Reader’s Choice: Karla P. Delgado

Karla P. Delgado | Art by Tine Paz-Yap

Many people include reading more as their New Year’s resolution. It’s a way to expand your world, to learn more, and to immerse yourself in the myriad of narratives that shape the reading scene. This is why I’ve launched a book series, where I ask friends to share their book recommendations—whether fiction or non-fiction, local or international—and the stories behind why these books matter to them.

Starting off, I’ve asked Karla Delgado—writer, co-founder of Kai Farms, and chief sustainability officer of Transnational Diversified Group (TDG), a business group of progressive, globally competitive companies that handle logistics, transportation, supply chain, and storage—to share her current reads, book recommendations, and the one book that changed her life.

What book are you reading now?

I enjoy keeping a pile of books next to my bed:

• “Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food” by Doreen G. Fernandez and Edilberto N. Alegre

• “Balikha: Regenerating Earth with the Wisdom of the Ancient” by Ronnie Yumang

• “Home Doctor: Natural Healing with Herbs, Condiments, Spices” by Dr. P.S. Phadke

What’s your favorite book?

I don’t think I can choose just one.

What book changed your life and why?

“The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis. I discovered the sheer joy of reading!

If you had one book you would like in your library, what would it be?

Curious to read “Zom-Fam: Poems” by Kama La Mackerel.

Which author would you want to have dinner with, and why?

Kama La Mackerel.

This is from their website: “Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator, and literary translator who believes in love, justice, and self and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the lines between traditional artistic disciplines to create hybrid aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge.”

“At once narratological and theoretical, personal and political, their interdisciplinary method, developed over the past decade, is grounded in ritual, meditation, ancestral healing modalities, auto-ethnography, oral history, archival research, and community-arts facilitation.”