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Cecilia Brainard

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is a Filipina American author born in Cebu, Philippines who writes fiction based in California. She attended college in the Philippines and received a bachelor's degree from Maryknoll College. After graduate work in filmmaking at UCLA, she began a career as a freelance writer, publishing over a dozen books and hundreds of essays and short stories exploring the Filipino immigrant experience. As an author, editor and teacher, she promotes Filipino American literature.

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356 views1 page

Cecilia Brainard

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is a Filipina American author born in Cebu, Philippines who writes fiction based in California. She attended college in the Philippines and received a bachelor's degree from Maryknoll College. After graduate work in filmmaking at UCLA, she began a career as a freelance writer, publishing over a dozen books and hundreds of essays and short stories exploring the Filipino immigrant experience. As an author, editor and teacher, she promotes Filipino American literature.

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Mary ruth David
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Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is a Filipina author of fiction based in California, U.S.A.

She was born


in Cebu, Philippines, attended St. Theresa's College in Cebu and in San Marcelino, Manila. She also went
to Maryknoll College (now Miriam College) in Quezon City from 1964 to 1968, graduating with a
Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Arts. She did graduate work in film making at UCLA in 1969.
Brainard's works include the internationally acclaimed novel, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept,
Woman with Horns and Other Stories and Philippine Woman in America. She is the editor of the
anthology Fiction by Filipinos in America and teaches creative writing at the Writers' Program of UCLA
Extension.

She was born in 1947 and grew up with her influential family in Cebu City, on the Island of Cebu,
Philippines. Cebu appears in her short stories and novel as Ubec (Cebu spelled backwards). Her idyllic
childhood is associated with her father, an engineer who was already in his fifties when she was born.
Brainard was the youngest of four children. Her father died when she was nine. To cope with the loss of
the father figure, she started writing journals at the age of nine. Her writing eventually evolved into
essays, then short stories, then novels.

She is the author and editor of over a dozen books, 250 published essays and four-dozen stories.
From 1968 to 1981, she worked in the area of communications as a documentary scriptwriter,
fundraiser and as an assistant director for a non-profit organization that included responsibilities in
public relations and development. Since 1981, she has worked as a freelance writer. She has taught in
the Animation Department at the University of Southern California. She teaches creative writing at the
UCLA-Extension Writers’ Program. She once wrote a bi-monthly column, Filipina American Perspective
for the Philippine American News, a newspaper in Los Angeles from 1982 to 1988. She was a founding
member and past officer of Philippine American Women Writers and Artists (PAWWA). She is a member
of PEN America.

As an author, editor, and teacher, Brainard is like the epic storyteller, Yvonne, in her
internationally-acclaimed novel, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept. She promotes Filipino-American
writers and Filipino-American literature so that other readers may learn, recover and remember. Her
works can be found in periodicals such as Focus Philippines, Philippine Graphic, Mr. and Mrs. Magazine,
Katipunan, Amerasia Journal, Bamboo Ridge and The California Examiner among many others. Her
stories have been anthologized in the pages of Making Waves (1989), Forbidden Fruit (1992), Songs of
Ourselves (1994), On a Bed of Rice (1995), "Pinay: Autobiographical Narratives by Women Writers,
1926-1998" (Ateneo 2000), "Asian American Literature" (Glencoe McGraw-Hill 2001) and many others.

Brainard immigrated to America in 1968 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1972. She
eventually married Lauren Brainard, whom she had met in the Philippines when he was serving in the
U.S. Peace Corps. The couple settled in Santa Monica, California where they have three sons namely
Christopher, Alexander, and Andrew.

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