Eric Gamalinda’s work has been described as “luminous” (Arthur Sze) and “wonderful and vibrant” (Michael Burkard). “Gamalinda is a marvelous poet,” wrote D. Nurkse, poet laureate of Brooklyn. “His wistful, fierce, enthralled voice seems to speak the true language, the sotto voce language we can’t hear in our world of binary and mutually destructive opposites.”
 
Recent awards and grants for his work include the Man Asian Prize shortlist [2009], the Cultural Center of the Philippines Independent Film and Video Awards [2004], the Asian American Literary Award and the Alice James Books New York/New England Selection for Zero Gravity [poems, 2000], the New York Foundation for the Arts [fiction, 1998], the Philippine Centennial Literary Prize for My Sad Republic [novel, 1998], and the Philippine National Book Award twice for Planet Waves [novel, 1990] and My Sad Republic [2000]. He has also won the Philippines’ top literary prize, the Palanca Memorial Awards, several times for poetry, fiction, non-fiction and playwriting. In 2010, his three-act play, Resurrection, was staged off-Broadway at the Clurman Theater on 42nd Street by Diverse City Inc.
 
Scott Hightower, writing in Coldfront Magazine, has described his poetry as “ambitious and dazzling.” Eugene Gloria, winner of the National Poetry Series, has said, “When I read Gamalinda’s new poems, I am moved by his abundance of feeling. His poetic vision has widened into Whitmanesque proportions. To paraphrase Whitman himself, Gamalinda’s poems are large, they contain multitudes. But one musn’t confuse this bigness of feeling with easy emotions. His poems are not sentimental, but are the stuff of honest human emotions.”
 
Eric Gamalinda has been in residence at Civitella Ranieri [Italy], Association d’Art de La Napoule [France], Chateau de Lavigny Residence pour Ecrivains [Switzerland], Fundacion Valparaiso [Spain], The Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio [Italy], Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers [Scotland], and The Corporation of Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ledig House International Writers Colony [USA]. In 2010 he was offered a residency by the Bogliasco Foundation, but unfortunately had to turn it down due to work demands. In 2013, he will return to Fundacion Valparaiso for a second residency.
 
He was publications director of the Asian American Writers Workshop until 1997, Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawaii in Manoa in 1999, and Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Asia Pacific American Studies Program in 2002-2003. He currently teaches at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.

Rica is a classically trained soprano, a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and a pole dance artist. As a singer, she has performed all over the world and was a guest of honor at the White House for proclamation of black music month in the summer of 2001. Rica won first place in Polesque, a pole-burlesque competition at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. Rica studied at the University of Michigan and the William Esper Studio.