Shakira Andrea Sison writes essays, fiction, and poetry.
She is the co-host of KTalk, a Filipino podcast about love, relationships, living abroad, wellness, and current events.
She is currently a regular contributor to Rappler, where she had a weekly column on gender issues, culture, politics, and immigration from 2012 to 2017.
She is the co-author of Don’t Tell Anyone: Literary Smut, a collection of lesbian and gay stories with Ian Rosales Casocot, published by Anvil in 2017.
In 2015, she was among Manila Bulletin’s 15 Women of 2015 who “empower, inspire, and make a difference.” In celebration of International Women’s Month, Panorama magazine also included her in their list of formidable women in “Who Run The World?” Later that year she was also given the Lasallian Scholarum Award for Outstanding Online Feature Story on Youth and Education and was listed first in Buzzfeed’s 17 Incredible Lesbian Pinays.
In 2014, she won the Hildegarde Award for Women in Media and Communication for her essays on gender and efforts in LGBTQ advocacy. Two of her essays, The Krakauer Table (First Prize) and (Insert Her Silence Here) (Second Prize), have won her Palanca Awards in 2013 and 2014, respectively.
She is a veterinarian by education (University of the Philippines Los Baños) and was working towards an MBA (University of the Philippines Diliman) while managing a retail corporation in Manila, Philippines, before relocating to New York in 2002. She worked as a veterinary technician and practice manager in a Brooklyn animal hospital until 2007, when she pivoted to a career in finance supporting C-level executives for 15 years.
She was a poetry fellow at the University of The Philippines National Writers Workshop in 1999. In 2000, she was included in the University of the Philippines Creative Writing Center’s Writers of the New Millennium. She was also a fiction fellow at the Gotham Writer’s Workshop in 2008.
Her work has appeared in the anthologies Motherhood Statements, Tingle, and the San Franciso-published book Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina-American Writers, UP CWC’s Buhay Bahaghari: The Filipino LGBT Chronicles, Esquire Philippines, The Philippine Star, Cosmopolitan Magazine Philippines, The Philippine Daily Inquirer Sunday Magazine, Thought Catalog, and Feministing.
Shakira is a triathlete, an avid skier, a lifelong swimmer, and a long-distance runner, completing the NYC Marathon in 2017. She loves to build terraria and ecospheres, bakes amazing sourdough bread, and is currently learning to play tennis. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada with her wife and pets.
