About

Gemma Guillermo was born in the Philippines and raised in Hawaii. She received both her B.A. in English and M.D. from Cornell University and lives in the Northern California Bay Area. Her writing explores themes of migration, identity, family, and class through a cross-cultural lens. She is a past recipient of the William Carlos Williams Prize for medical students, and her poetry and essays have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, American Literary Review, Hawai'i Review, and Kartika Review, where her memoir story “Slaying Monsters” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a 2025 Tin House Summer Workshop Fellow, working under the mentorship of Edgar Gomez. With the intimacy of a family photo album and the precision of clinical insight, Guillermo explores intergenerational trauma, cultural erasure, and the fragile boundaries between caretaking and disappearing into that role.  She has recently completed a memoir about growing up in Hawai‘i as the daughter of Filipino immigrants and is seeking representation.