Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz is the Palanca award-winning author of Women Loving (2010), the first sole-author collection of lesbian-themed stories in the Philippines, which is now available in an e-book entitled Women on Fire (2015). She is Associate Professor of creative writing at the University of the Philippines Mindanao. She has presented her work in literary festivals and events in Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, and Australia. Her work appears in the “New Asia Now” issue of Griffin Review, the anthologies The Near and the Far: New Stories from the Asia-Pacific Region (2016), and Sanctuary: Short Fiction from Queer Asia (2019). Cruz has received several Philippine writing fellowships and an international
Jade Mark Capiñanes is a Filipino writer. He is the author of the short story collection How to Grieve, published in 2022.
He won 3rd Prize in the Essay Category of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature in 2017 and 2024. He was a fellow for novella at the 2025 UP National Writers Workshop, for poetry at the 2023 Iyas National Writers Workshop, and for creative nonfiction at the 2019 Ateneo National Writers Workshop, 2017 University of Santo Tomas National Writers Workshop, and 2016 Davao Writers Workshop.
Born and raised in Davao City, he is currently taking his MFA in Creative Writing at De La Salle University in Manila.
