Elsa Valmidiano
ISBN: 9781965439197
Cover Art and Design: Isobel Francisco
Paper | 6 x 9 | 276 Pages
Publication Date: September 2, 2026
Distributors: Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Thrift Books
Price: $30
Synopsis
With a Foreword by Via Justine De Fant, Elsa Valmidiano’s Puraw Keridx is a hybrid collection of poetry and lyrical prose, which examines the chaos of infidelity at the end of a sixteen-year interracial relationship. Honoring the author’s native language, Ilocano, Puraw Keridx translates to “White Lover,” which carries the more significantly nuanced weight of colonialism, family secrets, and shame. Through moments of rage, disillusionment, empathy, compassion, and grief, Puraw Keridx is not only a testament to the author’s determination to reclaim agency after the destructive nature of her spouse’s infidelity, but also pays homage to the author’s maternal ancestors while ultimately examining how infidelity itself operates within a larger political framework of race, class, gender roles, and the hegemony.
Advance Praise
“Puraw Keridx is a searing examination of love, betrayal, and the ancestral ghosts that mold us. In this collection, Elsa Valmidiano opens the wound of a union disintegrated by infidelity and reveals the larger forces braided through its collapse: colonialism, white supremacy, inherited histories, womanhood, and the brittle architecture of intimacy. With poetic precision and devastating clarity, she traces the fault lines between denial and truth, destruction and desire, cultural memory and personal grief. What begins as heartbreak expands into an urgent meditation on power, race, and survival, transforming private ache into communal witnessing. Puraw Keridx is not simply a narrative of rupture but a reclamation—a love story transfigured into elegy, and a fierce refusal to vanish inside the lies of others.”
—Christina D. Rodriguez, author of Knees in the Garden
“In Puraw Keridx, Valmidiano narrates the shattering impact of infidelity through the lens of patriarchy, racism, addiction, and the familial hauntings that linger long and deep in us. In exploring the impact of the deep, continuous cuts of intergenerational trauma on her significant other, Valmidiano explores also her own, all the while reclaiming a self beyond martyrdom. No one should have to kill off the most precious parts of themselves as offering to the wounded altar of another. So often are we swept up into the spoken-unspoken demand to self-sacrifice, when ‘the truth is, you shouldn’t have to die for anyone, ever.’”
—James Diaz, author of Once More, Into The Light
“Puraw Keridx is a tale of vulnerability, truth, and an Ilocano woman’s ache for ancestral love and safety. In this gripping story, Valmidiano reveals colonial legacies from Spanish, British, Japanese, and American rule over her ancestral home and how they have manifested in the life of a Filipina wife who discovers after sixteen years of a relationship that her white husband has been keeping a white mistress. In this truth-telling, Valmidiano critiques centuries of unchecked colonial white privilege in mixed-race marriages. We have never seen a book like Puraw Keridx before. An unforgettable voice in Filipina American literature.”
—Arielle Taitano Lowe, author of Ocean Mother
Elsa Valmidiano (she/her) is an Ilocana-American essayist and poet. Her debut essay collection from New Rivers Press, We Are No Longer Babaylan, was an Editors’ Choice selection from their Many Voices Project competition in Prose, and was a finalist for the Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction. Her second essay collection from Querencia Press, The Beginning of Leaving, was recognized as part of the American Writers Museum’s Filipino American History Month Reading List for Memoirs, and was selected as the Creative Nonfiction title of the 2024 Independent Book Publishers Association/American Library Association (IBPA/ALA) Catalog. Puraw Keridx is her third essay collection.
