[2] According to The New York Times Book Review, "Realuyo’s lucid prose, unencumbered by sentimentality or hindsight, lends freshness to the conflicts of his somewhat familiar characters and color to a setting both impoverished and alluring.
The anthology maps Asian American life in New York City, beginning with works by poet Jose Garcia Villa in the 1930s and the birth of the Asian-American literary and political movement in the 1970s.
The collection also explores the more contemporary voices of Pico Iyer, Bharati Mukherjee, Henry Chang, Xu Xi, Maxine Hong Kingston, Kimiko Hahn, Vijay Seshadri, Betty T. Kao, Wang Ping, and many others.
Ranging in age from 16 to 87, more than sixty writers and artists look at love and loss, work and history, identity and sexuality, loneliness and dislocation, giving a closer look at the most diverse ethnic community in the United States.
Realuyo began his writing through his plays and poetry in elementary school in Manila, where he wrote in his native language Pilipino (Tagalog), but later shifted to English when his family immigrated to the United States when he was a teenager.
The poem's inclusion in U2's The Joshua Tree anniversary concert tour received much media attention and highlighted the plight of Filipino domestics in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
He is the founder of We Speak America,[23] an English Language podcast for adult learners, a project that won a business plan award while he was at Harvard.
[25] He has recently completed a new fiction book about the Filipino-American experience in New York City, The F.L.I.P Show (recipient of an Urban Artist Initiative Grant and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction[26]), a new collection of poems, The Rebel Sonnets, and is currently working on a second novel and another poetry collection, The War Theory (recipient of Queens Council on the Arts Grant and a Yaddo Fellowship).
He holds a Master's of Education degree with a focus on Technology and Innovation from Harvard University, where he also served as a Social Entrepreneurship Fellow at John F. Kennedy School of Government's Center for Public Leadership.