FIFTEEN new fellows, including the workshop’s first foreign participant, were named to the fifth UST Writers Workshop organized by the Center for Creative Writing and Studies (CCWS) held in Baguio City last month.
Workshop panelist Paolo Enrico Melendez disclosed that the UST-CCWS focused on those who are just starting out as writers and have not been a fellow yet of any writing workshops.
For this year, more than a third of the total participating fellows are Thomasians.
The fellows for fiction in English were Michelle Abigail Pascua, Dennis Andrew Aguinaldo and Maria Lourdes Parawan. The fellows for fiction in Filipino were Katrina Grace Valdez and Louie Navarro.
In the poetry category in English were Kristine Anne Gomez, Karen Ann Capco, Mercedita Baritugo, Maria Loyva Conje-Fernandez, Maria Isabel de Ungria, and Australian Nea Eileen Cahill. The fellows for poetry in Filipino, meanwhile, all hail from the provinces: Joseph DL Saguid of Marinduque, Neri Nuyda Ronatay of Albay and Varsitarian writer Deni Rose Afinidad of Rizal.
This year’s batch also saw a first, as Jose Misael Santos became a fellow for the one-act play. No one in the previous years qualified for the said category.
Aside from minor reformatting, the workshop, Melendez said, follows a particular procedure. UST-CCWS usually accepts applications as early as December. The entries then undergo meticulous deliberation from the panelists. Preparation for the workshop starts sometime the first few weeks of April.
The week-long workshop featured eleven regular panelists and two guest panelists, Michael Coroza and National Artist F. Sionil Jose, who is also the co-director of the workshop together with Dr. Ophelia Dimalanta and Dr. Cirilo Bautista.
