Friday Forum: Noelle de Jesus – Filipino American author of “Cursed and Other Stories”

Harvard professor David Damrosch calls “literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” global or world literature. Certainly, the social and political realities of the world have tremendous impact on the actions and and morality of the human community, and writers of fiction know this all too well as the place from which their plots develop. Some writers contend with more than just one world. Noelle Q. de Jesus was born in the US in 1967, she grew up and came of age in middle class Martial Law Manila in 3rd world developing Philippines, did her MFA in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and for the last 24 years  has lived in 1st world developed Singapore. She is the author of two short story collections, Cursed and Other Stories (Penguin Random House SEA) and Blood Collected Stories (Ethos Books Singapore 2019), and she is at work on a novel. She will read from her work, discuss her writing and current project and the way her life in two Southeast Asian countries and in the US bears upon her fiction.

Noelle Q. de Jesus is a Filipino American writer of fiction who started out as an advertising copywriter at McCann Erickson Philippines, and then went on to help found the first Southeast Asian edition of Cosmopolitan magazine in the Philippines in 1997 as its Associate Editor. In 2000, she moved to Singapore with her family and worked in women’s magazines including Elle Singapore, as Deputy Editor. All throughout that time, she continued to write fiction on the side, curating a regional flash fiction anthology series (Fast Food Fiction), and publishing a number of books, including two short story collections, Cursed and Other Stories (Penguin Random House SEA 2019) and Blood Collected Stories (Ethos Books 2015) which won the 2016 Next Generation Indie Book Award for the Short Story and has French translation. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Witness, Fiction Attic Press, and The Art and Craft of Asian Stories (Bloomsbury Editions) . Last year, she was a 2023 Fellow for the University of Iowa International Writers Residency and published her English translation of screenwriter Ricky Lee’s For B or How Love Devastates Four Out Of Every Five Of Us. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University, and she is currently completing a novel.

A recording will be available on the CSEAS YouTube channel following the event.