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Please join us for a reading with Nita Noveno (Nonfiction, 2002 ) as she sits down with Gina Apostol to discuss her memoir Mud on the Moon.
About the Book:
Mud on the Moon is a hybrid memoir that intertwines a daughter’s exploration of her Filipino immigrant father’s obscured past with a reimagined version of his untold story. Born in Southeast Alaska, Nita Noveno traces the legacy of her father, who arrived in the US in 1928 as part of a wave of Filipino men seeking better opportunities through manual labor in agriculture and other industries. The book alternates between Nita’s coming-of-age story and imagined chapters of her father’s life, revealing the gaps and silences that lie between their experiences. With a blend of personal and historical imagery, Mud on the Moon offers a rare glimpse into the lives of Filipino immigrants in America. It is a meditation on how family, memory, and identity are shaped by the stories we inherit, both spoken and unspoken, across generations.
“Mud on the Moon is a lyrical, innovative memoir linking Philippine history to the American present, and the American past to Filipino lives, asking us to see contemporary America, especially but not only Filipino America, in novel ways, in both meanings of that word: as a complex and layered narrative demanding to be told and as an art experiment raising stakes on not only what it means to be American but also what it means to make art. Risk-taking, clear-eyed, but always artful, engaging, and above all embracing of multiple worlds and times, Noveno is a voice for our complex moment.”
—Gina Apostol, author of La Tercera and Insurrecto
“Mud on the Moon is a beautiful story of a daughter in the act of knowing her father. Noveno collects and creates the threads of his story, stitching and restitching memories, records, artifacts, history, mystery, and fiction. A delight of formal invention, this memoir brilliantly weaves narrative and photograph, father and daughter, fact and fiction, creating a moving, rich, multifaceted portrayal of the life of her father, a Filipino immigrant to the US, and her own.”
—Ananda Lima, author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and Mother/land
Presented by the Creative Writing Program at The New School for Social Research.
The New School offered the first academic creative writing workshop in 1931 and pioneered a new philosophy of education. The idea: students would make their own lives and their own stories part of their education. Today, The New School continues to celebrate and cultivate daring and diverse new voices through its Creative Writing program. The value of this approach is reflected in the publications and achievements of our MFA Creative Writing graduates and faculty.
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Nita Noveno is the recipient of the 2024 Women's Prose Prize from Red Hen Press for her hybrid memoir Mud on the Moon (August 2026). A graduate of The New School's MFA Creative Writing Program, her creative nonfiction and hybrid work has appeared in MĀNOA, Hippocampus, The Margins, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction, composition, and literature at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, and is the founder and host emeritus of Sunday Salon, a long-running New York City reading series. The child of Filipino immigrant parents, she grew up in Southeast Alaska and now lives in Queens, NY.
Gina Apostol is the author of five novels, among them Insurrecto, named by Publishers Weekly one of the Ten Best Books of 2018, and her most recent, La Tercera, selected an Editors’ Choice of the New York Times. She has been awarded the Rome Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award, and two Philippine National Book Awards, among other honors, fellowships, and residencies. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines.
