POMA, Edgar

POMA, Edgar (b. 4 May 1959), playwright, poet, cultural activist.

Born in Sacramento, California, to Filipino immigrant parents, Edgar Poma is a gay Filipino author residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Raised in a migrant camp outside Walnut Grove, California, he wrote his first literary works when he attended the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate. There he studied playwriting with Carlos Morton, Josephine Miles, Adrienne Kennedy, and Marvin Rosenberg. His poetry, plays, and other creative writings have explored various questions of identity, linking race and ethnicity, family, and sexuality. Poma has also written about AIDS and life in the San Francisco Bay Area and California in general. In 1983 he received the Galbraithe Prize for Poetry.

In 1981 Poma's play Reunion debuted in San Francisco's Latino Mission District; it had two successful runs there. Reunion dramatizes the struggles of a young Chicano student returning home from college with his gay lover. Originally a vignette from a student-written production entitled "El Chicano Moderno" ("The modern Chicano"), it eventually received wide recognition through Poma's collaborations with the late Bay Area Chicano gay artists Rodrigo Reyes and Hank Tavera. The reading of Reunion in 1981 as part of the presentation of the National Theatre of Aztlán or TENAZ (Teatro Nacional de Aztlán) at the International Latin American Theatre Festival in San Francisco signaled the first time gay issues had been addressed directly in a play in Chicano/Latino context. Though well received in the larger community, festival coordinators refused to grant the play full production space, arguing that its material might be "offensive" to Latin American participants.

Poma's literary work reflects the conflicts and struggles of his life as a gay Filipino American. Drawing from his community's historical and regional experiences, he was part of Bay Area Philipino American Writers (BAYPAW) in the early 1980s. In 1985 BAYPAW published Without Names: A Collection of Poems, in which Poma contributed three of his own works. The group itself, like its literary productions, emerged from an earlier cultural collective, the Kearney St. Workshop in San Francisco.

Poma's work has appeared in Ploughshares (Spring 1986), the Asian Pacific American Journal (Fall/Winter 1995), Flippin': Filipinos on America (1996), Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America (1997), and Growing Up Filipino (2003). In 1995 one of his poems was read literally by thousands of residents throughout the Bay Area when it appeared in Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains as part of the city's Poetry in Transit program. Entitled "Passenger," the poem speaks poignantly about the desire to show the world to a frail companion dying of AIDS.

Poma's first full-length play about contemporary Filipino life was Little Train, mounted by Teatro Ng Tanaan (Theater for Everyone) at San Francisco's Mission Cultural Center. The dark two-act play was about a Filipino-American career woman dealing ineptly with her aging immigrant parents. His other plays include Summoning (performed at the New Conservatory Theatre), and Studly Guy Baptized in the River (also mounted by Teatro Ng Tanaan), Tim the Puritan (presented as part of HBO's first New Writers Workshop in 1994), and Hypnotista, Warm Embrace, and The Fame Game (produced for the City College of San Francisco's Festival of American Playwrights of Color, I, II, and III). In 1995 he received a California Arts Council Grant for playwriting. Commenting about his work in "The Little Boy Who Fell in the Puka," Poma remarks that the story "encompasses some of [my] favorite themes: power, migrant farm worker history, sentimentality, a nagging undercurrent of loneliness, and a terrible unmasking, all in the backdrops of Hawaii and Northern California" (Brainard, p. 160).

Bibliography

Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra, ed. Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America. Pasig City, Phillipines: Anvil Publishing, 1997.

Poma, Edgar. "The Black Kite," " Easter Light," and "In the Orchard, Behind the House." In Without Names: A Collection of Poems. San Francisco: Kearney Street Workshop Press, 1985.

——. "The End of Awkwardness." In Flippin': Filipinos on America. New York: The Asian American Writers' Workshop, 1996.

Horacio N. Roque Ramírez

see alsoreyes, rodrigo; tavera, hank; theater and performance.