Lit & Luz Events Recap
We partnered up with Lit & Luz Festival this fall to offer a variety of programming.
Part of our Fall programming was done in collaboration with the Lit & Luz Festival, a Chicago-based celebration of language, literature, and art. The Lit & Luz Festival supports writers and artists through programs of international cultural exchange, creating space for essential dialogues between residents of Mexico and the United States. The Center for Latinx Literature of the Americas collaborated with the Festival for three events this semester. Find a recap of each of these events below.
Anthony Cody
Writer, Anthony Cody, kicked off Lit & Luz's programming with a keynote address and marked our first collaboration with MAKE Lit. Cody addressed the theme for this year’s Lit and Luz Festival, “Revision,” and he shared important insights both about his family history and his off-the-page writing process. Cody interspersed his talk with readings of his poetry, and the event culminated with a conversation between Cody and CLXLA director Daniel Borzutzky. If you missed this keynote address, you can view it at Lit & Luz’s YouTube page.
Dolores Dorantes & Robin Myers
For our second event with the Lit & Luz Festival, we invited US-based Mexican poet Dolores Dorantes as well as the English-language translator of Dorantes’s work, Robin Myers, to UIC’s campus for a bilingual reading and discussion. Dorantes read selections from her collection Copia in Spanish, each of which was followed by a reading of Myers’s translation. The event concluded with a discussion between Dorantes, Myers, and the audience, in which they discussed the nature of poetics, translation, and international collaboration.
Panel Discussion
Our final co-sponsored event was a lively panel discussion about the upcoming anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. We were joined by anthology editor Ruben Quesada along with contributors ir’ene lara silva and Sheryl Luna, each of whom read a poem and a brief passage of an essay. Afterward, the three of them joined Center director Daniel Borzutzky for a conversation about the origins of the anthology, the craft of poetry, and Latinx identity. If you missed this panel, you can watch the recording on Lit & Luz’s YouTube page.
