A B O U T
Rachel Evangeline Chiong is a Toronto-based author and poet. She has won the Norma Epstein Foundation Award in poetry and published her short stories in Humainologie and Augur. Her poem “Kabangka” is the namesake and inspiration for the Filipinx-Canadian Youth leadership organization: Kabangka. Thanks to the talent of cartoonist Sven, her kindest friend and favorite collaborator, she is a Doug Wright-nominated writer for “Index” a collection of Sven’s works. The anthology includes her debut comic “Celestine” and notably an adaptation of her poem “Dark Magic”.
She attributes her long-term, frenzied situationship with music to her husband, Jon Catanus, who is a jazz, hip-hop/RnB drummer. Sometimes, she writes articles on music and culture for publications such as Exclaim! and Musicworks. She attributes her exploration of the Filipino identity to herself, because she is Filipino. All of the time, she is involved in the community as a member of Salaysay, a collective of Filipino/a/x writers in Toronto, and as the secretary at the Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts & Culture. She believes that as much as language is an art it is also a science and graduated the University of Toronto as a linguist specialist with a focus on ultrasound technology.
She is currently working on her fantasy novel “The Malady and the Moon-eater”, which has been awarded Ontario Arts Council’s Recommender Grants and was long listed in Voyage’s Spring 2021 First Chapters Contest. She is under blood oath to finish it by December 2024.
