Mud on the Moon - by Nita Noveno (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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 / Wrote for the Devil and Mother/land

About the Author

Nita Noveno teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at The New School, Nita is also the founder and host emeritus of Sunday Salon, a long-running reading series in New York City. Her work has appeared in Mãnoa, Identity Theory, Brink, Hippocampus, The Hunger, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Open City and The Margins, among other publications. Nita grew up in the temperate rainforest of Southeast Alaska and lives in Queens, NY.