"There were also horror shows on the radio. Very terrifying and thrilling to me as a kid. They had all these creepy sound effects. They would come on at ten o'clock at night, and I just would scare myself to death." -- Jessica Hagedorn
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn (born 1949) is a Filipino-American playwright, writer, poet, storyteller, musician, and multimedia performance artist.
"Becoming a mother has helped make me a tougher, stronger writer.""But I think there's a genuine joy, too, a sense that no matter what, even if my stomach's growling, I'm going to dance. That's what I want to leave people with at the end of the play. After all this, people still know how to live.""Everything matters. Time is precious.""Growing up in the Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I was a child. It's now gotten very limited. They only make action movies and hard-core exploitation movies. Women get raped; men get shot.""Hybridity keeps me from being rigid about most things. It has taught me to appreciate the contradictions in the world and in my life. I scavenge from the best.""I also identify as a Latin person, a person who has Latin blood.""I don't believe in sampling some Tibetan music just to make it sound groovy, but you do your homework, you understand what you're doing with it.""I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up.""I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.""I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there's a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough.""I'm an underdog person, so I align myself with those who seem to be not considered valuable in polite society.""I'm preparing for a multimedia theater piece, Airport Music, that's coming up in New York City.""Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains.""Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.""My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify.""There are certain regions in the country where the indigenous people eat dogs.""We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child."
Hagedorn was born in Manila to a Scots-Irish-French-Filipino mother and a Filipino-Spanish father with one Chinese ancestor. Moving to San Francisco in 1963, Hagedorn received her education at the American Conservatory Theater training program. To further pursue playwriting and music, she moved to New York in 1978.
Joseph Papp produced her first play Mango Tango in 1978. Hagedorn's other productions include Tenement Lover, Holy Food, and Teenytown. Her mixed media style often incorporates song, poetry, images, and spoken dialogue.
In 1985, 1986, and 1988, she received Macdowell Colony Fellowships, which helped enable her to write the novel Dogeaters, which illuminates many different aspects of Filipino experience, focusing on the influence of America through radio, television, and movie theaters. She shows the complexities of the love-hate relationship many Filipinos in diaspora feel toward their past. After its publication in 1990, her novel earned a 1990 National Book Award nomination and an American Book Award. In 1998, La Jolla Playhouse produced a stage adaptation.
She lives in New York City with her younger daughter.
Chiquita Banana. Third World Women (3rd World Communications, 1972)
Pet Food & Tropical Apparitions (Momo's Press, 1975)
Dangerous Music (Momo's Press, 1975)
Mango Tango (Y'Bird Magazine January 1, 1977)
Dogeaters (Penguin Books, 1990)
Danger and Beauty (City Lights, 2002)
Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (editor) (Penguin Books, 1993)
The Gangster of Love (Houghton Mifflin, 1996)
Burning Heart: A Portrait of the Philippines (with Marissa Roth) (Rizzoli, 1999)
Dream Jungle (Viking Press, 2003)
Anthologies that include Hagedorn's work
Four Young Women, ed. Kenneth Rexroth (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).
Time To Greez! Incantations From the Third World Time To Greez! Incantations From the Third World, eds. Janice Mirikitani, et al. (San Francisco: Glide Pubs., 1975).
American Born and Foreign: An Anthology of Asian American Poetry," eds. Fay Chiang, et al. (New York: Sunbury Press Books, 1979).
Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets, ed. Joseph Bruchac (New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1983).
The Open Boat: Poems From Asian America, ed. Garrett Hongo (New York: Doubleday, 1993).
Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth, eds. Karen Kelly and Evelyn McDonnell (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
Stage Presence: Conversations with Filipino American Performing Artists, ed. Theodore S. Gonzalves (San Francisco and St. Helena: Meritage Press, 2007).
