, and her column Dreaming the World appears every two weeks in the weekly newspaper WOZ. Since 2017, she has published longer reportages from the Philippines, Shanghai and Seoul. As a literary translator from Filipino to German, she has translated books by Luna Sicat Cleto, Allan N. Derain, Lualhati Bautista, and Isabelo de los Reyes.

J. PHILIP IGNACIO is a musician, actor, documentary filmmaker, improvisational theatre veteran, and Co-Founder of Third World Improv, the premiere improv school in the Philippines. His first graphic novel, Alandal (German Edition: Alandal 1, Dantes Verlag 2024), won the 40th National Book Award and 7th National Children’s Book Award. His book has German, Burmese, and English editions.

Patricia May B. Jurilla, PhD is a Professor at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, where she teaches book history and literature.  The first formally trained Filipino book historian, she has authored various books and articles on Philippine printing and publishing.  

Dione Kong is an illustrator and comics creator based in Metro Manila. Graduated with a degree in animation, she loves visual storytelling and has illustrated several children’s books like Kokak!, written by Maloi Malibiran-Salumbides and published by Room to Read; Dad’s Cab, written by Joseph DeGuzman and published by Scholastic Inc..; and Kazumph!, written by Danny Obillo and published by A Tree in Bani. She is also the author and illustrator of My Ghost, Where’d You Go?, her first graphic literature, published by Anino Comics. She aims to capture beauty and emotions through her drawings and resonate with the readers through her stories.

Angelo R. Lacuesta is a novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and filmmaker. He has written more than ten books and has won numerous national awards for his writing, including the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award, the NVM Gonzalez Award, several Palanca Memorial Awards, Philippines Graphic Awards, and National Book Awards, among others. He has represented the Philippines at several international festivals and conferences concerning literature, cinema, and culture.

His most recent publication is the novel IRÔ, published by Milflores Publishing in 2025, with a forthcoming collection of new short fiction, entitled Affidavit, scheduled for the same year. IRÔ was selected as one of ten novels to be presented for possible film adaptation at the “Books at Berlinale” section of the 2025 Berlinale Film Festival.

In 2024 he wrote and produced the film An Errand, based on a short story he wrote, for the Cinemalaya Film Festival, one of Asia’s most important festivals for independent cinema. The film was also selected as part of the Bright Futures section of the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). In 2025, Song of the Fireflies, a film he also wrote and produced, had its international premiere at the Manila International Film Festival in Los Angeles, U.S.A., where it earned audience awards for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Supporting Actor.

He is co-managing director of Good Intentions Books, an independent publishing house based in Manila. He is editor-at-large at the Esquire magazine Philippines and is the current president of the Philippine Centre of PEN (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) International.

Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta is an award-winning writer from the Philippines. She has published five collections of poetry, two of which one first place at the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards, the foremost literary prize in the Philippines. Her latest poetry collection College Boy won the National Book award in 2023.

During the pandemic, Katigbak-Lacuesta wrote Assembling Alice, a biofiction on the life of Alice Feria, her maternal grandmother, and one of the first Filipina journalists in the Philippines. It was hailed as an audacious invention that was also “a sharply-observed and lyrically-rendered depiction of an era.”

Katigbak-Lacuesta has been the Filipino delegate to international literary festivals in Dubai, Rotterdam, Medellín, San Francisco, Macau, Kuala Lumpur and South Korea. In 2015, she completed a writing residency for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Robert Laurio graduated with a degree in AB Philosophy at St. Anthony Mary Claret College in Tandang Sora, Quezon City. He finished his Master in Pastoral Ministry (MPM-2003) from Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, and his Master in Business Administration (MBA-2013) from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.

He has been in the publishing industry for 21 years, and is presently the Production Manager at Claretian Communications Foundation, Inc., where he oversees and strategizes the growth plan for the following Departments: Editorial and Product Development, Foreign Orders and Rights, Logistics, and Printing Services.

As the Production Manager, Bob liaises with editors and foreign publishers and arranges or purchases foreign rights for the local market. He has worked with foreign publishers to acquire the rights to publish and distribute their books in the Philippines and other Asian territories. He facilitated selling rights and translation rights to foreign publishers, coordinated the translations of books to English and Filipino, and worked with publishing houses in the Americas and Europe.

In 2024, he attended and participated in the Frankfurter Buchmesse. As a delegate from a Catholic publishing house, his experiences taught him a lot about building meaningful relationships with authors, creatives, and fellow publishers, especially religious publishing houses abroad.

From 2014-2018, he taught management courses to college students. Bob speaks Filipino, English, and Chavacano and understands Spanish and Cebuano. He enjoys playing the guitar, singing, and bonding with his two dogs and cats at home.