Paz Marquez-Benitez

Paz Marquez Benitez was born in 1894 in Lucena, Tayabas (now Quezon). Marquez – Benítez authored the first Filipino modern English language short story, Dead Stars, published in the Philippine Herald in 1925. Born into the prominent Marquez family of Quezon province, she was among the first generation of Filipino people trained in the American education system which used English as the medium of instruction. She graduated high school in Tayabas High School now, Quezon National High School. She was a member of the first freshman class of the University of the Philippines, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1912.

https://alchetron.com/Paz-M%C3%A1rquez-Ben%C3%ADtez

After "Dead Stars" she only had one more published short story, entitled "A Night in the Hills". Two years after graduation, she married fellow teacher Francisco Benitez. In 1919 she founded Woman's Home Journal, the first women's magazine in the country and later became the editor of Filipino Love Stories, the first anthology of Philippine short stories in english - compiled in 1928 from the works of her students.

When her husband died in 1951, she took over as editor of the Philippine Journal of Education at U.P., holding the editorial post for over two decades.

Manuel Arguilla

Manuel Estabilla Arguilla (Nagrebcan, Bauang, June 17, 1911 – beheaded, Manila Chinese Cemetery, August 30, 1944) was an Ilokano writer in English, patriot, and martyr.
He is known for his widely anthologized short story "How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife," the main story in the collection How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife and Other Short Stories, which won first prize in the Commonwealth Literary Contest in 1940.
His stories "Midsummer" and "Heat" were published in Tondo, Manila by the Prairie Schooner.
Most of Arguilla's stories depict scenes in Barrio Nagrebcan, Bauang, La Union, where he was born. His bond with his birthplace, forged by his dealings with the peasant folk of Ilocos, remained strong even after he moved to Manila, where he studied at the University of the Philippines, finished his BS in Education in 1933, and became a member and later the president of the U.P. Writer's Club and editor of the university's Literary Apprentice.

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Most of Arguilla's stories depict scenes in Barrio Nagrebcan, Bauang, La Union where he was born in 1911. His bond with his birthplace, forged by his dealings with the peasant folk of Ilocos, remained strong even after he moved to Manila where he studied at the University of the Philippines, finishing an Education degree in 1933. He became a member and later the president of the U.P. Writer's Club and editor of the university's Literary Apprentice.

In the 1936 short story contest sponsored by the Philippine Free Press magazie, Arguilla won first place with his story entitled "Epilogue to reconciliation". He later become a creative writing teacher at the University of Manila and worked at the Bureau of Public Welfare as managing editor of the bureau's publication, Welfare Advocate, until the outbreak of World War II in 1943.

An agent of the famous Marking's Guerillas, Arguilla secretely organized a guerilla intelligence unit against the Japanese invaders during the war. While he held an important position on the Board of Censors and in the Japanese propaganda network, he gave vital information and military secrets to the Filipino Guerillas. In 1944, he was captured, tortured, and executed by the Japanese army at Fort Santiago.

Jose Garcia Villa

Jose Garcia Villa (August 5, 1908 – February 7, 1997) was a Filipino poet, literary critic, short story writer, and painter. He was awarded the National Artist of the Philippines title for literature in 1973, as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing by Conrad Aiken. He is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rhyme scheme" in writing poetry, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks—especially commas, which made him known as the Comma Poet. He used the penname Doveglion (derived from "Dove, Eagle, Lion"), based on the characters he derived from himself. These animals were also explored by another poet E. E. Cummings in Doveglion, Adventures in Value, a poem dedicated to Villa.

https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/jose-garcia-villa/

Considered the leader of Filipino "artsakists" - a group of writers who believe that art should be "for art's sake" - he once said that "art is never a means; it is an end in itself". Villa's poetic style was considered too aggressive at that time so that when he published Man Songs, a series of erotic poems in 1929, he was fined P70 for obscenity by the Manila Court of First Instance. In that same year, however, Villa won the Best Story of the Year from the Philippine Free Press magazine for his "Mir-I-Nisa" and edited/published Philippine Short Stories: Best 25 Short Stories of 1928 - an anthology of Filipino short stories written in English. It is the second anthalogy to have been published in the country after Paz Marquez Benitez's Filipino Love Stories.

Villa used the penname "Doveglion" (derived from dove, eagle, lion), based on the characters he derived from himself. These animals were also explored by the American poet e.e. cummings in his "Doveglion, Adventures in Value" a poem dedicated to Villa. Villa is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rhyme scheme" in writing poetry as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks- especially commas placed after every word- which mae him known as the "Comma Poet". He was awarded the Philippine National Artist for Literature in 1973, as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing in the Unted States.

Carlos Bulosan

Carlos Sampayan Bulosan (November 24, 1913 – September 11, 1956) was an English-language Filipino novelist and poet who spent most of his life in the United States. His best-known work today is the semi-autobiographical America Is in the Heart, but he first gained fame for his 1943 essay on The Freedom from Want.

Photo credit-https://www.ilwu.org/the-legend-of-carlos-bulosan/

Born to Ilocano parents in Pangasinan in 1911, Carlos Bulosan was a Filipino-American novelist and poet best-known for the semi-autobiographical novel America Is In the Heart. Most of his youth has spent in the countryside as a farmer. Like many Filipinos during that time, he migrated to United States in the 1930's at the age of 17, in the hopes of finding greener pasteurs. Bulosan never saw his homeland again.

After many years of racial discrimination, starvation, and sickness, Bulosan had to undergo surgery for tuberculosis in Los Angeles. the operation made him lose most of the right side of his ribs and the function of one lung. He was confined in the hospital for two years where he took advantage and read one book per day, making him a prolific writer and poet of Filipino struggles abroad.

Notable Commonwealth Writers and Their Notable Works

• Filipino Poetry (1924) by Rodolfo Dato;

• English-German Anthology of Filipino Poets (1934) by Pablo Laslo;

• Jose Garcia Villa's Many Voices (1939) and Poems of Doveglion (1941);

• Poems (1940) by Angela Manalang-Gloria;

• Chorus for America: Six Philippine Poets (1942) by Carlos Bulosan;

• Zoilo Galang's A Child of Sorrow (1921), the first Filipino novel in English, and Box of Ashes and Other Stories (1925), the first collection of stories in book form;

• Villa’s Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (1933);

• "The Wound and the Scar" (1937) by Arturo Rotor, a collection of stories;

• "Winds of April" (1940) by N. V. M. Gonzalez

• "His Native Soil" (1941) by Juan C. Laya;

• Manuel Arguilla's "How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife and Other Stories" (1941);

• Galang's "Life and Success" (1921), the first volume of essays in English; and

• the influential "Literature and Society" (1940) by Salvador P. López.