Marjorie Evasco

Filipina writer

Marjorie Evasco (born September 21, 1953) is a Filipina poet. She writes in two languages: English and Cebuano Visayan and is a supporter of women's rights, especially of women writers. Marjorie Evasco is one of the earliest Filipina feminist poets. She is a recipient of the S. E. A. Write Award.

Born in Mindoro into a family of teachers who were "always talking English", she was brought up and educated as a Roman Catholic and her formative years in school were spent under the tutelage of German and Belgian nuns. Evasco and her family lived in Tacloban City and Dumaguete City, then moved to Manila in 1984. She finished her B. A. in 1973 from Divine Word College of Tagbilaran, Masteral Degree in Creative Writing in 1981 at Silliman University and her Doctor of Philosophy in Literature (Ph. D. Litt.) at De La Salle University Manila. In 1984, she became a member of the faculty at De La Salle University, and completed her doctoral degree in 1998. For many years, she was Director of De La Salle University's Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center (BNSCWC). She is currently a University Fellow and Professor Emeritus for Literature at the same university.

Evasco has received several literary awards from the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for her essays. For her books, she has garnered the National Book Awards from the Manila Critics' Circle, and the Gintong Aklat for Dreamweavers'' (Book Development Association of the Philippines). For her poems, she has won several major prizes from the Philippine Free Press. Her poems in English and Binisaya (Cebuano Visayan) have appeared in many important anthologies including Luna Caledonia, "Agam: Filipino Narratives of Uncertainty and Climate Change,""Sustaining the Archipelago: Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry," "The First Five: New Literature by Southeast Asian Writers," and the Norton anthology "Language for a New Century: Poems from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond" (Eds. Ravi Shankar, Tina Handal, et al). She has been published extensively in Asia, Europe and North America and her works have been translated into various Philippine languages and world languages, the latest of which was Italian. She has also participated in various writers' festivals such as the 10th Vancouver International Writers' Festival in 1997; the Southeast Asian Writers' festival at the University of Malaya Cultural Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2003; the Wordfeast 1st Singapore International Literary Festival in 2004, the Man Hong Kong Literary Festival in 2006. the XVIII International Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia in 2008, the 2010 Granada Festival Internacional de Poesia in Granada, Nicaragua, and the 2021 online edition of the Festival Internacional de la Lectura Yucatan (FILEY) where she read with Yucateca writer Sol Ceh Moo and Spanish translator Perla Coll Ehrenberg.