Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
Born and raised in the Philippines, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (she/her) currently resides in the Netherlands. She is the founder of the online Munabol Writing Sessions for BIPOC youngsters and has led workshops for the Other Futures Festival and for Fiber (a multi-disciplinary art project). Her workshop practice is influenced by Adrienne Maree Brown, Edouard Glissant’s work on relationality, Rolando Vazquez and various thinkers on decoloniality and decolonial practice.
Her interest lies in stimulating and encouraging makers, thinkers and dreamers to explore beyond what is the comfort zone and she is constantly at work developing different approaches and different ways of encouraging prospective writers. Her recent work includes explorations in collaborative and collective story creation and story-making through diverse tools and media.
Rochita attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle in 2009. She was the recipient of the Octavia Butler Scholarship in 2009, “carrying on the legacy of Butler’s powerful “change-the- world” science fiction”. In 2018, Rochita received the Milford Bursary for non-white writers. Rochita’s speculative work has appeared in a variety of online and print publications. In 2021, she released the chapbooks Colonial Dreaming and A Small Assemblage under Alternate Munabol Productions.
Her essays and reviews have been published in a variety of venues. She penned the column called Movements which is still available online at Strange Horizons. More recently, she has begun writing in Dutch. Her first short story in Dutch is published in a Dutch anthology “De Komeet – speculatieve verhalen” in which several speculative writers of diverse cultural backgrounds are inspired by WEB DuBois The Comet published in 1920.