Event Type
Join us for an evening of poetry that spans the experimental, the political, the sonic, and the deeply personal: a celebration of Mexico's dynamic literary present featuring four extraordinary voices from Mexico alongside two exceptional translators based in New Orleans and Mexico City.
Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola creates experimental poetry that fuses language with performance, sound, film, drawing, and installation. Her recent work includes The Telaraña Circuit (Tender Buttons, 2023), Templos en erupción (2025), and her debut album REZO (Insect Poem)—an ode to the stridulation of insects. Co-editor of diSONARE, an experimental editorial platform from Mexico City, Hinojosa Gaxiola has performed and exhibited at venues from Fonoteca Nacional to The Poetry Project.
Hugo García Manríquez, poet, translator, and scholar with a PhD from UC Berkeley, explores language and political economy in works like A-H. A Reading of NAFTA and Lo Común. As a translator, he has brought essential works by William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Jack Spicer, and Sean Bonney into Spanish. García Manríquez will be translated by Cameron Lovejoy, New Orleans-based poet, editor, and book artist who operates the micro-press Tilted House.
Karen Villeda, award-winning author of seven poetry collections, three essay collections, and three children's books, brings her genre-defying work that explores the intersections of literature and multimedia through her project POETronicA. Her most recent collection, Teoría de cuerdas (String Theory), has garnered international acclaim, and her work appears in the Library of Congress Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape—a rare honor for Mexican poets. Villeda will be translated by Whitney DeVos, founding member of NAFTA (the North American Free Translation Agreement) and scholar of Indigenous languages, whose translations have appeared in The New Yorker, POETRY, and Best Literary Translations 2026.
Román Luján, poet, scholar, and translator based in the Bay Area, explores a poetics of anti-assimilation in works like Sánafabich, examining the history of violence on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Winner of three national poetry prizes in Mexico, his work has been translated into English, German, and Finnish. His first full English-language collection, Imagenigma, is forthcoming from Cardboard House Press.