Member Profile

Patria Rivera is the author of Puti/White (2005), shortlisted for the Canadian Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and The Bride Anthology (2007), both published by Frontenac House Media. Her latest poetry collection, BE, was released by Signature Editions in 2011. She is also a co-recipient of the 2007 Filipino Global Literary Award for Poetry.

Rivera won an honourable mention in the 1997 ARC National Poetry Magazine Poem of the Year Contest and has received fellowships to the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada and the Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat Centre in Scotland.

In 2005, Rivera’s poem, “Rare species,” was selected as the second prize winner in the Eric Hill Award of Poetic Excellence competition held by QWERTY, a literary journal published by the English Department of the University of New Brunswick.

In 2009, her poetry was anthologized in the Oxford University Press series, Perspectives on Ideology. Her chapbook, Weathering, an exchange of poems, was also released in 2008 by Silver Maple Press.

Born and raised in the Philippines, Rivera graduated with a journalism degree from the University of the Philippines. She has also undertaken media and editing studies at the International Training Institute in Sydney, Australia, the International Institute for Journalism in Berlin, Germany, and the Nieman Centre for Journalism at Harvard University. She lives with her family in Toronto’s east end.