Born and raised in Manila in the Philippines, Hannah Keziah Agustin is the daughter of Ilocano parents who went from the barrio to the city to pursue opportunity—which was also what made her family immigrate to Wisconsin in 2019. These journeys have deeply shaped the stories that Hannah writes about as a journalist, essayist, and poet.
When Hannah moved to the United States, she was 18 and wanted to tell stories that liberated the people around her, especially migrants like her who grappled with the challenges of their new world. This pushed her to double major in English and film studies, researching narratives of colonialism, exile, and the diaspora. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, she was an active member of the University Honors Program, the Southeast Asian Organization, and The Muse, her university’s literary journal, where she was the nonfiction editor. Hannah wrote essays and poems that were later published in renowned literary magazines like North American Review, Electric Literature, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
Writing about her experience as an immigrant, she was the recipient of the 2023 Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets from Michigan Quarterly Review, the 2022 W.W. Norton Writers Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2021 Bernice Slote Award for Emerging Nonfiction Writers from Prairie Schooner. Hannah has also received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Key West Literary Seminar, Indiana University Writers Conference, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and Image Journal.
After graduating from college, Hannah started working as a social media coordinator and writer for InterVarsity USA, a nationwide campus ministry headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, where she creates content to grow students and faculty into world changers. She is a freelance journalist who covers events in Southeast Asia for Christianity Today, with a recent article being about the effects of church scandals on the faith of Gen Z Filipinos. As a member of the Sojourners Journalism Cohort, Hannah will be writing opinion pieces about migration and labor from a Christian social justice lens. In all that she writes, she fights for the liberation of all people, especially the people of her homeland, the Philippines.
