Hannah Keziah Agustin

About Hannah Keziah Agustin

Hannah Keziah Agustin was born and raised in the urban sprawl of Metro Manila in the Philippines. With roots in Ilocos Norte and Cagayan Valley, she has spent much of growing up looking back at her ancestral home in the north of the country. She yearned for her grandmother and the rice fields she tended to. She longed for the barrio’s quiet and the stray dogs she befriended there. When her family immigrated to America in 2019, she realized how much her life has existed in the fractures of displacement. Her aunts were caregivers in the Arab Peninsula, and her uncles were seafarers in Greece. Her mother was a nurse at a care home in Wisconsin, where she found herself at 18 years old. It is within and around these absences that Hannah works as a poet, essayist, and translator.

Hannah’s writing explores exile, spirituality, and transnational labor. She received the 2024 Page Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets from Michigan Quarterly Review, the 2022 W. W. Norton Writer’s Prize, and the 2021 Bernice Slote Award for Emerging Nonfiction Writers from Prairie Schooner. A writer whose work straddles many genres, her essays appear in Best American Essays 2025, Best Spiritual Literature 2025, North American Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and her poems appear in Poetry Northwest, Black Warrior Review, Electric Literature, among others. She has also co-translated a collection of poems for children by Vijae Alquisola titled Whenever You Are Silent (University of the Philippines Press). She has received support from Ragdale, VONA, Brooklyn Poets, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Key West Literary Seminar, Indiana University Writers Conference, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and many other organizations.

Hannah is currently pursuing her MFA in Literary Reportage at New York University, where she is doing research on the rise of Christian Zionism in the Philippines, and the intertwined struggle of Filipino and Palestinians against occupation. Before going back to school, she was a religion reporter who freelanced for National Catholic Reporter, Christianity Today, and Sojourners, covering spirituality and politics in Asia and America. She also worked in non-profit communications for a national campus ministry that provided space for young people to explore their faith. Outside of the academy, Hannah sings in a church in East Harlem, and organizes with GABRIELA New York, a feminist organization that fights against gender-based violence in the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora.