Jojo Soria de Veyra

Vicente Ignacio Soria de Veyra (born October 28, 1961 in Tacloban City), better known as Jojo Soria de Veyra, is a Filipino painter, editor of diskurso art magazine, curator, blogger of arts/cultural/social/political criticism, poet, short fiction writer, musician and . A dropout of the University of the Philippines Diliman College of Fine Arts in the mid-1980s, his one-man show titled The New Middle Class and the Remaking of Our SoHo, Our Spray-Painted Little Section of the City and other fictions, held in 2019 at Altro Mondo Gallery at The Picasso Boutique Serviced Residences in Makati, has been deemed notable, while his painting has been described as "subtle . . . in exemplifying the here and now."
As an art critic, de Veyra has been tagged as a populist, with a leaning towards the identification of the relationship between artworks' efforts or functions and the societies or niche surrounding them. He has also advocated for significant creation and curation, as well as for the promotion of art through participatory criticism. “To be honest, all we need is just one art review that a handful of people would react to, for us to be able to say that we have a social, living art-critical culture as opposed to an art culture living only in the individual reviewer’s head,” he stated in one talk. The art magazine online that he edits, diskurso.com, has been hailed as among the meager number of Philippine websites and publications seriously engaging in criticism.
A writing fellow in the 1987 Silliman National Writers Workshop and the 1988 UP National Writers Workshop (where he was awarded a Likhaan Award for his poems in English) as well as in the 1988 Silliman University first semester-long seminars-workshop, de Veyra has published his poems in local and international publications, including the Luis Francia-edited Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Philippine Literature in English and the Ethos Books and Anvil Publishing co-published anthology Love Gathers All. Some of de Veyra's pieces have become favorites in classroom exchanges.
De Veyra has released e-books of his poems. Many of his poetry pieces have been noted for their elliptical bent, as with "Testigo", with which he has been described as being "more interested in the rhetoric of the voice, even the rhetoric of silence or not being able to say what one wants to say."
* Religioso/Espiritual (2019)
* Allegoria (2018)
* Tension (2017)

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