TWICE HONORED, STILL HUMBLE: The Quiet Brilliance of Palanca Awardee Al Jeffrey Gonzales

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I. Roots and Roads

Al Jeffrey L. Gonzales was raised between two worlds—half in Batad’s salt-breathed air, half in the city’s clamor. The radio, the gossip, the flicker of late-night TV—they were his first teachers in rhythm and story. “I was surrounded by narratives before I knew what they were,” he says, smiling. “Maybe that’s why I write—to make sense of the noise.”

In those early years, curiosity became compass. He saw how even the smallest stories—farmers waiting for rain, women trading laughter at the market—could carry truth. It’s this intimacy with the ordinary that would later define both his writing and his teaching. “Stories,” he says softly, “are the way we hold memory.”

That instinct—to give language to the overlooked—followed him into the classroom. “When I teach creative writing,” he tells his students at the Iloilo State University of Fisheries Science and Technology (ISUFST), “I ask you to go back home—to your barangay, to your grandmother’s voice, to the corners no one bothers to see. That’s where real literature hides.”

II. The Weight of Winning

In the world of Philippine letters, few names earn two consecutive Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. When Gonzales did, it wasn’t victory he first felt—it was relief. “Someone once said it’s harder to second come than to become,” he muses. “The first Palanca was disbelief. The second? Legitimacy.”

The Palanca, often dubbed the Pulitzer of the Philippines, is not merely a medal. It is both crown and compass. For Gonzales, who aptly uses the pen name Aligmat—meaning “to stay awake”—the recognition silenced the quiet self-doubt that haunts most artists. “I’ve always wondered if I was a real writer,” he admits. “The second win didn’t answer that completely—but it gave me peace.”

But prestige has never been the goal. “The award just reminded me that the stories we tell must serve someone other than ourselves,” he says. “It’s not about applause; it’s about awareness.” In true ISUFST creative work fashion—where purpose outshines pride—Gonzales treats the Palanca not as a finish line, but as proof that authenticity still resonates.

His triumph also mirrors the university’s growing national stature: a CHED-recognized Center of Development in Fisheries, ISO-certified, globally ranked, and passionately Filipino at heart. Excellence, for both Gonzales and ISUFST, is not a trophy—it’s a duty lived daily.

“Al’s back-to-back Palanca is not just a medal on a shelf; it is a light turned on for our students who are learning to name their own truths. At ISUFST, we measure excellence by service—when craft returns to the coastline as courage, when stories come home to our communities. Aligmat reminds us that a fisheries university must also be a university of memory and meaning.”

III. The Craft and the Classroom

When Gonzales left his former post to join ISUFST, he quoted Nanny McPhee: “When you need me but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, I must go.” For him, ISUFST was a new frontier—young, brave, unfinished. “I wanted to be where I could matter,” he says. “Here, I feel that.”

Inside his class, writing is both craft and courage. Chairs may be mismatched, but the conversations are electric. Students read aloud, laugh nervously, then realize they’ve said something true. “I don’t demand perfection,” he explains. “I ask for honesty.”

One afternoon, a student submitted a play about abuse. It was raw, haunting. Later, she confessed it was her own story. “That changed me,” Gonzales recalls. “It reminded me that writing isn’t just art—it’s refuge.”

He anchors his lessons in empathy, teaching that revision is not punishment but persistence. “Some truths need time,” he tells them. “Even rejection has rhythm.” He often shares how Bagat, his Palanca-winning story, was once turned down by both a workshop and a contest. “Maybe it was destined to wait,” he shrugs. “That’s what writing—and life—teach us: patience.”

IV. Beyond the Page

Gonzales dreams not of fame but of a reading culture reborn. “If I could spark one habit in every student,” he says, “it’s to read for wonder again.” He believes that readers become thinkers, and thinkers become better citizens—echoing ISUFST’s mission to produce empowered, globally competitive graduates who serve both people and planet.

Beyond Al’s own wins, ISUFST’s creative bench is quietly deep. Fellow Palanca awardee and ISUFST Main Campus-Tiwi Site educator Kim Pillo-Frufonga—whose work Al once translated—stands shoulder to shoulder with the University Creative Works Office (UCWO) team, a circle of faculty and staff who keep reminding the campus that the arts are not extras but essentials. Together, they champion poems, plays, stories, films, and translations as both scholarship and soul work—ways of thinking rigorously, feeling fully, and staying anchored to community. It is the same current that runs through Gonzales’s classroom, where the books he loves become bridges to the voices his students are discovering.

His literary influences—Mary Oliver, Louise Glück, Kazuo Ishiguro, Nick Joaquin, Leoncio Deriada, Alice Tan Gonzales, among others—walk quietly through his syllabi. Yet he never imposes them. “I want my students to find their own voices,” he insists. “When they do, the world listens differently.”

He credits mentors like Dr. Hazel P. Villa and the late Dr. Leoncio P. Deriada for shaping his path. “They taught me that stories from the regions—our stories—are not provincial; they’re powerful.” Now he passes that belief on, fostering creative communities through workshops and networks like LIRA, Sunday Club, and Bathalad-Sugbo.

Though wary of the rise of artificial intelligence in writing, Gonzales keeps faith in the human heart. “AI can mimic form,” he says, “but it can’t feel wonder—or guilt, or longing.” For him, technology is tool, not threat: a way to widen access without thinning soul.

Outside campus, he joins readings and lectures, balancing the “celebrity” side of authorship with the quiet discipline of teaching. “Writers,” he says, “are keepers of memory. The world forgets too easily. We write so it remembers.”

And when asked what keeps him writing, after back-to-back wins and unending work, his answer is simple: “Gratitude. The world has been kind. Writing is how I say thank you.”

In the story of Al Jeffrey Gonzales, we find the soul of ISUFST itself—rooted in humble beginnings, reaching for excellence, and never forgetting the people whose lives give stories meaning.

Here, awards are not the end of a journey but the echo of a promise: that truth, told bravely, can still change the tide. (Herman Lagon | PAMMCO)