About

Elsa Valmidiano is an Ilocana-American essayist and poet, whose ancestral roots hail from Uyaoy and Ubbog in Bacnotan, La Union through her mother; and from Labnig, Lapog and the town proper of Cabugao in Ilocos Sur through her father. She acknowledges her Itneg roots through her great-grandfather (her paternal grandmother’s father) from Labnig. Philippine-born and LA-raised, she is a long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Elsa’s 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, The Beginning of Leaving, was published by Querencia Press, and was recognized as part of the American Writers Museum’s Filipino American History Month Reading List for Memoirs. Her essay collections have been featured and reviewed in RHINO, Rain Taxi, Pacific Daily News, Women Who Submit, Tiny Spoon, Anti-Heroin Chic, Marías at Sampaguitas, Halo-Halo Review, and HOME MADE. 

For a complete list of Elsa’s published work, please visit the CV tab.

Elsa was a 2025 Writer in Residence at France’s Château d’Orquevaux International Artists and Writers Residency, and was a recipient of their Denis Diderot Grant. She is a 2017 alum of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, and a 2018 alum of the Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi, Georgia. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. She has read in various locales nationally and internationally. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

Elsa is a law graduate of Syracuse Law with a Certificate of Specialization in Family Law and Social Policy, and received the Award for Jurisprudence of Human Rights. Her legal skills spill into her literary career as an essayist and poet. 

Elsa was a reproductive rights activist for several years with Planned Parenthood in San Francisco, a post-abortion counselor for Exhale in Oakland, and a post-abortion complications care intern at Likhaan—a women’s health organization in Quezon City located in her Motherland, the Philippines. During her months as a post-abortion complications care intern in Quezon City, Elsa split that time facilitating healing exercises, games, art projects, chorus, and creative writing exercises with survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence at a women’s shelter outside Tacloban. 

Last, but not least, she would really like it if you pronounced her last name as her ancestors intended: /väl-mĭ-jänō/.