Cinelle Barnes is a formerly undocumented memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of MONSOON MANSION: A MEMOIR (Little A, 2018, Booklist starred review) and MALAYA: ESSAYS ON FREEDOM (Little A, 2019), and the editor of the New York Times New & Noteworthy book, A MEASURE OF BELONGING: 21 WRITERS OF COLOR ON THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH (Hub City Press, 2020).

Cinelle earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Longreads, Garden & Gun, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed Reader, Literary Hub, Hyphen, and CNN Philippines, among others. Her essay, “Carefree White Girls, Careful Brown Girls”, is anthologized in A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home (Catapult, 2020). Cinelle was a contributing editor, instructor, and writer at Catapult.

Cinelle’s work has received fellowships and grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, VONA, Kundiman, the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund, the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant, and Capita. Her debut memoir was listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Bustle and nominated for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award. She is the 2021 Vulgar Geniuses Nonfiction Honorary Awardee for her writing and social justice work and 2021 writer-in-residence at Pasadena City College, and was a Focus Fellowship artist-in-residence at AIR Serenbe in 2020, a short-term writer-in-residence at City of Asylum in 2019, and the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, where she and her family live. In 2021, Cinelle was named one of 50 Most Influential by Charleston Business, joining thought leaders in state and local politics, the arts, academia, activism, healthcare, and business.

She is currently at work on a immigrant travel memoir.

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