Luis H. Francia

Luis Francia was born in the Philippines and earned his BA from Ateneo de Manila University. He immigrated to the US after college, moving to New York City. In the 1970s, he began working for the Village Voice, a newspaper he was associated with for more than 20 years. A journalist, an editor, and a teacher, Francia began to write poetry in workshops with famed Filipino writer Jose Garcia Villa at the New School. His collections include The Arctic Archipelago (1992), Museum of Absences (2004), The Beauty of Ghosts (2010), and Tattered Boat (2014). His memoir Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago (2001) won a PEN Open Book Award and an Asian American Literary Award. Francia has published numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including Memories of Overdevelopment: Reviews and Essays of Two Decades (1998), A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos (2010), and RE: Reflections, Reviews, and Recollections (2015). Francia’s play The Strange Case of Citizen de la Cruz was staged in September 2012 at Bindlestiff Studio in San Francisco.

Francia edited the collection Brown River, White Ocean: A Twentieth Century Anthology of Philippine Literature in English (1993). With Angel Velasco Shaw, he coedited Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999 (2002) and coedited the literary anthology Flippin’: Filipinos on America (1996) with Eric Gamalinda. Francia teaches at New York University, Hunter College CUNY, and the City University of Hong Kong. A regular contributor to newspapers such as the Voice, Francia writes an online column for the Manila paper Philippine Daily Inquirer. He lives in Queens, New York, with his wife, Midori Yamamura.