The Halo-Halo Review is pleased to
interview authors in the aftermath of a book’s release. This issue’s featured
writers include Angela Peñaredondo.
(Photo by Margarita Corporan)
What is your most recent book?
All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, 2016)
When was it released?
March 2016
What has been the response?
The book was awarded the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Book Prize
with Kenji Lui (a poet and friend I admire) so that felt good. I didn’t think
it would happen but I did hope to publish this manuscript directly after my MFA
program so I felt immense gratitude when it was selected by Inlandia and
blurbed by mentors, Juan Felipe Herrera, Ronaldo Wilson and Carmen Giménez
Smith. Inlandia Institute is a cool, small press that gives special attention
to writers from the Inland Empire area of southern California but I still had
to do so much promotional work when it was released. It didn’t get any
attention from “high brow” literary establishments but I’m west coast/southern Californian-based/queer/pilipinx
poet so I practice not harboring any illusions of acceptance from larger
literary industries or popular gate-keepers who leave a small and select door slightly
ajar for queer poc postcolonial feminist poets and writers BUT I’m very grateful
for the readings, discussions, panels, publications, reviews, artists and
activist comrades, intellectual and artistic collaborations that came as a
result of the book. I learned so much from these forces and continue to be
inspired and educated by people that I met and continue to cross paths with
because of ATLToT. I don’t take that
kind of thing for granted, I can’t imagine ever.
What has surprised you about the response?
Since my teenage years I didn’t feel connected with Filipino/a
American communities. This wasn’t because there weren’t any around, I mean I’m
from California. At the time, I felt the Fil-Am creative community lacked
inclusivity, not visibly supporting the wide spectrum of Filipino/a/x
identities. At times, it felt hetero-normative, binary and male-centered so I
patched together my own community. However, ATLToT
became a talisman, connecting me to like-minded folx, which definitely includes
a robust, artistic, radical, intellectual and queer Pilipinx literary community
that gave me a deep sense of renewal. It’s a space that I want to keep
cultivating, expanding and challenging.
I’m still surprised and feel so much warmth when someone
approaches me after a reading, and expresses sincere resonance to ATLToT or that they saw themselves somewhere
in my narratives or that our stories intersect through the reading of my work.
It especially moves me when someone expresses that my poems have spoken to,
identified and/or contextualized feelings of invisibility or alienation. I’m in
deep solidarity with these folx because I’ve been there too and still struggle
with it.
Tell me something about the book that may not be obvious or
known.
I might have told this story to others before…the cover was a
collaboration with L.A. based artist, Mike Saijo. Using xacto-knives, we cut
each letter by hand from vinyl and glued them onto clear plexiglass. We walked
around his neighborhood in Boyle Heights and laid the plexiglass on various
surfaces that felt either temporary or eroded by time. I know it sounds
esoteric but it made perfect sense for us as artists to create a visual
narrative and even a kind of intuitive performance or ritual to personalize the
cover. I really appreciate collaborations like this.
What are you working on now?
A couple of poetry and nonfiction
hybrid manuscripts that involves the re-imagining and subverting of
Filipino/a/x historical narratives of war and cultural erasure through queering
poetic narratives, myth-making, and personal magikal conjurings.
*****
Born
in Iloilo City, Angela Peñaredondo is a queer Pilipinx
poet-artist-educator living and working in Riverside and Los Angeles. Angela is
author of the chapbook Maroon (Jamii Publications) and All
Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, winner of the
Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize). Her work has appeared in Jacket 2, Anomaly
(aka Drunken Boat), Weird Sister, Asian American Writers Workshop: The Margins,
Four Way Review and elsewhere. Angela is also a Kundiman and VONA/Voices
of our Nations Art fellow as well as a recipient of a University of
California Institute for Research in the Arts Grant, Gluck Program of the Arts
Fellowship, Tin House Scholarship, Squaw Valley Writers Fellowship, Naropa
University’s Zora Neal Hurston Award a Dzanc Books International Literary
Program Scholarship among others. Find Angela at www.apenaredondo.com
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