About

Vida Cruz-Borja is a Filipina fantasy and science fiction writer, editor, artist, tarot reader, and conrunner. Her short fiction and essays have been published in F&SF, Fantasy, Strange Horizons, PodCastle, Expanded Horizons, and various anthologies. She won the 2022 IGNYTE Award for Best Creative Nonfiction for “We are the Mountain: A Look at the Inactive Protagonist,” which will be republished in Letters to a Writer of Color in Spring 2023. She is the author of two illustrated fantasy short story collections: Beyond the Line of Trees (2019) and Song of the Mango and Other New Myths (2022). Her work in her different fields has been nominated, longlisted, and recommended for the Hugo Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. (now Otherwise) Award. She was a 2018 Tiptree Fellow. Currently, she’s a freelance book editor with Tessera Editorial and The Darling Axe and is co-director of FiyahCon Fringe BonFiyah under the larger umbrella of FIYAHCON, a BIPOC-centered convention for science fiction and fantasy readers and writers.

Vida also won First Place for the second quarter of the 2017 Writers of the Future contest for her novelette “Odd and Ugly.” She attended the 2014 Clarion Writers Workshop in San Diego, California; the 51st Silliman University National Writers Workshop (Fellow for Fiction); and the 20th Iligan National Writers Workshop (Fellow for Novel-in-Progress). In 2016, she was also a fellow at the first Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio Writers Workshop.

She has also written a variety of articles for the National Book Development Board, the UK’s Postcolonial Studies Association, Spot.ph, GMA News Online, and The Philippine Online Chronicles.

You can find her working on a novel, half a dozen short fiction projects, or an otome game narrative. She lives in Manila with her husband and their dogs.

Drop her a line at hello@vidacruz.org if you’d like advice on your own writing, a commission, or a tarot reading.