Description: Writer. Editor. Immigrants’ rights and human rights advocate. Hello, kumusta! I'm Vina Orden, freelance writer of essays, interviews, reportage, and op-eds about the Pilipin* community in The Margins (the award-winning digital magazine of the Asian American Writers' Workshop), hella pinay, the arts journalism forum Hyperallergic, Asian Journal, The FilAm, and The Halo-Halo Review. Personal essays…
Hello, kumusta! I’m Vina Orden, freelance writer of essays, interviews, reportage, and op-eds about the Pilipin* community in The Margins (the award-winning digital magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop), hella pinay , the arts journalism forum Hyperallergic , Asian Journal , The FilAm , and The Halo-Halo Review. Personal essays and poetry may also be found on my blog hyffeinated . As an Editor of poetry and creative nonfiction at Slant’d magazine , I help uplift emerging Asian American voices. W
I was a 2022 Open City Fellow at AAWW and surfaced underreported stories of the pandemic from low-income, immigrant communities that remain invisible or occupy “in-between” spaces in New York City. I also am working on my first novel for young adults and recently participated in Tin House’s 2022 YA Workshop and the 2022 Kweli Color of Children’s Literature Conference as a scholarship recipient and 2022 Kweli Sing the Truth! Mentee .
Born in Baguio City, Philippines, I immigrated to New York City when I was 13 years old to reunite with my mother who had been recruited to work in the US during a nursing shortage at the height of the AIDS crisis. My work as an immigrants’ rights and human rights advocate was motivated by my experience as a daughter of an overseas foreign worker and a political prisoner (my father was a student activist during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. ) and as an immigrant myself.