Biographical Note
Carlene Sobrino Bonnivier was born in 1940 in Los Angeles, California, two weeks after the death of her father, Gerhard Gustav Bonnivier, and four weeks after her mother, Marciana Cesaria Sobrino, was released from detainment at the Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco, California. Her parents met and married in the Philippines where her American father was stationed with the United States Cavalry. Bonnivier grew up in Los Angeles, in the Bunker Hill neighborhood known as Filipinotown.
At age seventeen, Bonnivier moved to Washington, D.C., and began working in the White House. Later, she worked in the United States Congress and the Office of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. In 1972, she graduated from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and joined the National Teacher Corps as a volunteer in Salinas, California. Afterwards, she joined the Peace Corps and taught in Malaysia while earning a master's degree in cross-cultural education from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bonnivier continued her education at the University of Denver and studied cross-training theater at Perseverance Theater in Juneau, Alaska.
Bonnivier spent most of her adult life living and teaching in Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, Japan, and Spain. Her experiences abroad heavily influenced her textbook Reading Attack Skills for Adults (1984) and her novel Autobiography of a Stranger (1993), which was published under the name Kalifa Sobrino Bonnivier.
In 1998, Bonnivier began teaching at Kadena High School in Okinawa, Japan. After returning to the United States, she continued teaching language arts and writing at the University of San Francisco, the University of California, Irvine, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Starting in 2010, Bonnivier held writing workshops while collecting stories of those who lived in historic Filipinotown in Los Angeles. These stories contributed to her novel Seeking Thirst (2009) as well as the book Filipinotown: Voices from Los Angeles (2013). Based on this project, she created the readers’ theater Up Against the Wall. Bonnivier also wrote and produced the musical Warrior based on the 1977 evictions at the International Hotel in San Francisco.