"The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting" by Veronica Montes

VERONICA MONTES is the author of Benedicta Takes Wing and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction published by Philippine American Literary House (PALH) in 2018. Her chapbook, "The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting", is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in September 2020. Her reading venues/classroom visits include the Library of Congress - Asian Division, Asian Pacific Museum, San Francisco Main Library, Bindlestiff Studio, Kearny Street Workshop, Inside Storytime, Lit Crawl, UC Berkeley, USF, SFSU, Santa Clara University, Notre Dame de Namur, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in literary journals including Bamboo Ridge and Prism International; online at SmokeLong Quarterly, CHEAP POP, Lost Balloon, Spelk Fiction, Right Hand Pointing, and Spry Literary Journal; and can be found in several anthologies.

ALAN CHAZARO is the author of "This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album" (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and the forthcoming "Piñata Theory" (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and a Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco’s MFA program. He is currently a creative writing adjunct professor in the Bay Area, and the co-founding editor at HeadFake.

Philippine-born and LA-raised, ELSA VALMIDIANO is a writer and poet who calls Oakland home. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary journals and anthologies. Elsa is an alum of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and Summer Literary Seminars hosted in Tbilisi. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and has performed numerous readings such as at Artists Against Rape, Kearny Street Workshop’s APATURE, Scriptorium, Litquake, and more. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. A recipient of the Editors’ Choice selection from the 2018 Many Voices Project competition in Prose sponsored by New Rivers Press at Minnesota State University Moorhead, Elsa’s debut essay collection, We Are No Longer Babaylan, is slated for publication in Fall 2020/Spring 2021. Last, but not least, she would really like it if you pronounced her last name as her ancestors intended: /väl-mĭ-jänō/.

RICCO VILLANUEVA SIASOCO is a writer, educator, and activist. He received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has taught at Boston College, Columbia University, and the Massachusetts College of Art. Ricco has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, Lambda Literary, and The National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a board member of Kundiman, a national literary organization dedicated to Asian American literature. Ricco lives in San Francisco. The Foley Artist (Gaudy Boy, 2019) is his first book.