User:Ina Cariño/sandbox

Ina Cariño (b. 1988) is a Filipinx American poet and the author of the poetry collection Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. Cariño was born in Baguio City in the Philippines and moved to the United States in 1999. Their poetry appears in Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. Ina is a Kundiman fellow and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center.

Education
In 2019, Cariño received their MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.

Cariño also attended East Carolina University, where they received a BA in English literature and minored in music performance on the violin at the ECU School of Music.

Awards
Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry. The Whiting Award, awarded by The Whiting Foundation, is an American award presented annually. According the Whiting Foundation's website, "[s]ince 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards, of $50,000 each, are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.

In 2021, Cariño was also selected as one of the four winners of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, sponsored by the 92Y Unternberg Poetry Center in New York City.

Alice James Books awarded them the 2021 Alice James Award for their debut poetry collection Feast. The book has received advance praise from poet Ilya Kaminsky:"'‘To be other is to read badly- / drawn maps,’ writes Ina Cariño, ‘to hum / with a revolutionary's love song.’ I love the vividness of these poems, the language of the senses that's so alive on each page of Feast. But these poems aren't just beautiful, sensual lyrics. There is more at stake here. Cariño is a kind of poet who claims family and identity with style that's akin to spell-making. ‘I dream in a tongue not my own’ the poet says—and we see it instantly: here, even a simple act of cooking rice can become a ceremony, a rhapsody of liberation. All of this is done not with literary pretension but with vulnerability and honesty. If Ina Cariño says ‘names are spells,’ it is because this poet aims to write actual spells, and not just with the pen, but with breath: ‘I am the last spell, the only song left. deliberate utterance of bone’. Here, we are in presence of something special, I think. Bravo.”"

Indigena Collective
In 2019, Ina founded a reading series, Indigena Collective, centering marginalized creatives in the Triangle area of North Carolina. The Collective has had a total of 12 readings, some of which were in person and some of which were virtual due to the pandemic.