Writer, poet, playwright, and former humanities professor Virginia Reyes Moreno passed away on Aug. 14. She was 98.
Known to her peers as “the high priestess” and “the empress dowager of Philippine poetry,” Moreno was a faculty member of the then UP College of Arts and Sciences in the late 1950s. In 1959, she co-founded the UP Department of Humanities, now the UP Department of Art Studies.
As chairperson of the now defunct UP President’s Council on the Arts, Moreno founded the UP Film Center in 1976 and served as its director until her retirement in 1989. In 2003, the UP Film Center was merged with the UP College of Mass Communication Department of Film and Audiovisual Communication to become the UP Film Institute.
From 1970 to 1982, she was a consistent member of the UP President’s Council on the Arts, either as chair, vice chair, or consultative board member.
Known nationally and internationally for her literary works, Moreno was the author of the play “Straw Patriot” (1956). Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez translated this into Filipino in 1967 as “Bayaning Huwad.” In 1969, “The Onyx Wolf,” also known as “La Lobra Negra” and “Itim Asu,” won the National Historical Playwriting Contest. The Cultural Center of the Philippines turned the play into a ballet performance a year later, with National Artist for Dance Alice Reyes as the lead.
“Itim Asu” was also staged in 1984, 1990, and in February 2020 as part of the 50th season of Ballet Philippines. Moreno was at last year’s presentation prior to its cancellation because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Moreno’s first and only book on poetry, “Batik Maker and Other Poems,” received the first prize of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature (poetry) in 1972. Handcrafted, and with a cover and pages made of imported material, it was a gem—literally and figuratively. Its titular piece “Batik Maker,” and “Order for Masks” were featured in Philippine literature textbooks, and came to be studied by generations of Filipino students.
In 1984, Moreno won the Southeast Asia (SEA) Write Award, which recognizes the impact of her literary excellence and cultural leadership on Southeast Asia. In 1991, the French government made her a chevalier (knight) of the “Ordre des Palmes Academiques” (Order of Academic Palms in France), conferred on persons with distinguished contributions to education and culture.
Moreno finished her bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1948, and obtained an MA in English literature in 1952 from UP. She was a Fulbright scholar at the Kansas Institute of International Education (1953), a Rockefeller Foundation fellow for creative writing in New York (1954), a fellow for poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Workshop in Middlebury (1954), and a resident fellow at the International Writers Program of the University of Iowa (1973). In Europe, she spent time in Bellagio for a writing fellowship; went to London to study theater and film at the British Film Institute (1969, 1973); and to Paris to study at the Center of Drama (1972). She visited Japan, India, France, Germany, Sweden, and the former Yugoslavia to observe the cinema (1976).
Moreno was also the lone female member of the Ravens, a fellowship of younger writers founded by National Artist for Literature Jose Garcia Villa.
She was born on April 24, 1923 in Gagalangin, Tondo, Manila. Her ship-captain father died when she was only six years old, leaving their rice-trader mother to raise her and two younger siblings: UP alumnus and fashion icon Jose “Pitoy” Moreno, and Milagros, who was also an entrepreneur like their parents. She established the J. Moreno Foundation, Inc. in honor of Pitoy Moreno, and served as its president until her passing.
According to Facebook posts of relatives on her Facebook account, Moreno’s burial was on Aug. 17 and an online memorial will be held on the ninth day after her death, details of which will be announced soon on www.facebook.com/morenovirginiar.