Angela Manalang Gloria
Angela Manalang Gloria is lyric poet, pianist, and editor, had her roots in Guagua, Pampanga, but
her ancestors went to Albay and prospered. When she was about eight years old, she became fascinated
with books, read avidly, and in consequence her eyesight was seriously impaired. She loved music,
especially playing piano, nature and things that are dainty and beautiful. She was born on August 2, 1907
in Guagua, Pampanga, to Felipe Manalang and Tomasa Legaspi. She was the eldest in what was to be a
brood of eleven.
She started her early schooling with the Benedictine Sisters in Albay, and in Manila continued
under the tutelage of the same religious order. She then transferred to another girls' school, Sta.
Scholastica, and graduated salutatorian in 1925. In school she continued pursuing her interest in music in
hopes of becoming a great pianist. After graduation from high school she proceeded to UP and started
taking pre-law subjects, at the same time going into painting. C. V. Vicker, a member of the UP faculty,
noticed her creative work and advised her to change her program of study. She shifted her course to the
liberal arts and graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. in philosophy in 1929.
In UP she worked with the Philippine Collegian as a literary editor, with Celedonio P. Gloria as
editor-in-chief. Their friendship culminated in marriage. Subsequently, her husband, who finished the
LL.B. in UP, went into law practice. She became editor of the Herald Mid-Week Magazine but had to
resign six months later because of poor health. WWII came and her husband died. Her creative writing
gradually diminished.
Manalang Gloria’s poetry, however, has undergone revaluation in recent years. The publication
of a complete collection of her poems and a literary biography has made her work available to a wider
audience. Some of her works are Old Maid Walking on a City Street, Ermita in the Rain, Any Woman
Speaks, To A Lost One, To A Lovely Woman, Words, To Don Juan, I Have Begrudged the Years,
Cementerio del Norte, Querida, To the Man I Married, Revolt From Hymen and Soledad,
Carlos Bulosan
Carlos Bulosan was born in the Philippines in the rural farming village of Mangusmana, near the
town of Binalonan (Pangasinan province, Luzon island). He was the son of a farmer and spent most of his
upbringing in the countryside with his family. Like many families in the Philippines, Carlos’s family
struggled to survive during times of economic hardship. Many families were impoverished and many
more would suffer because of the conditions in the Philippines created by US colonization. Rural farming
families like Carlos’ family experienced severe economic disparity due to the growing concentration of
wealth and power in the hands of the economic and political elite. Determined to help support his family
and further his education, Carlos decided to come to America with the dream to fulfill these goals.
Bulosan (c. 1911– September 11, 1956) was a Filipino American author, poet, and activist. A
chronicler of the Filipino American experience during the 1930s - early 1950s, he is best remembered for
his semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical novel America Is In the Heart (1946) — a staple in American
Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies classes.
He emigrated from the Philippines in 1931. In the U.S., he worked in an Alaskan fish cannery and
as a fruit and vegetable picker in Washington and California, and eventually became an activist in the
labor movement. The horrendous conditions of Filipino laborers were fictionalized in his most famous
work, America Is in the Heart (1946). Excerpts of his 1944 book, Laughter of My Father, were published
in The New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar. Bulosan was commissioned by President Franklin Roosevelt in
1945 to write “Four Freedoms,” an essay for the Federal Building in San Francisco. Because of his radical
activism, Bulosan was blacklisted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the anti-Communist movement of the
1950s. His other books include the poetry collections Letter from America (1942), Chorus from America
(1942), and The Voice of Bataan (1943), as well as the novels The Cry and the Dedication (written in the
1950s and published posthumously in 1995) and The Sound of Falling Light (1960).
