Mud on the Moon

 ". . . a beautiful story of a daughter in the act of knowing her father. . . . stitching and restitching memories, records, artifacts, history, mystery, and fiction.”–-Ananda Lima, author of Mother/land

Mud on the Moon by Nita Noveno is a hybrid memoir that weaves a daughter’s journey of discovering her Filipino immigrant father’s hidden past with imaginative storytelling, offering a look into migration, identity, and the intergenerational legacies that shape who we are. 

Mud on the Moon is a hybrid memoir that intertwines a daughter's exploration of her Filipino immigrant father's obscured past with a reimagined version of his untold story.

Born in Southeast Alaska, Nita Noveno traces the legacy of her father, who arrived in the US in 1928 as part of a wave of Filipino men seeking better opportunities through manual labor in agriculture and other industries. The book alternates between Nita's coming-of-age story and imagined chapters of her father's life, revealing the gaps and silences that lie between their experiences. With a blend of personal and historical imagery, Mud on the Moon offers a rare glimpse into the lives of Filipino immigrants in America. It is a meditation on how family, memory, and identity are shaped by the stories we inherit, both spoken and unspoken, across generations.

Nita Noveno teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at The New School, Nita is also the founder and host emeritus of Sunday Salon, a long-running reading series in New York City. Her work has appeared in Mãnoa, Identity Theory, Brink, Hippocampus, The Hunger, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Open City and The Margins, among other publications. Nita grew up in the temperate rainforest of Southeast Alaska and lives in Queens, NY.