10:30am-12:00pm - A Stage Across Time: Writing for the Ephemeral

What does the stage allow us to remember differently than other forms of storytelling?

This panel brings together Filipino playwrights and theatre artists to reflect on the slow, often unseen work of building community through performance. From the intimacy of the stage to the reach of books, film, television, and recorded media, theatre offers a uniquely ephemeral form: one rooted in presence, risk, gathering, and the fleeting charge of a live audience.

Together, panelists will discuss the challenges and possibilities of writing Filipino diasporic stories for the stage, the emergent themes shaping their work, and the questions that continue to surface across generations: memory, migration, language, family, resistance, care, and survival. How do our stories change as we move through time? What does a career in theatre make possible, and what might lead artists to shift into other forms?

Centred on intergenerational resistance and the long game of cultural work, this conversation considers theatre as both a record and rehearsal: a space where Filipino communities can return to the past, confront the present, and imagine futures still in the making.

Playwrights: Kamila Sediego, Marie Beath Badian, Bianca Miranda. Facilitator: Davey Calderon

12:30-2pm - The Archive of Home: Personal History as Collective Memory 

How is history co-created and co-authored? And how do we move beyond the “official” historical record?

This panel explores community archiving and personal history-building as intimate, creative, and deeply political acts. In contrast to institutions that often decide what is preserved, legitimized, or left behind, writers have long turned to homes, families, kitchens, photographs, letters, oral histories, recipes, gossip, grief, and memory as living archives.

Bringing together writers whose work is shaped by personal and collective histories, this conversation asks how stories are gathered outside traditional institutions, and how these acts of remembering can become part of a larger cultural record. What happens when the archive is not a museum, but a family album? A dinner table? A voice note? A story passed from one generation to the next?

Panelists will reflect on how community memory informs their writing and practice, from the fragments they inherit to the histories they choose to preserve, reimagine, or resist. At its heart, this panel considers how personal lenses can become powerful tools for history-making, and how the stories we keep close can help us understand who we are, where we come from, and what we hope to carry forward.

Authors: Sol Diana, Rina Chua Garcia, Facilitator: Jennilee Austria Bonifacio

2:30pm-4pm - The Stories that Raise Us

What do we pass down when we write for children?

This family-friendly panel brings together children’s authors to reflect on the joy, care, and responsibility of writing for young readers. Children’s books can be a child’s first doorway into language, imagination, culture, history, and belonging. They can teach, comfort, delight, and help families begin important conversations in ways that feel accessible and full of wonder.

Together, panelists will discuss how they write stories that speak to children while also resonating with parents, caregivers, educators, and communities. How do authors make big ideas feel welcoming for young readers? What kinds of knowledge, values, histories, and cultural traditions do they hope to pass down? And how can children’s literature help a new generation feel seen, curious, and connected?

At its heart, this conversation celebrates storytelling as a form of care. Through picture books, middle grade stories, and books for young audiences, writers create worlds where children can learn, laugh, ask questions, and imagine who they might become.

Authors: Andi Vicente, Karla Sy, Allan Matudio Facilitator: Stephanie Ellen Sy