This weekend NYU will host Moving Archipelago, a conference on 100 years of Filipino American literature. In honor of the conference, here's an interview APF did with Filipino American literary luminary Jessica Hagedorn:

In 1971, a wealthy playboy in Manila claimed to have discovered a lost Stone Age tribe living in the Filipino rainforest. The tribe became the subject of a sensational National Geographic photo essay and was adopted by Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. But almost immediately, doubts were raised about the so-called discovery, and many have concluded that the story was a hoax. A few years later, Francis Ford Coppola brought a huge entourage to Marcos's Phillippines to film “Apocalypse Now,” an epic undertaking that took most of a year, and that Coppola famously compared to the Vietnam War itself.

These two events from the 1970s form the backdrop to Jessica Hagedorn's novel, Dream Jungle. When the book was published in paperback in 2004, APF’s Andrew Hsiao spoke to the author, who is one of Asian America's leading literary lights, a devoted community activist, and a longtime friend of APF, to discuss a book that he describes as amazingly ambitious, cinematic, and beautiful, and together with Dogeaters and Gangster of Love, completes a trilogy that does for the Marcos-era Phillippines what Dickens did for Victorian England.

Another interview with a Filipino American literary luminary in honor of this weekend's conference on 100 years of Filipino American writing.

Last year, APF's Andrew Hsiao talked to the brilliant, edgy writer Han Ong, one of the youngest recipients of a MacArthur fellowship, on the publication of Ong's ambitious, panoramic novel about a Filipino American prodigal son's return to the Philippines.