Photo by Jose Lagman
Renato Gandia is a Filipino-Canadian writer whose work explores faith, migration, memory, belonging, and queer identity.
He is the winner of the 2026 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. His work has appeared in Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing (Cormorant Books), Beyond the Concert Hall (Laberinto Press), Yay! queer: Free and Queer (Inkd Publishing), The Leaves Still Fallow (Big Thinking Publishing), and other literary publications and anthologies.
Renato is the author of the forthcoming memoir Unpriesting (Freehand Books) and the forthcoming poetry collection Eating Rice on Our Feet. He is the managing editor of Salingpusa and the acquisition editor of Constellations of Becoming: Queer Futures and Other Worlds, an anthology of speculative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.
He lives in Calgary and writes about the stories we inherit, the selves we abandon, and the people who teach us how to begin again.
Renato Gandia 