Join the Day Eight community at World Pride, Saturday, May 31, 2025 from 10-11am at the MLK central branch library, 901 G St NW, DC, for a queer Filipino literary panel, reading, and workshop, hosted and moderated by Regie Cabico with Reg Ledesma and Nico Penaranda.
This event is produced through support from the Mayor’s Office of Asian Pacific Islander Affairs, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, A Gathering of the Tribes, and individual donors to Day Eight.
Find additional details and RSVP on Eventbrite.
At this event, DC’s Liwanag / Filipino Book Festival organizers and queer poets will perform poems of the ever-evolving struggle to come out as queer, bisexual, non-binary and how their lives are impacted during the current administration. Their poems address resilience as Filipino Americans and the ways they find themselves fractured like the archipelago of their ancestry. Participants will be given a writing prompt connected to the reading, and an opportunity to share their work in a nurturing environment.
Regie Cabico is the first Asian American and openly queer poet to win the Nuyorican Poet Cafe’s Grand Slam. Television credits include MTV, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, TEDx Talk, and 2 episodes of The Poet Speaks. He is the author of A Rabbit in Search of a Rolex (Day Eight, 2023), an editor of the Mid-Atlantic Review, and co-director of Day Eight’s summer writing camp. He is also the Executive Director of A Gathering of the Tribes in New York – www.tribes.org
Reg Ledesma (they/them) is a queer Filipino writer based in the DC area. They are a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Asian American Studies program and Duke University’s Master of Public Policy program. They are a proud Jack Kent Cooke Scholar. They are the co-founder of Kwento Collective and Liwanag DC Filipino Literature Festival.
Nico Penaranda is a Filipino-American writer and musician from Washington, D.C. He currently teaches at Howard University. He graduated from AU’s MFA in Creative Writing Program in 2022. Recent publications are in Day Eight, Brigid Gate Publishing, Mistake House Publishing, Gardy Loo, The Keezel Review, and Z Publishing.IG: @npxhc.