Thomas Leonard Shaw

Thomas Leonard Shaw is a queer, liminal poet-critic who lives in perpetual transit from Siargao to Metro Manila. Once a Creative Writing student and Palanca Foundation scholar at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and a poetry fellow at the 1st Philippine National LGBTQ Writers Workshop, the 1st Cebu Young Writers Studio, and 26th Iligan National Writers’ Workshop, Thomas now majors in Comparative Literature, and studies what it means to be a writer and critic in this global age of cultural and artistic production. He was an awardee at the 2019 Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio Literary Awards and has been published by Voice and Verse Magazine. With a research interest in memory studies and the intersections between literature, history and imperial expansion, he hopes to one day teach literature and to help organize the first creative writing workshop in Siargao. His current project is an exploration of the dialectics between memory and history in the fiction of Angelica Gorodischer.

  • Brief Notes on Jaya Jacobo’s Arasahas

    I have always been fascinated with poetry that traverses the terrains of the physical, natural world, and attendant to the world of experience, of the spirit. I enjoy poetry that casts enchantment, not just necessarily from allusions to magic, specters, or other figurations of mystical otherness, but through the very experiential energies of a persona…

  • Looking at Space and Place: The Navigation of Meaning Making

    During the 1st Cebu Writers Workshop held in Oslob from the days of Feb 7 to 9, there arose during the sessions a constant need to talk about place-making. Here Place-making was dominantly figured through two other relevant concepts – that of space and that of meaning making. Fellows and panelists alike talked about their…

  • (Re)Solving the South(ern) Puzzle: Katitikan as Alternative Discourse

    The impetus for the Katitikan project — a literary journal embedded firmly in the intersections of national, regional, and postcolonial discourses — lies in an often misarticulated necessity for the interrogation of various notions of “South” and its socio-political implications vis-à-vis literary production within the Philippine Archipelago. Crucial to this investigation is the critical turn…