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Short Biography

Bino A. Realuyo is the author of the novel, “The Umbrella Country”  and the poetry collection, “The Gods We Worship Live Next Door”.  His literary works have appeared in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Harvard Review, Asymptote, North American Review, ZYZZYVA and are forthcoming in New American Writing, Salamander, The Georgia Review, and The Common. He is a 2018 NYSCA/New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in fiction.  He has recently completed two books, “Funny Little Island People” (fiction) and “#TheRebelSonnets” (poetry).  He was recently honored to have his poem "Filipineza" included by U2 in its 30th anniversary concert tour of Joshua Tree in Manila. 

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Click for Realuyo's Literary Curriculum Vitae . 

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Long Biography

Bino A. Realuyo was born in Manila, Philippines and moved to the U.S. as an adolescent.  He started writing plays and poetry as a child, but his love for world history, cultures and languages drove him to pursue International Studies at the American University’s School of International Service and Universidad Argentina de la Impresa in Buenos Aires.  Later in life, he pursued graduate studies in education and non-profit management at Harvard University as a Leadership Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government's Center for Public Leadership. 

He started publishing professionally in the U.S. in his early 20s, but he has always worked outside the literary and academic establishments as a community organizer and educator.   Fourteen years after his immigration to NYC, he published his first book, the novel The Umbrella Country (1999). The San Francisco Chronicle called The Umbrella Country as a “significant contribution to Filipino-American literature.”  He is also the author of a poetry collection The Gods We Worship Live Next Door (2005) which won an Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and the 2009 Philippine National Book Award. Judge Grace Schulman described Realuyo’s work as “passionate without a trace of sentimentality.”

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Realuyo co-founded the seminal literary organization, The Asian American Writers Workshop in 1991, and has since consistently published in literary journals, anthologies, and magazines.  He edited The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City (1999), which mapped Asian American life in New York City, from the works by poet Jose Garcia Villa in the 1930s and the birth of the Asian-American literary and political movement in the 1970s to more contemporary voices; and the special Filipino and Filipino-American issue of The Literary Review, "Am Here: Contemporary Filipino Writings in English” (2000).”