Rona dove into writing at the age of 11 when her auntie gifted her a diary for her birthday. As an only child, female, and with immigrant parents for whom American was their third language and culture, she had lots to say. Although her first love was singing and dancing, a passion for books and her facility with the written word, which drew much attention from her teachers, pointed to an equally tantalizing route towards becoming a writer. She was enrolled at the Uni as an English major, obediently fulfilling required G.E.’s when an opportunity to sing professionally yanked her back to the original dream.

But where’s the conflict? Alongside her developing performance career in New York City, she wrote. Poetry, screenplays, songs, blogs.

Two albums worth of songs written for her rock band, Quasilulu, are available on streaming platforms.

Four blogs, which ran simultaneously for several years, are no longer accessible, but in summary were:

Faster in New York, a weekly account detailing her yearlong experiment of fasting once a week.

Apple Jams, a prose and poetry collection of character observations made on her 1 hour commute via NYC subways and bike rides to and from an office job.

Quips Across the Universe, prose and poetic sketches inspired from travels.

Letters to the Aegean, a romantic epistolary dialogue with the Greek sea.

More recently, Rona received her MFA in Writing from Columbia University, where she was awarded a Teaching Fellowship and served as a Chair’s Fellow the year before. She’s also a literary translator from French and Tagalog. Several writing projects are currently burning her brain cells, among them a chapbook of mistranslated songs and a novel in verse.