Posted by Eileen Tabios -- ertabios(at)aol(dot)com at the Flips mailing list:

Meritage Press is delighted to congratulate the following winners for the 2005 "Babaylan Speaks" Poetry Contest, judged by Jean Vengua:

FIRST PLACE:
"Spaces" by Arkaye Velasquez Kierulf

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
"A House" by Mikael de Lara Co
"Save as Draft" by Joel M. Toledo
"APO BAKIT" by Amalia B. Bueno

SPECIAL MENTIONS:
"way /way/" by Marlon Unas Esguerra
"charmed" by Yvonne Hortillo

There were so many great entries that we created 3 categories of winners. To see the winning poems and the Judge's Commentary, please go to
Click here: Babaylan Speaks
or
http://www.meritagepress.com/babaylan/

Thanks to all who participated and congratulations to the winners. For convenience, I also cut-n-pasted the Bios of the winners below.

ENJOY!

Eileen Tabios
Meritage Press
www.meritagepress.com

**********

BIOS OF "BABAYLAN SPEAKS" winning authors in alphabetical order:

Amalia B. Bueno is a researcher and publicist living in Honolulu. Born in Quezon City, PI she emigrated to Hawaii at the age of seven. She has a BA in English Literature from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and entertains herself with writing poems and short stories. She was published for the first time last year, when three of her poems, "Filipina," "Shame," and "On Hearing My Mother Call Out To Our Neighbor Over the Courtyard Fence" were included in Bamboo Ridge Press, Spring 2005 Issue #87. "Apo Bakit" is a tribute to her grandmother.

Poet, Writer, Teacher, and DJ, Marlon Unas Esguerra is second generation Filipino American Muslim, born and raised in Chicago. He is a first year M.F.A. candidate in Poetry at the University of Miami. In 1998, he co-founded the panAsian spoken word ensemble, I Was Born with Two Tongues, which has since performed in over 300 colleges and venues across the country. Marlon is a three-time Chicago poetry slam champion and recently performed on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO. He is currently completing his first manuscript of poetry and is co-editing a new anthology with Nick Carbó, Son of the Dragon: Literary Dialogues with Asian American Men. Marlon's most recent awards include a fellowship to the University of Miami, the Wallace Douglas Award for Excellence in Teaching, a Columbia Award for Scholarship, and two Eileen Lannan Poetry Prizes from the Academy of American Poets.

Yvonne Hortillo says about herself: si yvonne? inuumaga kung matulog. walang tulog yan. di natutulog. hinihintay yung kindat ng araw sa umaga bago magpakalunod sa kumo't kama. maraming plano, ambisyosang nakakatawa. di mapigil kung tumawa, tunog asukal at malaya, tunog kapit-patalim na simot na simot. pareho pa rin, natatandaan ko nung high school - mahilig sa nobelang may bidang dragon: lahing aswang.

Arkaye Velasquez Kierulf is a senior chemistry student at the Ateneo de Manila University. He was a fellow of the Ateneo and UP National Writers Workshops, and a recipient of the Loyola Schools Award for the Arts.

Mikael de Lara Co graduated with a BS in Environmental Science from the Ateneo de Manila; he is supposed to be working on his MA in Panitikang Pilipino - Malikhaing Pagsulat from the same university. A fellow of the Ateneo, UST, Iyas and Dumaguete National Writers Workshops, Mikael has been writing primarily in Filipino since his college days and has yet to publish a poem in English. He plays lead guitar for the new wave/punk/blues band Los Chupacabras, and is lead vocalist for Gapos, a progressive rock/jazz/blues band with a social realist bent.

Joel M. Toledo is currently finishing his M.A. degree in Creative Writing (majoring in poetry) at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He is an instructor at the Department of English of Miriam College. In 2005, he won first prize for his poetry collection, "What Little I Know of Luminosity" in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. He was also awarded second place for his poetry entry in the 2004 Palanca Awards. Joel is the recipient of the 2006 National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Writers Prize for poetry, a grant for the writing and possible publication of his first book of poetry.