Hello all,

If you’re wondering why this latest email looks the way it does, it’s because I’ve moved the newsletter to Buttondown, where it’s more pared down than Squarespace’s, and lets you and me concentrate on the text. Which is a writer’s specialty, I’ve heard.

So, on to the news!

UPCOMING EVENTS

If you’re in New York on October 28, I’ll be attending the annual Words Without Borders Gala as one of its literary hosts.

WWB is dear to my heart—it reopened the publishing industry to me by selecting me for its 2021 Editorial Fellowship. Since then, I’ve been able to introduce so much meaningful work to the world, not just originally in Filipino and Bikol, but in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Uyghur, and Vietnamese, too. Editing essays about translation and editing translations have also kept me connected to the Philippines in a very different way from either visiting, or even writing about it in my poetry.

If you’d like to join me in support of a great literary magazine, tickets to the gala can be purchased here: wwborders.live/2026Gala (hint, hint: you might hear me share a translation).

From November 6-7, I will be back in Indiana University as a guest for the annual Heim Colloquium. I and a few translators will be engaging in deep conversations with graduate students on the topic, “Who Owns Translations?” It’s sure to be lively, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing old friends and visiting my old grad school haunts. If you’re a Bloomington friend reading this, come say hi!

RECENT AWARDS

I’m very happy to share that PEN Translates, English PEN’s flagship program, recognized my translation of Carlo Paulo Pacolor’s The Compendium of Impossible Objects with a grant to my publisher Tilted Axis Press. This should help the book reach more audiences when it publishes next year. Stay tuned for more updates!

RECENT EVENTS AND PUBLICATIONS

Speaking of Words Without Borders, I am proud to have worked with them again, this time as a guest editor. I put together a folio of Philippine revolutionary writing in translation, and was happy to contribute my own translations, as well. Read my editor’s note, my translations of Kerima Lorena Tariman’s poems “Second Song” and “Narrative and History,” and the rest of the folio here.

On September 24, 2026, I was happy to be part of a panel about labor and translation with fellow organizers for Center for the Art of Translation’s Day of Translation. The highlight of the evening was seeing Emily Wilson (most recent translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey), see her wear our union pin (National Writers’ Union, baby), listen to her keynote address, and then take a photo with her in the green room. The night before the event, the union gathered for dinner, and it was so incredibly lovely to meet up with my friends and share a meal.

On September 17, 2026, I helped East City Bookshop celebrate Yu-Mei Balasingamchow’s debut novel, Names Have Been Changed. I was so entirely swept away by this stylish, spunky, globe-trotting novel, and really hope you read it and meet Ophir, easily one of the most fascinating heroines in recent memory.

On May 20, 2026, I was invited to be part of a panel for PEN America. It was great to hear about the business of translation from different viewpoints, and it was a good opportunity to challenge publishers to pay their translators more.

RECOMMENDATIONS

I am in the middle of reading Ajay Sing Chaudhary’s The Exhausted of the Earth and I must say that if you read anything about climate change this year, let it be this book. The Baffler published what is basically the book’s first chapter, “We’re Not in This Together.”

I think you’ll find that it’s so smartly-written, so clear-eyed, so realistic and hopeful about a livable future for the most number of people in the midst of climate catastrophe. I can’t wait for all of us to build “the minor paradise of the sustainable niche.”

On the music front, Olivia Rodrigo’s latest album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is still enjoying repeat playthroughs in my household.

ET CETERA

I have been quite busy, as you can see.

In August, I was in Ireland and Scotland over my birthday week. Highlights were seeing the Book of Kells, bog bodies (I’d love to show you pictures, but they aren’t for everyone), everything about Edinburgh (cue me looking up graduate programs at the University of Edinburgh and instantly giving up when I see they don’t fund international students), and Highland! Cows!

Saw Stars, Broken Social Scene, and Metric in concert (cried when Stars sang “Your Ex-Lover is Dead”), was in Sturbridge, MA to meet friends’ new baby (Hi, Calvin!), and got way way way into the World Cup (I really wanted to become a full-fledged futbol fan, except it’s too much time, money, and beer-drinking commitment for this Tita).

At the beginning of the year, too, I spent three blissful, painful weeks in the Philippines as we laid my father’s ashes to rest among his parents. We took my mother on a trip to Bohol afterwards, went snorkeling, saw tarsiers, ate way too well.

Before that there were also other trips to Connecticut, to New York, to Atlanta, to San Diego, to Los Angeles… Watched the Final Fantasy Orchestra (!!) in Baltimore…

Clearly, I need to be updating you all more frequently.

In other news, I am actively seeking new employment in literary editing or communications, so if you have leads, please send them my way! I’m also always happy to take on freelance consulting work. Also, also, if you have a rich, mysterious uncle whose dream is to fund a literary magazine, tell him I have a proposal at the ready.

In the meantime, here’s a link to buy me coffee, if you so wish. Until next time!

Yours,
Soleil