Clarissa Trinidad Gonzalez

Clarissa Trinidad Gonzalez was born in Manila, where she grew up with her family’s stranger-than-fiction stories and larger-than-life personalities. She worked as a copywriter and associate creative director in some of Manila’s top ad agencies before moving to Canada in the mid-nineties. She worked as a technical designer at the Hudson’s Bay Company, then studied creative writing at the University of Toronto, under authors Helen Humphreys and Kim Echlin. Her poetry has been published in the Variety Crossing literary journal and in other online journals. Her debut novel, Celestina’s House, was a finalist for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction and was included in CBC’s Canada Reads 2026 Longlist. When she’s not writing or working at her day job in communications, she likes to spend time with her family, experiment in the kitchen, travel, and watch classic films.