Last year, I helped organize Transcribing Herstory: Contemporary Filipinx Voices, featuring an all Pinay panel of Elaine Castillo, Melissa Sipin, Trinidad Escobar, Janice Sapigao and Renee Macalino Rutledge. It was a very successful and well-received reading, with people clamoring for more.

So here’s more!

Along with Pilipinx American Library, I’m hosting another event at SF Public Library’s Public Knowledge space at SFMOMA: Bound by Hxstory: Insurrecto and other stories on Saturday, March 23 from 3 – 5 p.m.

A few more details about Insurrecto and the event:

Join us for a reading in celebration of Gina Apostol’s critically-acclaimed new novel Insurrecto – one of Publisher Weekly’s best books of 2018, “witty and stylish” according to NPR, and a “bravura performance” proclaimed the NY Times and Asian Review of books – following the journey of two women, an American filmmaker and Filipino translator, and their dueling accounts of a dark and forgotten massacre in Samar during the Philippine-American War. This special afternoon highlights stories located in the heart of the Philippines and the United States, illustrating the often untold and intertwined histories of both nations. Gina Apostol will be joined by Bay Area-based Elaine Castillo who will read from her novel America is Not the Heart. Apostol and Castillo will be in conversation following the readings.

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Before Gina Apostol’s fourth novel, Insurrecto, hit the shelves, Publishers’ Weekly named it one of the Ten Best Books of 2018. Insurrecto was also named Buzzfeed’s Best Books of 2018 and Autostraddle’s 50 Best Feminist Books of 2018, among many other Best Lists. Her third book, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

Elaine Castillo was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Comparative Literature. She is a Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation Fellow, and her writing can be found in Freeman’s, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Taste Magazine, Bon Appetit, Electric Literature and elsewhere. Her short film, A Mukbang, was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space. America Is Not the Heart is her first novel and has been nominated for the Elle Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, the Aspen Words Prize, and the Northern California Independent Booksellers Book Award.

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I promise it will be a good time! And the Public Knowledge space at SFMOMA is very cool.