Hanalei Ramos

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Long bio:

Hanalei Ramos is a Filipina writer from Jersey City, New Jersey . She continued to hone her writing through workshops such as CreateNow (Asian-American Writer's Workshop, NYC), and Something to Say (Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia). In 2003, she co-founded the 101project, a multidisciplinary arts collective, with Stephen Bor and Hang Le.

Hanalei has facilitated several youth and adult poetry workshops, hosted an Asian American open mic series in Philadelphia, and participated twice in the Asian Arts Initiative's annual Artists Exchange. She has also hosted her own radio show on Philadelphia's Asian Public Radio. Hanalei has been featured at various venues and college campuses across the country including GirlFest Honolulu (2004) and the East Coast Asian American Student Union (2005). She was also chosen as a panelist for the youth contingent of the March for Women’s Lives (2004) in Washington DC.

Hanalei Ramos is a writer, performer, and community educator. She has toured around the nation to various college and university campuses as a spoken word artist. Hanalei has authored Letter to Martha,, a personal testimony to her firsthand experience3 with domestic violence, and published her first collection opf poetry and prosetry, Foiled Stars. Hanalei developed her first one-woman show, Guns and Tampons: A History of Violence Against Women I Know, through the generosity of the Asian Arts Initiative, which was performed at the first ever National Asian American Theater Festival. Most recently, Hanalei and Jiny Ung were named fellows for Project Rowhouses (Houston, TX). Hanalei is a proud founding member of Filipinas for Rights and Empowerment (FiRE) and lives and works in her native Jersey City, New Jersey.

Short and SURRRRRIOUS bio:

Hanalei Ramos is a writer, performer, and community educator. She has toured around the nation to various college and university campuses as a spoken word artist. Hanalei has authored Letter to Martha,, a personal testimony to her firsthand experience3 with domestic violence, and published her first collection of poetry and prosetry, Foiled Stars. Hanalei developed her first one-woman show, Guns and Tampons: A History of Violence Against Women I Know, through the generosity of the Asian Arts Initiative, which was performed at the first ever National Asian American Theater Festival. Most recently, Hanalei and Jiny Ung were named fellows for Project Rowhouses (Houston, TX). Hanalei is a proud founding member of Filipinas for Rights and Empowerment (FiRE) and lives and works in her native Jersey City, New Jersey.

Short and Sillay bio:

Hanalei Ramos is a very nice person and a stereotypical aquarius. FACT: while it is a common misconception that “aquarius, the water bearer” is a water sign, it is not. It is actually an air sign! Other than that, she is a proud founding member of Filipinas for Rights and Empowerment, a mass-based organization for Filipinas in the NYC area. Hanalei has also toured around the country as a performer and is the author of Foiled Stars, Letters to Martha, and the one-woman show, Guns and Tampons: A History of Violence Against Women I Know. Hanalei currently lives and works in her native Jersey City, NJ. For more information about her, please visit www.hanaleihanalei.com

Liner bio:

...an Aquarius who is extremely fond of goldfish (the animal and the cracker.) Hanalei likes Richard AND James Wright, you, and the tender sound of applause.

Hanalei Ramos: artist statement (updated 2008)

The power to create a new reality is a feat, but to accurately represent the reality in which we live is an entirely different ability. The latter is an ability I am committed to mastering.

My goal is to develop narratives intended to capture the truth in any situation. The ability to wield words to manipulate fictitious characters and circumstances always astounded me. The command of writers in any genre's canon (classical and contemporary) propelled a desire in me to communicate in equally blossomed prose. This yearning to negotiate the poetic with the life I lead resulted in an ongoing stint in "prosetry." However, as I fell deeper into my studies as an English major at university in my twenty-somethings, I noticed myself willingly disengaging from the presented material. I was left to question whether I had "it" in me to go on and seek the relevance Romantic Poetry from the United Kingdom had on my life as second generation Filipina-American woman from Jersey City, New Jersey. This connection became a difficult one to pursue, and was eventually forgotten as my political analysis honed itself around gender, race, and class issues.

I finally accepted the label "artist" upon reading Octavia E. Butler's essay, "Furor Scribendi." In it, she says,

"Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice."

Until that point, I did not realize that I short-changed myself as an artist. In the struggle to define myself as a young adult while laying the foundation for the rest of my adult life, I had completely surrendered my artistic self. In this denial of my true self, the one who lives to create, I accumulated misery. However, with Butler's cue, I wrote my way out of my fragmented self. I then wrote a series of letters to Martha Stewart while she was incarcerated. Letters to Martha has since become my best known work and details the bottom of my depression. Until this day, people who read that chapbook are touched, and feel compelled to let me know --- always a humbling experience. Again, using Butler's model, I became more committed to myself as a writer and performer. I allowed myself to invest the effort in my craft on a daily basis, and the persistence in practice allowed me to move forward and explore my capacities within writing and performance.

In studying the trends of my writing, I noticed that my best work exposed itself when I was the most vulnerable and honest with myself. Therefore, in writing and performing, I always pursue the more difficult choice. The discomfort (whether on the page or stage) allows me to make a real connection with my audience, and much of my current work explores this dynamic between artist and audience. Guns and Tampons: A History of Violence Against Women I Know is a one woman show that challenges our ideas of love and womanhood, and concurrently examines the subtle ways forms found within domestic violence creep up in the relationships between two people. While the show is an amalgam of interviews with women survivors of domestic violence, much of the emotional core is drawn from my own experiences with love in my childhood and adult lives. During the process of interviewing, I transform into one conducting a social investigation, and my work becomes buttressed by material extracted (with permission) from oral histories and interviews of the theme I pursue. Afterwards, I filter it through my contextual lens as a Filipina-American woman with the privilege to code switch between English and Tagalog. I then pour my gathered material though a sieve woven by the fibers of oppression: patriarchy, privilege, racism, sexism, classism, bureaucratic capitalism, imperialism, feudalism and other systematic constructs. Because I work from what I know --- personal experiences, mostly my own --- but especially when borrowed, it is of utmost importance that the narrative I create reflects one's actual experience. Only then is it ready. The product of this process is the art I create: written and performed.

Thus, I have made my artistic process a streamlined science.