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Ann van Wijgerden

Ann van Wijgerden writes poetry that refuses the comfort of separation. For her, the human is not an observer of the earth but a continuation of it, and the planet is not scenery but an interior condition. The crises we name as external, poverty, violence, ecological collapse, are present in the body, the family, the private room. And what breaks in the private room echoes outward into the world.

Dutch by birth, she has lived in Manila for more than three decades. She arrived in 1988 at twenty eight with her husband Paul for work in primary health care training and found herself in Tondo along Manila Bay, a landscape of dense poverty where she once went months without seeing a blade of grass, a bird, or a tree. After a period back in the Netherlands, she returned in 2008 and co founded Young Focus, which now supports over a thousand young people through education.

Her debut collection Dear Planet is deeply autobiographical, yet it moves with a systems mind, tracing how colonial histories, public policies, and family silences circulate through one shared fabric of suffering. The poems do not offer neat healing. Instead they practice attention, a discipline of looking and listening long enough to hold grief and beauty in one breath, where birdsong, tides, garden paths, and falling petals do not erase pain but accompany it.