Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is one of the writers who built Filipino-American literature into something a reader could find on a shelf. Her best-known novel, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, first published as Song of Yvonne in Manila in 1991 and brought out in the United States in 1994, is told through a nine-year-old girl living through the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, her war braided together with the folktales her family's cook recites.

Born in Cebu in 1947, Brainard began writing after her father died when she was nine. She studied communication arts in the Philippines and filmmaking at UCLA, immigrated to the United States in the late 1960s, and settled in California, where she has long taught in the Writers' Program at UCLA Extension and helped train a later generation of Filipino-American writers.

Her fiction keeps returning to a single invented city she calls Ubec, Cebu spelled backward. The novels Magdalena (2002) and The Newspaper Widow (2017), and the story collections Woman with Horns and Acapulco at Sunset, move through Philippine history, war, and the lives of women, and her work has been translated into Finnish and Turkish.

As much as the novels, it is her editing that shaped the field. Brainard assembled anthologies that gave Filipino-American writing a shared home, including Fiction by Filipinos in America and the classroom staple Growing Up Filipino, now several volumes deep. She co-founded the group Philippine American Women Writers and Artists and started a small press to keep these books in print.

Reviewing the war novel, Kirkus counted her among the writers giving Filipino-American experience its literary due. Her subjects are Philippine history and memory, the diaspora, and the women too often left out of the record. For a list of living Filipino authors, she is one of its elders, and one of its builders.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.