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Showing posts from November, 2019

Dr. Resil B. Mojares: National Artist for Literature 2018

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Somewhat ashamed to admit this in writing, but the first time I met Dr. Resil Mojares, I didn’t know who he was, let alone his stature in the local community of letters—a community which, as a naive nineteen-year-old attending his first writers workshop, I was unwittingly about to be inducted into. This was back in 2010, at the 26th Cornelio Faigao Memorial Writers Workshop, where I was first introduced to other luminaries of Visayan literature, as well as other young literary practitioners better read and with already more poems and stories to their name. Though a linguistics and literature major, I was still just a couple of years past a high school education that had weaned me on Homer, Shakespeare, Harper Lee, and other esteemed works of the Western canon, so I was a long way off from even beginning the process of what many a literary website refer to as “decolonizing one’s reading list.” Flashback to a couple of months from this writing, when I received that first emai...