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Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio is a Filipina-Canadian author, speaker and school board consultant who builds bridges between educators and Filipino families through her initiative, Filipino Talks. After completing her master’s degree in Immigration and Settlement Studies, she graduated from the Humber School for Writers and completed a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She was a finalist for the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award and has been published in various anthologies. She lives in Toronto, ON, where she is writing her second novel.
"""'Why do we call it ""the motherland"" when it isn't where our mothers are?' With these words, Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio begins her extraordinary novel, inviting readers out onto the bridge that so many Filipino families navigate every day, for years, for decades, a crossing-over place of longing, confusion, anger, and complicated love. Here's the real deal, a novel that opens up the world in a new way. Be prepared for goosebumps, tears and laughter. People everywhere, and in Canada, too, have benefited from the love, labor and often blatant exploitation of Filipino women (and men) working abroad, separated from their own beloved families. This book is a double testament--to the heartbreaking human cost of such a system and to the tenacity, humor and strength of the people who survive it."" --Karen Connelly, author of The Change Room and The Lizard Cage ""These are stories that love you, leave you, and come back to you. These stories return jagged, complicated by their departure, and grown in your absence. Austria-Bonifacio documents the Filipino Canadian diaspora with the eyes of a camcorder and the heart of a Filipino surviving outside of the Philippines--holding everything. Here, there is the heat of home and the wrath of winter sticking to your skin and sincerely asking, 'How have you been made a stranger in your own life?'"" --Janice Lobo Sapigao, author of like a solid to a shadow, Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets ""Austria-Bonifacio invites the reader into the fractured and chaotic worlds of Filipino-Canadian families attempting to reassemble after years apart. . . . It is a poignant exploration of cultural loss. Reuniting With Strangers is an absorbing portrait of not only multiple generations of the Filipino-Canadian community, but of the simultaneity of grief and joy when building a life in a new country."" --Quill & Quire ""What's the price of separation? How do we reconnect with the identity and culture we first knew? How much does it take to unify families? Reuniting With Strangers might just be the newest love letter to the Filipino-Canadian community."" --Inquirer ""In these astonishing stories from the perspectives of migrant caregivers, Austria forces us to witness the emotional truths of those in servitude, and desperate to get a leg in the door."" --Catherine Hernandez, award-winning author and screenwriter of Scarborough ""A polyphonic chorus focusing on the lives of reunified Filipinx families--this collective of interlacing stories sings in a minor-major key of sorrow and joy, hurt and hope. Austria-Bonifacio has invented a dazzling form of literary kundiman where all forms of love are present and invited. The result is a truly moving exploration of the psychic costs of separation, buoyed by a giant courageous heart."" --Kyo Maclear, author of Unearthing ""Reuniting with Strangers expertly explores the pain of migration and the bottomless hope of family. Sacrifice threads through the community--a good parent is a good provider, and a good provider is one who leaves. But when a child is abandoned over and over again, his screams are '...the only sound the heart wants to make.' This is the truth Austria-Bonifacio tells in language that is alive, contemporary, vivid. Read this book. You will see the world with fresh compassion."" --Kim Echlin, author of Speak, Silence"
