It takes a village to launch one book. Our very first — BLUE by Wesley St Jo and Reme Grefalda — was released in March and officially launched at The Library of Congress in September. MANHATTAN: An Archaeology by Eileen R. Tabios debuted at the 4th Annual Filipino American International Book Festival in October. Two of our chapbooks were released as fundraising projects in July and September: MARAWI, in support of the Marawi armed conflict evacuees in the Southern Philippines, and AFTER HARVEY AFTER IRMA, for hurricane-displaced animals in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.
We culminated this year’s activities by participating in the 2017 Litquake Festival in San Francisco to raise money for the Napa Valley Community Disaster Relief Fund. Additionally, our press was featured for the first time in The Manila Standard by Dr. Jenny Ortuoste, and copies of our books can be found at Arkipelago Books, Stanford Library, SF Public Library, Poets House, Endicott College, Woodland Pattern Book Center, Asian American Studies Center, University at Buffalo, and the AAPI Collection at the Library of Congress.
We are grateful to the Filipino American community and the wider network of writers, artists, reviewers, booksellers and readers, from the Bay Area to DC, Philly, Luxembourg, New Zealand and the Philippines for believing in our work and for seeing with us a world of possibilities and the possibility of a better world.
