Bino Realuyo, Date of Birth
TweetBino Realuyo
Filipino-American novelist, poet, community organizer and adult educator
Date of Birth: 
About Bino Realuyo
- Bino A.
- Realuyo is a Filipino-American novelist, poet, community organizer and adult educator.
- He was born and raised in Manila, Philippines but spent most of his adult life in New York City.
- He is the author of a novel, The Umbrella Country, a poetry collection, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, and the editor of two anthologies.
- His acclaimed novel, The Umbrella Country published in 1999 by Ballantine Reader's Circle, Random House was included in Booklist's Top Ten First Novels of 1999.
- Upon release, the novel reached the #2 spot in the Philippines.
- The Umbrella Country was also a nominee for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers Award 1999 and a recipient of the first Asian American "Members' Choice" Literary Award in the year 2000.
- According to The New York Times Book Review, "Realuyo’s lucid prose, unencumbered by sentimentality or hindsight, lends freshness to the conflicts of his somewhat familiar characters and color to a setting both impoverished and alluring." The San Francisco Chronicle called Umbrella Country, "a significant contribution to Filipino American literature." Realuyo's first novel was also highly acclaimed in his home country, the Philippines, and continued to be taught in colleges and universities since its publication in 1999.
- The Manila Standard wrote, “This is a dangerous book because it reveals the Filipino soul, tortured, tormented by poverty .
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- Everything in this book has the sting of reality.
- The images are stunning but true.
- The smells are so strong they assault the reader.
- The people are familiar characters we have met in the comings and goings, ups and downs of our city lives: They may be stereotypes and archetypes, but you know them all, they were part of each of our past and they’re still very much around, 30 years after Gringo’s recollection.” Realuyo's first poetry collection, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door won the 2005 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, selected by Grace Schulman, distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York and poetry editor of The Nation.
- It was released by the University of Utah Press in March 2006.
- The Philippine edition of The Gods We Worship Live Next Door was released by Anvil Press in the Philippines in March 2008, marking his very first book publication in his birth country.
- The Gods We Worship Live Next Door received a 2009 Philippine National Book Award.In Spring 2000, he guest edited The Literary Review's special issue on contemporary Filipino and Filipino-American literature titled "Am Here: Contemporary Filipino Writings in English".
- He is also the editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American writings about New York City, a collection commemorating 100 years of Asian American presence in New York City.
- The anthology was published by the Asian American Writers' Workshop and Temple University Press in 1999, and awarded a PEN Open Book Award 2000.
- The NuyorAsian Anthology is a collection of fiction, poetry, essays, and art.
- The anthology maps Asian American life in New York City, beginning with works by poet Jose Garcia Villa in the 1930s and the birth of the Asian-American literary and political movement in the 1970s.
- The collection also explores the more contemporary voices of Pico Iyer, Bharati Mukherjee, Henry Chang, Xu Xi, Louis Chu, Maxine Hong Kingston, Kimiko Hahn, Vijay Seshadri, Betty T.
- Kao, Wang Ping, Ava Pin and many others.
- Ranging in age from 16 to 87, more than sixty writers and artists look at love and loss, work and history, identity and sexuality, loneliness and dislocation, giving a closer look at the most diverse ethnic community in the United States. Realuyo began his writing through his plays and poetry in elementary school in Manila, where he wrote in his native language Pilipino (Tagalog), but later shifted to English when his family immigrated to the United States when he was a teenager.
- Since co-founding Asian American Writers' Workshop after college, he has been published in major literary journals, magazines and anthologies in the United States including The Nation, Manoa, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, and The Kenyon Review.
- His work is widely anthologized and reviewed internationally.
- The opening poem in The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, Filipineza (Filipineza, poem ), is widely anthologized in collections, such as the Norton Anthology Language for a New Century and Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights. He used to blog and write essays of interest to the Filipino and Filipino American community for The Huffington Post.
- and also for the online Philippine news outlet, GMA News.
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