Fil-Am former poet laureate of Delaware receives Fulbright award

Dr. JoAnn Balingit’s project, WHAT WERE the NAMES of the TREES? A Memoir, is a hybrid-genre lyrical work about growing up biracial in the American South and coming of age in the aftermath of the violent loss of her parents.

Delaware’s Filipino American poet laureate from 2008 to 2015, Dr. JoAnn Balingit, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award in Literature: Creative Writing to the Philippines for the 2023-2024 academic year.

The U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board gave the award to Balingit, a poet and essayist who has been honored as a 2022 Individual Artist Fellow in Creative Nonfiction by the Delaware Division of the Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.

She received a 2021 Pushcart Prize nomination and was featured in Poetry Magazine’s August 2021 Poetry Podcast. Her poems and essays are published widely.

As an advocate for arts-in-education and community arts access, Balingit has directed statewide programs such as the Delaware Writing Region of Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for middle school and high school students. She has led poetry workshops and writing retreats for adults and taught poetry writing at the University of Delaware.

Balingit also teaches creative writing classes at New Castle County Libraries for the Creative Aging program, with an emphasis on storytelling through memory work. She has been a coordinator and teaching artist for Delaware’s Poetry Out Loud program for the past 15 years.

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“Dr. Balingit is deserving of this prestigious award,” said Governor John Carney. “Throughout her career — and especially during her time as Delaware’s poet laureate — she has shown a passion for sharing creative storytelling with our community. I want to congratulate Dr. Balingit on this achievement and look forward to seeing her future work.”.

Balingit’s project, entitled WHAT WERE the NAMES of the TREES? A Memoir, is a hybrid-genre lyrical work about growing up biracial in the American South, and coming of age in the aftermath of the violent loss of her parents. Separated from her eight younger siblings, the lonely teen enters adulthood desperate to belong.

During her stay in Pampanga Province, she will seek an understanding of her Filipino family history and the forces that shaped her father’s education and environment as a U.S. colonial subject before he migrated to the United States.

With archival research, interviews, and a fuller view of race and empire, especially as it relates to erased Filipino American history, and diaspora, the mestiza writer traces her parents’ lives and her own path of survival to becoming a writer. During this Fulbright grant she will continue to study in depth her father’s native language and culture, Kapampángan.

Dr. JoAnn Balingit is among over 800 U.S. citizens who will teach or conduct research abroad for the 2023-2024 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program.