Insights in California

About the Book

Insights in California 2003 is the author’s way of thinking about the future, recording memories, and coping with the daily stress of adjusting to her new life in America as a newcomer from the Philippines. Culture shock, social adjustment, widening perspective on different subjects, deepening reflections, heightened faith and convictions—these are some of the topics in this book of poems. Some of them are addresses to real people whom the author got acquainted with or talked with. The style is a marriage of free verse and blank verse though sometimes there is still the attempt to construct patterns of rhythm and rhyme and to follow structure and metrical patterns such as in Haikus on November. In general, however, the writer set herself free from the norms of conservative poetry. And she enjoyed the liberating experience as she did in journalism.

About the Author

Maria Theresa Pantaleon is the daughter of Marino Pantaleon, a lawyer, and Natividad Baltazar, a nurse, in the Philippines. Her lawyer father inspired her whenever she would sit at the back of the courtroom hearing him speak of some familiar lines she would relate to some poems she had read. In college, she had the experience of having her poems published in the campus paper where she served as news reporter at first, then as literary and features editor. She finished AB. journalism and took up M.A. in English literature, M.Ed. and Ed.D. major in educational management. She worked as high school journalism teacher and school paper adviser for 22 years and wrote for different publications while teaching journalism and English grammar and literature in different colleges and universities in the Philippines before coming to California. She passed the LongRidge Writers’ Group writing aptitude test and was published in Today’s Famous Poets—On the Wings of Pegasus, an anthology by the Famous Poets Society of Oregon and also in another anthology by the American Poets Society of Maryland. She served as the editor of Exult Business Journal based in Anaheim, California. She is a Distinguished Member of the International Society of Poets, an Editor’s Choice Awardee of the International Library of Poetry with her poem published in its book. Colors of Life. She is also published in Our 100 Most Famous Poets—Brief Chroniclers of Our Time, by the Famous Poets Society based in Oregon and the International Who’s Who in Poetry by the International Library of Poetry in Maryland. Insights is her first book of poems and its coming out in print is one of her dreams come true—a fulfillment of her father’s dream, too. As well as the completion of her late husband Jan’s graphic work.