Can you guess who wrote these books?
Well, I know it's obvious 'cause the author's name is written at the bottom part.
It's CECILIA MANGUERRA BRAINARD!
Born one year after the Philippines gained its independence, Cecilia
Manguerra Brainard was surrounded from the start with a sense of her
country’s having been born at almost the same time as herself. After
centuries of Spanish colonialism, more than four decades of American
control, and four years of Japanese occupation, finally, in 1946,
Filipinos were free to determine their own future. The Americans had
helped prepare for this moment through elective models and had fought
side by side with Filipinos during the war, and the Americans were vital
to the difficult postwar reconstruction, but Brainard grew up well
aware of her fellow Filipinos’ own proud contributions toward
establishment of an independent Philippines. The street on which she
lived in Cebu was called Guerrillero Street in honor of her father, a
guerrilla and then a civil engineer involved in rebuilding shattered
Philippine cities. Many of the anecdotes in her first novel, Song of Yvonne, came from tales of war remembered by her family.
As a result, even when Brainard left home for graduate studies at the
University of California at Los Angeles in the late 1960’s, she brought
with her an identity as a Filipina. She married a former member of the
Peace Corps, Lauren Brainard, who had served on Leyte, an island close
to Cebu. In California, she worked on documentary film scripts and
public relations from 1969 to 1981. Then she began the newspaper columns
later collected in Philippine Woman in America, which describe
the enrichment and frustration felt by Philippine Americans who are
straddling two cultures. Conscious of her own Americanization and
anxious to provide her three sons with cultural choices, she formed
Philippine American Women Writers and Artists, an organization intent on
publishing remembered legends and scenes from the contributors’
childhoods. Brainard’s organization was intended to provide a continuum
of presence from varied pasts to a shared future. Such dedication to the
“memory of a people” is in the ancient Philippine tradition of the
female babaylan, or priestess.
Cecilia
Manguerra Brainard is the award-winning author of nine books, including
the internationally-acclaimed
novel, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, Magdalena, Vigan and Other Stories,
Acapulco at Sunset and Other Stories, Philippine Woman in America, Woman
With Horns and Other Stories, Cecilia's Diary 1962-1968, Fundamentals
of Creative Writing, and Out of Cebu: Essays and Personal Prose.
She edited four books: Growing
Up Filipino I and II, Fiction by Filipinos in America,
Contemporary
Fiction
by Filipinos in America, and Magnificat: Mama Mary's Pilgrim Sites.
Cecilia co-edited six books, including
Journey of 100 Years: Reflections on the Centennial of Philippine Independence;
Behind the Walls: Life of Convent GirlsAla Carte: Food and Fiction,
and Finding God: True Stories of Spiritual Encounters. She
has also written a novel with four other women entitled, Angelica's
Daughters, a Dugtungan Novel.
Her
work has been translated into Finnish and Turkish; and many of her
stories
and articles have been widely anthologized. Brainard's second novel,
Magdalena inspired a
stage play, Gabriela's Monologue, which was produced in 2011 by
the Bindlestiff Studio in San Francisco as part of Stories XII! annual
production.
Cecilia has received a California Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction,
a Brody Arts Fund Award, a Special Recognition Award for her work dealing
with Asian American youths, as well as a Certificate of Recognition from
the California State Senate, 21st District. She has also been awarded
by the Filipino and Filipino American communities she has served. She
received the prestigious Filipinas Magazine Arts Award, and the Outstanding
Individual Award from her birth city, Cebu, Philippines. She has received
several travel grants in the Philippines, from the USIS (United States
Information Service).
She
has lectured and performed in worldwide literary arts
organizations
and universities, including UCLA, USC, University
of Connecticut, University of the Philippines, PEN, Beyond
Baroque, Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and many others. She
teaches creative writing at the Writers Program at
UCLA-Extension.
She is married to Lauren R. Brainard,
a former Peace Corp Volunteer to Leyte, Philippines; they have three sons.
Here are some of her pictures:
REFERENCES:
http://www.ceciliabrainard.com/
