Baguio Art Month on

By Gaby B. Keith

BAGUIO CITY -- The Summer Capital's celebration of Art Month goes full throttle as the Sin-Agi Artists steps on the gas on its art workshops at the Baguio City National High School and an art exhibit at The Manor at Camp John Hay.
    Local journalist Pigeon Lobien said the workshops enter this weekend their second week for the Baguio Educational Art Festival with literature and theater on center stage at the BCNHS library. Facilitators for the literary workshop are Luchie Maranan, Frank Cimatu and LA Piluden.
    For fiction writing, Maranan will handle the workshop as the translator of the late Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Hundred Years of Solitude. She is Baguio-born and bred who graduated from the University of the Philippines in 1981 (AB Humanities in Comparative Literature).
    She is at present the vice chairman of the Dap-ayan ti Kultura iti Kordilyera. Maranan has edited books and co-edited anthologies and her works have been anthologized as she continues to write English and Filipino poetry, creative nonfiction and children's stories.
    Piluden is a creative writing fellow in various national writers' workshops hosted by the UP, Ateneo de Manila University and University of Santo Tomas. She writes and has published fiction and nonfiction as a member of the Ubbog Cordillera Writers' Group.
    The UP Baguio professor writes a column for the Baguio Chronicle. Cimatu is the managing editor of the Baguio Chronicle and is a two-time Palanca Awards winner for poetry.
    University of Baguio professor Roger Federico will tackle theater. Federico is a community theatre practitioner who in 2017 was the only participant to the Young Audiences program held in Okinawa, Japan. In 2020, he was a visiting student scholar to Flinders University in South Australia.
    Federico recently earned his Master of Arts degree in Theater Arts from UP Diliman. On Wednesday, Sin-Agi convenor Leandro Yangot and chairman of the art festival will lead a three-month long show at The Manor with Filipino Swiss artist Claire Jaun Torres.