Magandang hapon; good afternoon!
Pardon our late post! As you may already know, Marías is still (and has been) open for general submissions; and, maintaining the magazine's social media presence along with a book club is no easy feat! However, what our staff does is a labor of love, and we're able to accomplish it because of each other.
As a recap, we read In the Country by Mia Alvar for our January pick. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Though we are Filipinx, it provided a glimpse into backgrounds and situations that we may not encounter despite being of the same ethnicity. Alvar's nine stories humanizes us, reminds us that we are not a caricature nor our stereotypes.
For the month of February, we expanded our book club to include poetry books as well. So, to join Toni Morrison's The Source of Self-Regard, we also picked up Danez Smith's Homie and Alison C. Rollins's Library of Small Catastrophes in honor of Black History Month. We're excited to read your thoughts and see the pics of your books at home!
While you're here, we also wanted to provide an early glimpse into our March picks (which is a lot)!
We had a poll beforehand with the majority votes requesting to read Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer for March. We will still read this book, but we're pushing this selection to April. We thank you for your understanding.
The reason for the postponement is per our late realization that the month of March is Women's History Month. So, all of our choices for March are by womxn.
Staying true to our goal of showcasing only BIPOC authors and poets of color, please see our list for our Basahin Mo Yan March picks:
Fiction
The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso
Non-Fiction
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Poetry
Souvenir by Aimee Suzara
Not My White Savior by Julayne Lee
Please do not feel intimidated nor obligated to read all the books on our list. We're grateful for your consideration alone.
Ultimately, we hope to expose you to authors and poets outside of the white canon, and if this means introducing you to a new name, a new voice, then that means we've done our job.
We're grateful for the support gained for our book club, and we're continuously amazed at the level of interaction and interest with it, which makes us love what we do even more. Ingat! We'll talk next time. Sincerely,
Keana Aguila Labra Editor-in-Chief