2018 California Book Award Finalist
 "Reyes writes with conviction about the various ways imperialism transforms women into 'capital, collateral, damaged soul.' However, the women that appear throughout the book are not merely victims; in Reyes's radical cosmology, these women—these daughters—are rebels, saints, revolutionaries, and torchbearers, 'sharp-tongued, willful.' This book is a call to arms against oppressive languages, systems, and traditions."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
 "Infused with Spanish and Tagalog, Reyes's beautiful, angry verse shines throughout. For a wide range of readers."—Library Journal, starred review
 Invocation to Daughters is a book of prayers, psalms, and odes for Filipina girls and women trying to survive and make sense of their own situations. Writing in an English inflected with Tagalog and Spanish, in meditations on the relationship between fathers and daughters and impassioned pleas on behalf of victims of brutality, Barbara Jane Reyes unleashes the colonized tongue in a lyrical feminist broadside written from a place of shared humanity.
 Praise for Invocation to Daughters:
 "Against violence against women, Barbara Jane Reyes rips and runs, jumping off Audre Lorde's 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,' Invocation to Daughters recombines registers—prayers, pleas and elegy—braiding a trilingual triple-threat, a 3-pronged poetics that enjambs and reconfigures the formal with the street, utterance with erasure, the prose sentence with the liminal. Invocation to Daughters reminds me of the 70's in the East Bay, when Jessica Hagedorn met Ntozake Shange and ignited a green flash seen from horizon to horizon. Barbara Jane Reyes is one of the Bay Area's incendiary voices."—Sesshu Foster
 "Invocation to Daughters is a space for multitudes, a hypnotic collection that draws from family history—particularly the complex cultural gendered dynamic between father and daughter—in order to create a manual for emancipation from the interior and exterior binds that keep us from ourselves. Through prayers, calls to actions, and testimonies, Reyes invents 'a language so that we know ourselves, so that we may sing, and tell, and pray.'"—Carmen Giménez Smith

Invocation to Daughters: City Lights Spotlight No. 16 (City Lights Spotlight, 16)

Literature & Fiction

Reyes, Barbara Jane

Poetry

City Lights Publishers

Poetry. Asian American Studies. POETA EN SAN FRANCISCO is the winner of the highly prestigious James Laughlin Award for 2005, awarded annually from the Academy of American Poetry and the only prize for a second book of poetry in the United States. Although Reyes' first book was not as widely known as the first book of many of the other eligible poets, the judges nevertheless courageously chose this risky, radical, and deserving second book put out by an energetic but very small publisher. Reyes received her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, where she also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Filipino American literary publication Maganda. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, Gravities of Center, was published by Arkipelago Books (SF) in 2003.

Poeta En San Francisco

Tinfish Press

A collection of lyric essays/creative non-fiction about growing up into and practicing Pinay poetry/poetics, as a young immigrant and daughter of hustling immigrants, woman of color writer, educator and mentor.\nAbout the author: 
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020).\nShe was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is also the author Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), which received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry, To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015), and Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishers, 2017). 
Her seventh book, Wanna Peek Into My Notebook?: Notes on Pinay Liminality, is forthcoming from Paloma Press in 2022.\nShe is also the author of the chapbooks Easter Sunday (Ypolita Press, 2008) Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008), and For the City that Nearly Broke Me (Aztlán Libre Press, 2012).\nHer work is published or forthcoming in Arroyo Literary Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, As/Us, Boxcar Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Chain, Eleven Eleven, Entropy, Fairy Tale Review, Fourteen Hills, Hambone, Kartika Review, Lantern Review, New American Writing, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Origins Journal, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, TAYO Literary Magazine, World Literature Today, xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics, among others.\nAn Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, she received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley and her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University. She is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco's Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program. She lives with her husband, educator and poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.

Wanna Peek Into My Notebook?: Notes on Pinay Liminality

Literary

Paloma Press

Tagalog is a language spoken by twenty-two million people in the Philippines. Diwata is a Tagalog term meaning "muse." Diwata is also a term for a mythical being who resides in nature, and who human communities must acknowledge, respect, and appease in order to live harmoniously in this world.
In her book Diwata, Barbara Jane Reyes frames her poems between the Book of Genesis creation story and the Tagalog creation myth, placing her work somewhere culturally between both traditions. Also setting the tone for her poems is the death and large shadow cast by her grandfather, a World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor, who has passed onto her the responsibility of remembering. Reyes' voice is grounded in her community's traditions and histories, despite war and geographical dislocation.
From "Estuary 2":
She was born with fins and fishtail, A quick blade slicing water.
She was her father's mermaid child, A river demon, elders said.
She mimicked her cetaceous brothers, Abalone diving bluest depths.
She polished smooth her brothers' masks, Inlaid nacre half moon eyes.
She lit oak pyres and bade the wind A whispered requiem.
Barbara Jane Reyes is author of two previous poetry collections including Poeta en San Francisco, which was awarded the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as adjunct professor in Philippine studies at the University of San Francisco.
 From National Book Critics Circle: Diwata as a mythological invocation takes the reader back to pre-colonial Philippines when the belief in these god and goddesses shaped the everyday lives on the Southeast Asian archipelago. They have now become your muses as you reach toward this cultural legacy to shape a distinct postmodern poetics in which you don’t simply erase colonial history- you build with that narrative as well."

Diwata (American Poets Continuum, 123)

BOA Editions, Ltd.

Barbara Jane Reyes answers the questions of Filipino American girls and young women of color with bold affirmations of hard-won empathy, fierce intelligence, and a fine-tuned B.S. detector. The Brown Girl of these poems is fed up with being shushed, with being constantly told how foreign and unattractive and unwanted she is. She's flipping tables and throwing chairs. She's raising her voice. She's keeping a sharp focus on the violences committed against her every day, and she's writing through the depths of her "otherness" to find beauty and even grace amidst her rage. Simultaneously looking into the mirror and out into the world, Reyes exposes the sensitive nerve-endings of life under patriarchy as a visible immigrant woman of color as she reaches towards her unflinching center.

Letters to a Young Brown Girl (American Poets Continuum Series, 182)