Binography

(This page is still under construction.  Please consult author before using bio, binoarealuyo@gmail.com )

Short Short Version

Bino A. Realuyo is the author of The Umbrella Country, a novel, and The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, a poetry collection. His works have appeared in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, New Letters, and several anthologies.  For the past fifteen years, he has worked as an Adult Educator and Community Organizer in underserved communities in New York City.  He can be found on the web at http://binoarealuyo.com.  He recently founded a social enterprise for low-skilled, low-wage immigrant workers, { We Speak America }, http://wespeakamerica.org.

Super Long Version

Bino A. Realuyo was born and raised in Manila, the son of a survivor of the Bataan Death March and a World War II Japanese concentration camp in the Philippines. He is a poet and a novelist, an adult educator and a community activist. He is the author of the award winning books, The Umbrella Country, a novel and The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, a poetry collection. He was also the editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City and The Literary Review’s Spring 2000 special issue on the Philippines: Am Here: Contemporary Filipino Writings in English.

His first novel, The Umbrella Country, was published by Ballantine’s Readers Circle, Random House in 1999. One of the nominees for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award in 2000, it was also Booklist’s Top Ten First Novels of 1999 and a recipient of an Asian American “Member’s Choice” Literary Award. It received acclaim in the U.S. as well as the Philippines.

The New York Times Book Review mentioned that Realuyo’s “lucid prose is unencumbered by sentimentality and hindsight” and that the novel lends “freshness to a setting both impoverished and alluring.” The San Francisco Chronicle cited, “The Umbrella Country is a significant contribution to Filipino American literature.” In the Philippines, the editor Jullie Yap Daza of The Manila Standard called the novel, “a dangerous book because it reveals the Filipino soul, tortured, tormented by poverty.”

His first collection of poetry, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, was a recipient of the 2005 Agha Shahid Ali Prize for poetry and was published by University of Utah Press. Poems in this collection have previously appeared in prestigious magazines in the U.S. such as The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Literary Review, New Letters and The Nation. He was a recipient of the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from Poetry Society of America. His first poems published in the Philippines were praised by the late National Artist for Literature N.V.M Gonzalez as “the most moving ones I have come across in years.” Gonzalez wrote in a letter to the publication, “I am honored for being one of his first readers, although for now, he is a continent, and an ocean away.” Grace Schulman, distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York and poetry editor of The Nation, wrote: “Bino A. Realuyo has that rare gift of transforming modern horror into art. . . . The book is passionate without a trace of sentimentality, a compelling account of destruction under a silent god.”

Realuyo has finished a novel titled, The F.L.I.P Show, about Filipinos on the east coast. He is at work on another novel and a collection of poetry. He has received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship for fiction, a Van Lier Foundation fellowship for poetry, Urban Artist Grant for fiction, PEN Open Book award for non-fiction, Valparaiso Foundation fellowship for fiction, a Yaddo Fellowship for poetry, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from Poetry Society of America, an Asian American “Member’s Choice” Book Award, and the 2009 Philippine National Book Award for Poetry.

Realuyo has a degree in International Relations from the School of International Service at The American University in Washington, DC and Universidad Argentina de La Empresa in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  He has a Masters of Education degree, with a focus on Technology, Innovation, and Education from Harvard University, where he was also honored with a Catherine D. Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship from The Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. 

He was a co-founder of the Asian American Writers Workshop. He works in the field of adult literacy, especializing in the integration of computer technology, Workforce Education, and Adult Literacy in disenfranchised immigrant communities. He is on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s international MFA program in Creative Writing.

He is a world traveller and enjoy living in other countries for extended periods. He is proficient in Filipino and Spanish and is currently studying Brazilian Portuguese.

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