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- Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo is an award-winning Filipina fictionist, critic and pioneering writer of creative nonfiction. Pantoja-Hidalgo is a high school valedictorian of St. Paul College Quezon City. She received both her Bachelor of Philosophy (Faculty of Philosophy and Letters)Ph. B. (1964) magna cum laude and MA in Literature (1967) meritissimo from the University of Santo Tomas. She later received a Ph. D in Comparative Literature from the University of the Philippines in 1993. She is an Associate for Fiction at the U.P. Institute of Creative Writing and a member of the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC). She previously served U.P. as Director of the U.P. Institute of Creative Writing, Director of the University of the Philippines Press and coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at the U.P. Department of English and Comparative Literature, College of Arts and Letters. Pantoja-Hidalgo is currently Vice President for Public Affairs and Professor of English, comparative literature and creative writing at the University of the Philippines. Pantoja-Hidalgo has been writing for Philippine newspapers and magazines since the age of fifteen. She has worked as a writer, editor and teacher in Thailand, Lebanon, Korea, Myanmar and New York, U.S.A. Her interesting lifestyle, the result of her husband's fifteen-year connection with UNICEF, is reflected in her writing. Pantoja-Hidalgo was originally best known for an unusual kind of autobiographical/travel writing, which includes Sojourns (1984), Skyscrapers, Celadon and Kimchi (1993), I Remember (1991) and The Path of the Heart (1994). Pantoja-Hidalgo later won numerous other prizes for her fiction, creative nonfiction, literary scholarship and edited anthologies. She has frequently published many of her creative and critical manuscripts in major publications in Finland, Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and the United States. Besides travel essays, Hidalgo has a collection of personal essays, The Path of Heart (1994), and Coming Home (1997). She has also edited several anthologies with the help of her colleagues from the University of the Philippines such as: Philippine Post-Colonial Studies: Essays on Language and Literature which she did with Priscelina Patajo-Legasto and The Likhaan Book of Poetry and Fiction with Gemino Abad. She has encouraged many aspiring writers’ efforts by editing their works: Shaking the Family Tree (1998) and Why I Travel and Other Essays by Fourteen Women (2000) with Erlinda Panlilio. Hidalgo found the idea of writing short and simple initiation stories appealing. It reflects in her collection of short stories: Ballad of a Lost Season and Other Stories (1987), Tales for a Rainy Night (1993), Where Only the Moon Rages: Nine Tales (1994), Catch a Falling Star (1999) and the most recent one Sky Blue After The Rain: Selected Stories and Tales (2005). Before and after her fifteen years abroad, Hidalgo was a teacher first at the University of Santo Tomas and later at the University of the Philippines. Completing the requirements for her doctoral degree on Comparative Literature, Hidalgo has found many opportunities to read Literary Theory as well as put these into practice in her own works. Hidalgo claimed that she had never considered herself a literary critic, but just the same, she found it useful to collect five of her critical essays in A Gentle Subversion: Essays on Philippine Fiction in English (1998). Hidalgo's critical essays, which reflects her interest in fictional writing by Filipino women, serves a much-needed contribution to a developing body of feminist scholarship in the country today.
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