Assembling Alice

Before and after the Battle of Manila, a Japanese spy and an American soldier have one thing in common: they both fall in love with Alice Feria, a pianist who would later become one of the first women journalists in the Philippines. Both would prove to be instrumental to her survival during the Japanese occupation and the liberation of Manila. Assembling Alice is a portrait of a woman as much as it is a portrait of the times she lived in. She came of age during the commonwealth period, survived both the occupation and the war, and did not write of her experiences as much as she spoke of them to those in her inner circle. Her experiences were sublimated into editorials she wrote for a small magazine called The Filipino Home Companion where she wrote of nation-building and what it meant or should mean to be a Filipino after the second world war. Inside these pages are the stories she told, and have been told about her.

Mookie KATIGBAK-LACUESTA is the author of four poetry collections: The Proxy Eros (2008), Burning Houses (2013), Hush Harbor (2017), and Eros Redux (2019). She obtained an MFA from the New School University in 2004, and has since taught in major universities in Manila. Katigbak-Lacuesta has also co-edited various literary Filipino poetry anthologies for the Cordite Poetry Review and Vagabond Press. In 2019, she co-edited The Achieve Of, The Mastery, a survey of contemporary Philippine Poetry in English, with Dr. Gemino Abad.