Rabanzo, Roxanne Kaye D.

BSA 2B
Bienvenido N. Santos
Bienvenido N. Santos was born in Tondo, Manila, on March 22, 1911. When Santos started schoold
States and instruction was in English. In his early attempts at creative writing, Santos developed an ear for
three kinds of communication: Pampanga in the songs his mother sang at home; English in the poems and
stories his teacher read at school; and Tagalog in the street life of the Tondo slums.
Santos left for America in September 1941 as a pensionado (scholar) of the Philippine Commonwealth
government. Thirty years old and an established short story writer in English at home, he enrolled at the
University of Illinois in the master's program in English. When war broke out in December, he found himself an
exile in America, cut off from his homeland and his wife and three daughters he left behind. The heartbreak of
this separation during his first sojourn in America is crucial to Santos's development as a writer.
Exile defined the central theme of his fiction from then on. In the summer of 1942, he studied at Columbia
University with Whit Burnett, the founder of Story magazine, who published his first fiction in America. After
studying Basic English with I.A. Richards at Harvard in 1946, Santos returned home to a country rebuilding
from the ruins of war. He came back to America in 1958 as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the University of
Iowa Writer's Workshop. His first two novels, Villa Magdalena and The Volcano, written under a Rockefeller
grant and a Guggenheim fellowship, were published in Manila in 1965, the year Santos won the Philippine
Republic Cultural Heritage Award for Literature.

In 1972, Santos and his wife Beatriz were on their way to the Philippines to "stay home for good," when news
of the declaration of martial law reached them in San Francisco. The new regime banned The Praying Man, his
novel about government corruption, and he was once again exiled from his home. From 1973 to 1982, Santos
was Distinguished Writer-In-Residence at Wichita State University. In 1976 he became a U.S. citizen. His short
story, "Immigration Blues," won the best fiction award given by New Letters magazine in 1977. In 1980, the
University of Washington Press published Scent of Apples, his first and only book of short stories to appear in
the United States. The next year it won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Santos died at his home in Albay on January 7, 1996.

Santos's stories can be grouped into three literary periods. The first period, the prewar years in the Philippines
(1930-1940) are set in the fictive Sulucan slums of his Tondo childhood and the rural towns and villages in the
foothills of Mayon volcano in Albay, where Santos married Beatriz Nidea, started his family, and built his
house. These stories are in the collections Brother, My Brother and Dwell in the Wilderness. Santos's exile in
America during the war years produced stories set in Chicago, Washington, New York, and other cities, where
he lectured extensively for the Philippine Commonwealth government in exile. You, Lovely People, The Day
the Dancers Came, and Scent of Apples belong to this period. In the postwar years Santos set his stories in
different places as he commuted between the Philippines and America. These years mark a period of
maturation and experimentation, and a shifting away from the short story to the novel form.
His use of memory--or, rather, a fictionalized memory--evokes empathy for his characters. A variation
of this technique is Santos's use of other "I" narrators, like the Pinoy old-timer Ambo, he of the trembling hands
("The Door" and "The Faraway Summer"), or Tingting, the tennis player, in the San Francisco novel. But even
with the voices of Ambo and Tingting, the stories are told from within, as if Santos had been inside them and
felt their pain. Santos believed it was important for a writer to feel compassion for his characters:
A novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist, Santos's early writings were in the English language he
learned at school, Tondo (the language of his mother's songs at home), and Tagalog (the native language of
the Philippines). In 1932, he earned a B.A. from the University of the Philippines. Under the Philippine
Pensionado program (a continuation of the U.S. one begun in 1903), Santos came to the University of Illinois
for a master's degree in English. Later he studied at Harvard, Columbia, and, as a Rockefeller Foundation
fellow, at the University of Iowa. His first two novels, Villa Magdalena and The Volcano, were published in the
Philippines in 1965. Santos became an American citizen in 1976. One year later, the Marcos regime banned
his novel about government corruption, The Praying Man, and he and his wife remained in San
Francisco. Scent of Apples (1980), his only book to be published in the United States, won the American Book
Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He wrote more than a dozen books about exiles in both of his
adopted countries, including the short story collections including You Lovely People (1955) and Brother, My
Brother (1960).

Lilia Quindoza Santiago

Lilia Quindoza Santiago is an award-winning writer who teaches and does research on Philippine
languages, popular cultures and literatures. She is Assistant Professor of Ilokano at the Department of Indo
Pacific Languages and Literatures, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Lilia Quindoza Santiago became the "Poet of the Year" in 1989 with the title of her poem "In the
Name of Mother, Child, Child and Child." Her poetry collections are also well-known: the "Eyes and others"
poetry ”(1977),“ Ordinary ”(1990), and“ Physical Images ”(1995). These poems are included in two published
books of poetry, Absolute (Pregnant, Nature Press, 1989) and Asintada (U.P. Press, 1997). She is also a
storyteller and has a collection of short fiction, The Healing Physician and other stories (Nature Press, 1989)
and editor of various books and writings. Her novel “The Ideal of Aguila” won the Grand Prize in Filipino novels
at the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.

LQS is the daughter of Victorino Quindoza of Sta. Cruz, Marinduque and Buena Cadanilla of Solano,
Nueva Vizcaya, and the wife of poet Jesus Manuel Santiago, mother of four children Haya Hope, Halina
Mandala, Balagtas Himigbayan and Daniw Plaridel. Born in Manaoag, Pangasinan but raised and educated in
the City of Baguio, he incorporated in her writings the issue of women in relation to indigenous, Iloko and other
ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines. She taught Philippine literature and creative writing in the U.P., and
was Associate for Fiction in Creation: Center for Creative Writing, U.P. Diliman Quezon City.

In 2004, she was awarded the GOVAD Balagtas by the Writers' Union of the Philippines (UMPIL) and
also received an Outstanding Professional Service Award from the U.P. Alumni Association. In 2005, she
became a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk, Virginia U.S.A.

She is currently based in Hawaii, U.S.A.