Adrian De Leon was born in Manila, Philippines but called Scarborough, Toronto home for many years. After graduating with an honours BA in English literature from the University of Toronto, Scarborough, he received direct entry into the PhD programme in history at the University of Toronto. His dissertation is entitled “In the Image of Industry: Indigeneity and Migrant Labor in the Making of Filipino America.” De Leon was an ethnic studies professor at the University of Southern California, the 2023–2024 Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History at Simon Fraser University, and is currently a professor of American and Philippine histories at New York University. He now resides in New York City. De Leon’s memoir, Notes From a Wayward Son, will be published in May 2026.
De Leon was one of three editors of Feel Ways: A Scarborough Anthology (Mawenzi House, 2021).
Poetry
barangay: an offshore poem
Photographs by Jason Edward Pagaduan.
Hamilton, Ont.: Buckrider Books/Wolsak & Wynn, 2021.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
As beautiful and varied as an archipelago, barangay is an elegant new collection of poetry from Adrian De Leon that gathers in and arranges the difficult pieces of a scattered history. While mourning the loss of his grandmother who “lived, loved and grieved in three languages,” De Leon skips his barangay, which is both a boat and an administrative unit in the Philippine government, over the history of both his family and a nation. In these poems De Leon considers the deadly impact of colonialism, the far-reaching effects of the diaspora from the Philippines and the personal loss of his ability to speak Ilokano, his grandmother’s native tongue. These are spare, haunting poems, which wash over the reader like the waves of the ocean the barangays navigated long ago and then pull the reader into their current like the rivers De Leon left behind.
Poetry
Rouge: Poems
Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2018.
PS8607 .E23525 R68 2018
Publisher’s Synopsis
Toronto the not-so-good? This series of poems is a response to the 2012 Danzig Street mass shooting at a block party in Toronto’s Scarborough area, during a period when gun violence had reached a peak in the city. Here the city’s east end becomes a source of poetic inspiration, and the east-west subway line as the organizing structure. Going from west to east, each poem is informed by a TTC subway stop, inspiring form, voice and content. We get meditations, commentary, and visual poetry. The conclusion is a pair of poems, both titled “Rouge”: the first makes use of reports, songs, and tweets that appeared following the shooting and the second is a lyrical response.