Carlos Bulosan Book Club to host Fil-Am author talk in LA

(From left) Filipino American writers EP Tuazon, Ricco Siasoco and Laurel Flores Fantauzzo will be speaking at an author talk organized by the Carlos Bulosan Book Club. CONTRIBUTED

LOS ANGELES — Filipino American writers Laurel Flores Fantauzzo, Ricco Siasoco and EP Tuazon will be speaking at an author talk organized by the Carlos Bulosan Book Club on July 20 at the LA Library in Historic Filipinotown.

Fantauzzo is the author of “My Heart Underwater,” published by Quill Tree Books. In the book, Corazon Tagubio feels like an outcast at her Catholic school. Her father gets into an accident and become comatose. When a crush on her teacher Ms. Holden turns into something more and the secret gets out, Cory is sent to her relatives in Manila.

She has to see how the country that has shaped her past might also redefine her future. (The audio book of “My Heart Underwater“ is narrated by Fil-Am Amielynn Abellera.)

Fantauzzo has also written “The First Impulse,” published by Anvil. Her essays have appeared in CNN Philippines, the New York Times, The Baffler and elsewhere. For her essay, “Under My Invisible Umbrella,” she received the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award, the Philippines’ most prestigious literary award.

She’s been a finalist for the Philippine National Book Award and for the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize. Fantauzzo has taught writing and literature at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Ateneo de Manila University.

Siasoco  is the author of “The Foley Artist: Stories,” which includes nine stories that voice to the intersectional identities of women and men in the Filipino diaspora in America, including a straight woman attending her ex-boyfriend’s same-sex marriage in coastal Maine, a college-bound teenager encountering his deaf uncle in Manila and a 79-year-old foley artist recreating the sounds of life but ultimately unable to save himself.

Siasoco is a writer, educator and activist whose work has been published in AGNI, Joyland, Drunken Boat and The North American Review.

He has taught at Columbia University, Boston College and the Massachusetts College of Art. He is a board member of Kundiman, a national literary organization dedicated to Asian American literature.

Tuazon is the author of “A Professional Lola and Other Stories,” which won the 2022 AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. The book is a collection of short stories that “blend literary fiction with the surreal to present the contemporary Filipino American experience and its universal themes of love, family and identity.”

Tuazon’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, Lunch Ticket, Peatsmoke and Five South. They have been a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction and Five South Short Fiction Prize.

In their spare time, Tuazon likes to go to Filipino seafood markets to gossip with the crabs.

The author talk will be moderated by Carlos Bulosan Book Club Chair Jaime Geaga. The book club was established in 2017 and is a project of the Friends of Echo Park Branch Library.

This particular branch of the Los Angeles Public Library is located in the heart of Historic Filipinotown and houses a dedicated Philippine Heritage Collection that consists of several hundred volumes on Fil-Am life and culture.

The club’s mission is to provide a forum to explore and learn about Fil-Am and other immigrant experiences through literature and art using various media, including print, audio and video formats.

The club was inspired by Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, a story of perseverance and sacrifice in the face of undaunting hardship to build a better life. The group’s aim is to preserve “our collective memory by collecting the individual stories of our contributions in the building of America.”

Visit carlosbulosanbookclub.org. Walter Ang is the author of Barangay to Broadway: Filipino American Theater. Available at Amazon, Bookshop and other online booksellers.