“Coming Home to the Island: Poems” authored by Arlene J. Yandug and published by Xavier University Press, has won the Philippine Literary Arts Council Prize for Best Book of Poetry in English. This remarkable achievement was announced by the National Book Development Board (NBDB) and the Manila Critics Circle (MCC) as part of the prestigious 41st National Book Awards, a distinguished honor for poets and writers in the Philippines. The formal awarding ceremony is scheduled for February 2024. Congratulations!
Her book won over four other equally quality poetry books in English.
In fifty poems, Arlene Yandug weaves strands of past and present, space and time, as she shows how the self is grasped in the larger narrative of Mindanao, her home island. Speculating not just on personal history, but also on the island’s distant past, the poet
magnifies for the reader details that re-present the invisible, remote layers of the self. Her book was published in 2022.
Yandug teaches literature and writing at Xavier University. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines Diliman. A poet writing in English and Cebuano, her poems have appeared in Bisaya Magasin, in Mindanao Harvest 4, Under the Storm, Kitaab, Red River Review, Future Lovecraft, The Philippine Free Press, Philippine Graphic, Kinaadman, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal where her poem about Camiguin won a prize. Aside from writing, her interests include Mindanao-orientated literatures, translation, the creative process, and mobilities—topics of interests she explored in papers, some of which were presented in international conferences in Manila, Indonesia and Korea. In 2021, she co-edited Tinubdan, a literary anthology, where she proposes the ‘region’ as a paradigm in viewing emerging voices from Northern Mindanao. She currently serves as the editor-in-chief of the 44 year-old Kinaadman Journal. Her first poetry collection, Coming Home to the Island: Poems, has been awarded a publication grant from the National Book Development Board (NBDB). – XU Press
If you want to buy the book, click HERE.
