Trinidad Tarrosa-Subido

Trinidad Tarrosa-Subido (1912,Shanghai, China – 1994) was a Filipino linguist and poet.

Biography

Trinidad Tarrosa-Subido was born in Shanghai, where her father worked as a musician. After her father's death, she and her mother returned to Manila in 1917. She graduated from Manila East High School, and in 1929, she took the civil service examination in order to work in the Bureau of Education, and passed it with a grade of 97 percent, the highest then on record. She enrolled as a working student at the University of the Philippines at Padre Faura (commonly known as UP Manila) in 1932 and met her husband Abelardo Subido. She became a member of the UP Writers Club and contributed her sonnets.

She got married in 1936 and graduated magna cum laude the following year. She then began to work at the Institute of National Language. In 1940, she published "Tagalog Phoenetics and Orthography", which she co-authored with Virginia Gamboa-Mendoza. In 1945, she and her husband published poems titled "Two Voices", with an introduction by Salvador P. Lopez.

After the war, the Subidos put up a daily newspaper, "The Manila Post", which closed in 1947 and made her a freelance writer. She then became editor of "Kislap-Graphic" and "Philippine Home Economics Journal".

She retired in 1971, and in 1984, she was invited by the Women in Media Now to write the introduction to "Filipina I", the first anthology consisting of works made exclusively by Filipino women. She was honored in 1991 by the Unyon ng Mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL).

She died in 1994.

In 2002, her family published a manuscript Tarrosa-Subido had been working on at the time of her death. Titled "Private Edition: Sonnets and Other Poems" (Milestone Publication), the retrospective volume contains 89 poems, a few of them revised and retitled versions of the originals.