Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is a poet and nonfiction writer from Cebu, Philippines.
[1] He earned his first Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) while on a Fulbright fellowship at Washington University in St Louis, and another MFA in Non-Fiction Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
[4] The book examines archival photographs of Ypil's hometown, Cebu, during the American Period.
Ypil describes the process of writing this book as revealing both historical place and himself: "By looking at the photographs, I ended up looking through them, and eventually discovered myself.
"[5] A review in Singapore Unbound says: "The Experiment of the Tropics is a meditation on the nature of cities, the revelatory power of photography, and the startling capacity of poetry to cut into the violent but redemptive parts of history.