Gina Apostol was born in Manila and lives in New York. She went to college at the University of the Philippines and earned her M.A. in Writing from the Johns Hopkins University. Her first novel, Bibliolepsy, won the 1998 Philippine National Book Award for Fiction. She just completed her third novel,The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, a comic historical novel-in-footnotes about the Philippine war for independence against Spain and America in 1896. Her latest, Gun Dealers' Daughter, recently won the PEN/Open Book Award and will come out in paperback this fall. She is currently working on a novel about the Philippine-American war, William McKinley's World.