Ricardo "Ricky" Monreal De Ungria (born 1951) is a Filipino poet.
De Ungria was born in 1951 and raised in Paco, Manila. He did spoken word poetry and performed in a rock band in the 1970s. He graduated with a Bachelor's degree cum laude in Literature from the De La Salle University. In 1990, while on a Fulbright Scholarship in the United States, he was awarded an MFA in creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis. He received writing residency fellowships at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in 1991 and the Bellagio Study of Conference Center in 1993.
In 1999, he moved to Davao City to become the first dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences of the newly established University of the Philippines Mindanao campus. In the same year, he founded the Davao Writers Guild, which publishes the works of its members; holds poetry readings; and hosts the Davao Writing Workshops, which started in 2005. The Guild has been publishing Cebuano, Filipino, Davaoeño, Karay-a, and English works in the literary journal Dagmay since 2001. In 2006, they began publishing a monthly literary supplement in SunStar Davao. While serving as Chancellor of UP Mindanao (2001-2007), he also organized the Davao Colleges and Universities Network (DACUN) in 2001 and the Mindanao Studies Consortium Foundation, Inc. (MSCFI) in 2003, both being a consortium of universities in the Davao and Mindanao regions, respectively. In 2004, he also organized the Mindanao Science and Technology Park Consortium Foundation, Inc. that was a consortium of academic institutions and government agencies in the Mintal area of Davao. He had retired from formally teaching creative writing and literature at U.P. Mindanao by 2018.
From 2007 to 2010, de Ungria served as Festival Director of Philippine International Arts Festivals. Around this time, he also sat on the board of judges for the Palanca Awards and chaired the Mindanao Science and Technology Park Consortium. He was a founding member of Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC) in 1981, and a member of the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL). He headed the Committee on Literary Arts at the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), where he became a Commissioner for the Arts in 2009. In 2015 and 2016, he served as director-in-residence of Silliman University's National Writers Workshop. For many years, he was a fellow of the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing in UP Diliman. He has served as a panelist in various writing workshops, including the UP Diliman, Silliman University, Davao Writers Guild, and the Ateneo de Davao Writers workshops. For his achievements in literature and writing, he was awarded the Gawad Balagtas by the UMPIL in 1999 and the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan (Literature) by the City of Manila in 2007. He was also UP Artist 1 from 2009 to 2011 and 2012 to the present time and the recipient of nine National Book Awards as of 2025.
Poetry
Anthology (as editor)
De Ungria's son Nikos died by suicide in 1998. Several of his subsequent poems focus heavily on this topic.