Luisa A. Igloria

  Sunday August 3rd at 4: 30 p.m.
 Prince Books is pleased to host a poetry reading and book signing with
Luisa A. Igloria
on for her latest poetry collection,Night Willow.

Like much of Luisa's work, Night Willow employs memory and associations as well as the ingredients of the everyday, but goes beyond the narrative and the purely lyrical to create a dream-like atmosphere that contains beauty, bewilderment, anguish, and hope. 

"In old stories, the elders speak of warriors with heart: "nakem;" of growing wiser as "growing in heart." In this fierce, sensual collection, Luisa A. Igloria tracks her own growing of heart, and in the process tears open the reader's heart as well. Her poems knife through the surfaces of ordinary life to reveal layers of poignancy, depth, and vulnerability. ...With razor-sharp language and an unflinching eye, she reveals a world of secret names given in childhood to confuse the gods, ...the ways past and present shadow each other, the urgent desire "to touch, be touched, be filled with fleeting grace."   ~ Reine Arcache Melvin, author of A Normal Life and Other Stories

Readers may be familiar with Igloria's poem-a-day project, published on Dave Bonta's blog, Via Negativa; what they may not realize is that she was the first Filipina woman of letters installed in the Palanca Literary Hall of Fame in the Philippines, and is an eleven-time winner of that country's highest literary award, the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature (in poetry, non-fiction, and short fiction) as well as having a very long list of American poetry awards to her credit.

Luisa A. Igloria is a poet, professor of English and Creative Writing, and Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. Her books include Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser, Night Willow: Prose Poems, The Saints of Streets, Juan Luna's Revolver, Trill & Mordent , and 8 other books. 

Luisa has degrees from the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was a Fulbright Fellow from 1992-1995. She has lived and worked in Hampton Roads for the last fifteen years; she enjoys cooking with her family, book-binding, and listening to tango music.

 If you have any questions regarding this event, please contact our staff at 757-622-9223 or email us at staff@prince-books.com