CMB

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/