Nationality 1: Philippine

Nationality 2: American

Rick Barot, the author of “Bonnard's Garden,” was born in the Philippines but grew up near San Francisco, California. He attended Wesleyan University, in Connecticut; the coveted Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa; and Stanford University, in California. Upon graduating, he began teaching poetry at Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner fellow. He next moved to the Pacific Northwest; in the early 2000s, he was working as an assistant professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University, in Tacoma, Washington.

When he first started college, Barot thought that he wanted to become a lawyer. Although he had been encouraged by teachers to follow a writing career, he thought that he needed to tackle something more academically challenging; passing English classes had always been easy, but he did not see that as a reason to make writing his life's work. However...