Originally published by the Philippine Information Agency

CEBU, Feb. 16 – Three contributors of the critically-acclaimed anthology Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change were featured in the environment-themed literary arts competition of the University of San Carlos (USC).

Renowned writers Grace Monte de Ramos, Marjorie Evasco, and Padmapani Perez held a reading of the students’ poetry entries during the Green Literary-Arts Fest of USC’s Talamban campus. They also facilitated a poetry workshop and share excerpts from their English and Cebuano pieces on climate change which were featured on Agam.

Agam is a collection of 26 images and 24 literary pieces written in eight different Filipino languages: Tagalog, Cebuano, Waray, Maguindanao, Bikol, Ilocano, Sinama, and English. Each piece tells the story of climate change without scientific jargon.

The anthology was published in 2014 by the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities [2] and has since been launched in Manila, Tacloban, Massachusetts, Denver, Washington, and Berlin. It has won a National Book Award from the National Book Development Association in 2015, as well as two Gintong Aklat awards in 2016 for Literature in English and Book Design. It was also featured in the 2016 Frankfurt Book Fair.

New York-based English professor Jeffrey Santa Ana will also be presenting next month his essay featuring Agam, which will be published in a book entitled South East Asian Ecocentrism. Joi Barrios is organizing the event in University of California, Berkeley.

Agam is available in National Bookstore and PowerBooks, and can soon be purchased at Fully Booked and Amazon. All sales proceeds will go to RE-Charge Philippines, ICSC’s Tacloban-based project which trains Haiyan survivors to become solar kit technicians and disaster responders.