The first national creative writing workshop devoted to Philippine LGBTQ poetry is being jointly sponsored this July by the University of the Philippines and Goldsmiths University of London, as part of the international research and arts consortium called GlobalGRACE: Global Gender and Cultures of Equality. GlobalGRACE is funded by the Research Council UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund.

The workshop will take place on July 23-27, 2018 at the University Hotel in UP Diliman, and will be facilitated by a panel of established LGBTQ poets, led by Professor Romulo Baquiran, Jr. of UP Diliman and Prof. Nerisa del Carmen Guevara of the University of Santo Tomas. Prof. J. Neil C. Garcia, the project coordinator of the Philippine component of GlobalGrace, will also be in the panel.

The workshop is open to all Filipino LGBTQ poets, from 18 to 40 years old, writing in any Philippine language. Submissions that are not originally written in English or Filipino will need to be accompanied by a translation into either language. Each submission should consist of a suite of 6 to 8 poems. There are no thematic requirements.

The ten fellows who will be accepted to the workshop will be billeted at the workshop venue, and will receive a daily stipend. A modest travel allowance may also be available for those who will be coming from the regions. There will be germane socials incorporated into the workshop schedule, to complement and enrich the fellows’ holistic experience.

This poetry workshop will be the first in an annual series of LGBTQ creative writing workshops. Succeeding workshops will be devoted to the writing of LGBTQ fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama.

The overarching goal of the Philippine component of the GlobalGRACE Project is to help realize and enact the ideal of cultures of gender and sexual equality through the nurturing and promotion of Philippine LGBTQ literature.

Moreover, this component seeks to provide institutional and pedagogical support to help discover and enable nonheteronormative voices and hone the creative writing skills of aspiring Filipino LGBTQ writers. These poems, stories, essays, and plays will hopefully not only express and disseminate but also enact, deepen, and expand the consciousness and identity of these writers, empowering and assisting them in their overall wellbeing.

The resultant texts and works of all the GlobalGRACE projects—across six countries—will be archived, published, and curated in the Global Museum of Equalities, to be housed in both the UK and South Africa.

These workshops are an affiliate activity of the Likhaan: UP Institute of Creative Writing.

The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2018.

Please email submissions, accompanied by a cover letter (that also attests to the works’ originality), to Prof. Francis Paolo Quina at philippinelgbtqworkshop@gmail.com