Lawrence Ypil

Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is a poet and nonfiction writer from Cebu, Philippines. Ypil is currently a Lecturer at Yale-NUS.^[1]

He earned his first Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) while on a Fulbright fellowship at Washington University in St Louis, and another MFA in Non-Fiction Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.^[1]

The Highest Hiding Place: Poems won the 2011 Madrigal-Gonzalez First Book Award and was a finalist for the Gintong Aklat Awards in 2010.^[2]

Ypil's second book, The Experiment of the Tropics was the co-winner of the 1st Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize (with Jenifer Sang Eun Park's Autobiography of A Horse: A Poem). It was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in Gay Poetry^[3] and on the Editor's Long List for The Believer Book Awards in 2019.^[4] The book examines archival photographs of Ypil's hometown, Cebu, during the American Period. Ypil describes the process of writing this book as revealing both historical place and himself: "By looking at the photographs, I ended up looking through them, and eventually discovered myself. It felt like looking at beautiful, deep, dark mirrors."^[5]

Books

• The Highest Hiding Place: Poems (2009)
• The Experiment of the Tropics: Poems ISBN 978-0982814253 (2019)

Critical reception

A review in Singapore Unbound says: "The Experiment of the Tropics is a meditation on the nature of cities, the revelatory power of photography, and the startling capacity of poetry to cut into the violent but redemptive parts of history."^[6]