Alton Melvar M. Dapanas

Assistant Nonfiction Editor

Philippines

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), essayist, poet, and translator from the southern Philippines, is the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Published from South Africa to Japan, from France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish, their latest works have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, The White Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine and nominated twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays, they’re editor-at-large at Asymptote. Find more at their author website.

Articles, essays, and other writing on Panorama byAlton Melvar M. Dapanas can be accessed using the links below.

On the Dagli: A Translator's Note

Within the tradition of Philippine literature written in Filipino, an œuvre distinct from Philippine Anglophone literature and literatures of other local Philippine languages, the dagli...

The Space In Their Lives I Had Left Behind

“… you remained misunderstood because you could not speak the language well enough. One learned to accept the frustration of not being able to express...

An Iteration of Reckoning

In this interview, Alton asked Lavinia about The Best Women’s Travel Writing anthology, the nebulous speculated futures of travel literature – in particular, travel writing...

Fingers Stretched Out Towards The Sun

In Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections (2020), postcolonial literary scholar Corinne Fowler named Louisa Adjoa Parker along with other writers...

My City Can Heal Water Violin, Water Wings

Paris, a metropole of histories and artistry, has long been a muse for writers who navigate its lambent streets and fevered dawns: Zola; Balzac; The...

Heartbeats Behind Our Songs

In Aotearoa New Zealand’s electric contemporary literary scene, Tina Makereti is a Māori novelist, essayist, scholar, and cultural worker with an unmistakable voice whose prose...

llegar es ser parte de un paisaje: Giancarlo Huapaya on Migrant Writings and the Poetic Cartography of the American Sun Belt

In Giancarlo Huapaya’s poetry collection [gamerover], the Arizona State Fair behind his Phoenix home and the open desert of the Tornillo Detention Centre are not...

A Shadow-Country for Misfits: Daryl Lim Wei Jie on Ancestries and Singaporean Food Writing

As co-editor of Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet (2020), the first anthology of its kind, Daryl Lim Wei Jie helped assemble a lineage of...