Ninotchka Rosca (born in the Philippines in 1946) is a Filipina feminist, author, journalist and human rights activist who is active in GABRIELA Network USA, a member of the MARIPOSA ALLIANCE (Ma-Al), a multi-racial, multi-ethnic women's activist center for understanding the intersectionality of class, race and gender oppressions, toward a more comprehensive practice of women's liberation. As a novelist, Rosca was a recipient of the American Book Award in 1993 for her novel Twice Blessed.
Rosca is active in the Women's Anti-Imperialist League (WAIL) and is a contemporary Asian-American who is known for the short stories Bitter Country and Monsoon Country. Her short stories had been featured in the 1986 Best 100 Short Stories in the United States by Raymond Carver and the Missouri Review collection of their Best Published Stories in 25 Years, while another was included in the Ms Magazine's Best Fiction in 30 Years. She is also the author of the best-selling English language novels State of War and Twice Blessed. The latter won her the 1993 American Book Award for excellence in literature. Her most recent book is JMS: At Home In The World, co-written with the controversial Jose Maria Sison, who has been included in the U.S. list of "terrorists".
Rosca was a political prisoner under the dictatorial government of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. She was forced into exile to Hawaii, United States when threatened with a second arrest for her human rights activism by the Marcos regime. Rosca has been designated as one of the 12 Asian-American Women of Hope by the Bread and Roses Cultural Project. These women were chosen by scholars and community leaders for their courage, compassion and commitment in helping to shape society. They are considered role models for young people of color, who, in the words of Gloria Steinem, "have been denied the knowledge that greatness looks like them."
Rosca had been a leader in Amnesty International and the PEN American Center. Rosca was also a founder and the first national chair of the GABNet, the largest and only US-Philippines women's solidarity mass organization. She is the international spokesperson of GABNet's Purple Rose Campaign against the trafficking of women, with an emphasis on Filipinas.
She was the Director of Communications and Development at the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health and lived in San Jose, California.
She attended the University of the Philippines and lives in Queens borough of New York City. Her lecture schedules are managed by Speak Out Now. A huge fan of science fiction, Rosca reads four books a week (three "light," one "heavy"). She is divorced and has two children.
She was at the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women which took place in Beijing, China, and at the UN's World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria. At the latter, she drafted the Survivors Statement, signed by four Nobel Prize winners and hundreds of former prisoners of conscience. This statement first applied the phrase "modern day slavery" to the traffic of women. It was in Vienna as well where the slogan "women's rights are human rights" gained international prominence; Rosca had brought it from the Philippine women's movement and helped launch it internationally.
Rosca was press secretary of the The Hague International Women's Tribunal on Japan's WWII Military Sex Slavery which convicted Japan's wartime era leadership for creating and using the Comfort Women. Rosca is particularly concerned with the origins of women's oppression and the interface between class, race and gender exploitation, so that women can move toward greater theory building and practice of a comprehensive genuine women's liberation. She often speaks on such issues as sex tourism, trafficking, the mail-order bride industry, and violence against women, and the labor export component of globalization under imperialism.
Rosca's Canadian fans call her "The First Lady of Philippine Literature." She is currently a correspondent for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the most widely-read broadsheet in the Philippines.
