Lawrence Ypil
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is a poet and nonfiction writer from Cebu, Philippines. Ypil is currently a Lecturer at Yale-NUS. 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 University of Iowa. "The Highest Hiding Place: Poems" won the 2011 Madrigal-Gonzalez First Book Award and was a finalist for the Gintong Aklat Awards in 2010. 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 and on the Editor's Long List for The Believer Book Awards in 2019. 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." 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."