Life and Practice

J. Neil C. Garcia teaches creative writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where he serves as Director of the university press and a Fellow for Poetry in the Institute of Creative Writing. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and works in literary and cultural criticism. Between 1994 and 2014, he coedited the famous Ladlad series of Philippine gay writing. Other important anthologies that he edited are Aura: The Gay Theme in Philippine Fiction in English, published in 2012, Bright Sign, Bright Age: Critical Essays in Philippines Studies, 2017, Busilak: New LGBTQ Poetry from the Philippines, and Lamyos: New LGBTQ Fiction from the Philippines. He is the lead academic investigator for the Philippines of Project GlobalGRACE: Global Gender and Cultures of Equality, a world-wide research and arts consortium sponsored by the Research Councils of the United Kingdom and Goldsmiths, University of London, which concludes its operations this year. He is currently at work on “Likha,” his seventh poetry book, and “Burden of the Oral: Essays.”