Pureza Neri Ramos Library

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Pureza Neri Ramos Library

A research and resource center for arts and culture writing in Cagayan de Oro and Northern Mindanao

18/03/2026

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐆𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐄𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐚𝐝𝐦𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐢 𝐋. 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐳 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐋𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫á𝐥 𝐈𝐬𝐬𝐮𝐞 #𝟏: 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬

Padmapani L. Perez is co-founder of Mt. Cloud Bookshop in Baguio City. Padma authored Green Entanglements: Nature Conservation and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Indonesia and the Philippines (2018, University of the Philippines Press), and its companion children’s book, Shelah Goes to a Da-ngah (2016, Alam-am Publishing). She is lead editor of the award-winning anthology, Harvest Moon: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis (2021), and co-editor of Tiw-tiwong: An Uncyclopedia to Life, Living, and Art in Baguio, the Cordilleras, and Beyond (2022). She currently works in Mt Cloud Bookshop and organizes creative collaborations and conversations on writing and restoring our ecological relations. She is a volunteer for the Save Baguio Market Movement.

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Literál Issue #1 is accepting submissions on public markets until April 24, 2026. For inquiries, email us at [email protected].

11/03/2026

Literál is now accepting submissions for its first issue on public markets.

The thriving of public markets signals the fissures of how urbanization fails to integrate with the place and its inhabitants. This phenomenon testifies that the imagined world itself is outside the majority of its inhabitants’ access, and thus, is proof against the urbanized place’s habitability amidst homogenization, commercialization, and corporate standardization. Urbanization proposes that progress is monolithic, homogenous, and linear, and thus, is an illusion that we aim to dismantle.

We prompt everyone to expand on the public market as both concept and site for resistance against colonial and capitalist modes of what socioeconomic progress may look like through critical, historical, cultural, and/or ecological purviews. These explorations do not merely necessitate an examination of socioeconomic stratifications and economic growth; it also urges us to rethink the states of precarity that we each inhabit and how we ourselves are stakeholders as part of these communities once these public markets collapse under the hands of corporate privatization.

We invite everyone to reflect on how public markets remain significant in your locality regardless of social mobility and socioeconomic backgrounds, how it has shaped and shifted your perception regarding cultures and communities, and how our collective efforts to defend it may foster spaces for alternative ways of collaborative world-building where an imagined future, albeit precarious, becomes a more habitable time to live in.

For this issue, we accept interviews, essays, short stories, critiques, hybrid works, and mixed media submissions. Works must not exceed 3,000 words. You may submit your works at [email protected] until April 24, 2026. Accepted works will be published on our online platform and in print.

For inquiries, send your questions at [email protected].

10/03/2026

The Pureza Neri Ramos Library (PNR Library) of Carmen Art District is proud to launch its arts & criticism wing, Literál Journal!

Literál is a CDO-based arts & criticism journal dedicated to promoting critical conversations on local and translocal issues on art, culture, and society today. The journal urges everyone to look beyond what is ‘normal’ or ‘literal’ through discursive ways of reimagining the world outside our preconceived modes of how it is made. We are concerned with thinking that comes undone and is refashioned through uncanny ways of world-making where the minute and the peripheralized takes center stage and traditional thought itself becomes defamiliarized, comes apart, and is remade.

Stay tuned to our first call for submissions on local and translocal issues surrounding the role of public markets in interrogating our notions of progress vis-à-vis urbanization in our localities.

09/03/2026

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫á𝐥'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐝, 𝐉𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚 𝐂. 𝐒𝐮𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐛

Jessa C. Suganob is a translingual writer working with image, text, and ephemera. She writes and translates in English, French, Filipino, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and Kinaray’a in her works. Her published writings are accessible in Kritika Kultura, ANMLY, Hulagway: Empire & Emporia, Petrichor, OF ZOOS, TLDTD, LUMIN Journal, and elsewhere.

She is currently based in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines.

Jessa has been speaking about the politics of independent publishing and alternative circuits of literary and cultural production for various institutions nationally and internationally. She was a writing fellow in the 20th Ateneo National Writers Workshop. Her collaborative zine So We Must Meet / Apart has been a finalist for the 2024 Big Other Readers’ Choice Awards. She was Associate Editor for the independent nonprofit Los Baños-based arts and criticism platform The Basement by Magpies Press.

Jessa is currently the Director of Literary Arts in Carmen Art District.

08/03/2026

Stay tuned for our literary programs! -PNR Library

Address

CARMEN ART DISTRICT, #20 Andres Fernandez, Carmen
Cagayan De Oro
9000

Website

https://www.facebook.com/CarmenArtDistrict

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