Bino Realuyo
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Bino A. Realuyo is a Filipino-American novelist, poet, community organizer and adult educator. He was born in Manila, Philippines and was briefly raised there. He lived mostly in New York City. His acclaimed novel, The Umbrella Country published in 1999 by Ballantine Reader's Circle, Random House, was included in Booklist's Top Ten First Novels of 1999. Upon release, the novel reached the #2 spot in the Philippines. It also garnered a 1999 Pushcart Prize nomination. The Umbrella Country was also a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Award 1999 and a recipient of an Asian American "Members' Choice" Literary Award 2000.
[edit] Background
As a community organizer and adult educator, Realuyo has worked for human rights organizations and labor unions in New York City since graduating from college. He co-founded the Asian American Writers' Workshop[1] in 1991, upon return to New York from college. For the past 12 years, he has committed his work life to adult education, working for labor unions in revolving capacity: organizing, program management and now, as a classroom teacher in disenfranchised communities. He is dedicated to social change, inspired by his father, the late Augusto Roa Realuyo, an architect and engineer and survivor of the Bataan Death March and Japanese Concentration Camps in the Philippines during World War II.
[edit] Affiliations and awards
Realuyo has completed a poetry collection titled, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door. Poems from this collection have appeared in literary journals and anthologies such as The Nation, Manoa, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, and The Kenyon Review. He has received a Van Lier Fellowship and a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from Poetry Society of America.
He has recently finished a collection of interconnected stories about the Filipino American experience in New York City, titled, THE F.L.I.P SHOW. He is currently working on a second novel, THE ASHEN PARTS, which received a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in 2000 and a Valparaiso Fellowship in 2004 (Spain), and a collection of creative non-fiction, THE MANILA FOLDER. He is about to embark on a new project, tentatively titled, ISLA.
He is a regular contributor to The Literary Review, and guest edited its special issue on contemporary Filipino and Filipino-American literature in Spring 2000. He is also the editor of THE NUYORASIAN ANTHOLOGY: Asian American writings in New York City, published by the Asian American Writers' Workshop and Temple University Press in 1999, and awarded a PEN Open Book Award 2000.
Realuyo regularly travels the country for university readings and lectures. A resident of Manhattan, Realuyo has a a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from the School of International Service of the American University in Washington, D.C., and Universidad Argentina de la Empresa in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University's new International MFA in Creative Writing.
Realuyo's The Gods We Worship Live Next Door won the 2005 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. It was released by the University of Utah Press in March 2006.
