Hi! I'm Avril Shakira Villar
Avril Shakira Villar is a writer and youth leader from the Philippines. She is the author of I Live Because I Almost Died and an alumna of WriteGirl LA. She is one of the finalists in the English Poetry category of the 2025 Maningning Miclat Art Foundation competition. Her poems appear in Adi Magazine, Evanescent Magazine, Arcana Poetry Press, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Renard Press, and other literary magazines.
I write about everything — and I mean everything. The politics that make you want to scream and the flowers that make you forget why you were screaming in the first place. Migration, grief, the price of eggs, the thing your mother said that you're still thinking about four years later. The big unbearable things and the small ordinary ones that turn out, upon closer inspection, to also be unbearable, or beautiful, or both at the same time. If it is happening, if it is real, if someone somewhere is living it, I write about it.