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, where she works as a psychiatrist. 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 a Pushcart-nominated essayist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, American Literary Review, Hawai'i Review, and Kartika Review. She is a 2025 Tin House Summer Workshop Fellow and the winner of the 2025 Black Warrior Review Nonfiction Contest. She is currently at work on her manuscript, a memoir about a daughter of Filipino immigrants growing up in Hawaii. 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.