The Social Divide in City Fiction

Jessica Zafra is a writer. She is best known for the Twisted books, which were collections of her popular newspaper columns. Her first novel, The Age of Umbrage, is now available, as is The Collected Stories of Jessica Zafra, which contains the stories from her two previous collections, Manananggal Terrorizes Manila and The Stories So Far, plus new and uncollected material. She gives writing workshops called Writing Boot Camp three or four times a year.

She has hosted talk shows on TV (POV) and radio (Twisted in the Morning; Twisted on Sunday) and her mouth can run on automatic pilot. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, and the Hong Kong Standard. She’s written one movie (Elwood Perez’s Esoterika Manila), gotten executive producer credit on another (Lav Diaz’s Norte), and managed an extremely popular band for four months (at which she was entirely useless). Also, she’s produced books for the Management Association of the Philippines, SGV, the Women’s Business Council, and the William Shaw Foundation. She has won Palanca Awards for fiction and the National Book Award for essay, and was a fellow of the Yale-China Institute.