Looking Back at 20 Years of Letras Latinas: Dan Vera

Photos thanks to Adrian Gaston Garcia and Valerie Martínez. From left to right: Adrian Gaston Garcia talking to Dan Vera at the book signing table. Ofelia Montelongo, Dan Vera, and Adrian Gaston Garcia posed together with a copy of Latino Poetry held between them. Panel discussion moderated by Sami Miranda featuring Dan Vera, Blas Falconer, and Valerie Martínez sitting on stage together.

---

As a writer and reader I’ve been both witness and beneficiary of  Letras Latinas' 20 years of work connecting poets and building communities and audiences for writing. So many of their projects, from the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize and the Pintura Palabra Ekphrastic workshops, to readings and partnerships with organizations like Folger Shakespeare Library, Split This Rock and AWP, have given me unforgettable experiences as a writer and audience member. I don’t believe this would’ve been possible without Letras Latinas. Because while the larger literary world would like to believe it is open to diverse voices, the truth is it takes the insistent and patient work of programs like Letras Latinas, to carefully bridge the divides, to pointedly and diplomatically call out the shortcomings and gaps of institutional and organizational programs, to patiently forge the kinds of precise long-term partnerships that are necessary to building a truly representative and vibrant literary landscape. Letras Latinas has done it with multiple organizations and institutions.

These projects have allowed writers to forge deep connections with one another around the country, many creating close friendships and collaborations. I especially love how Letras Latinas has not only best exemplified, but always nurtured a spirit of literary citizenship by not only creating spaces to expand the conversation, but supporting our efforts to replicate the experience elsewhere.  

All of this dignified work has been accomplished with such graceful subtlety and precision that I fear it can go unnoticed at times. Which is why this anniversary year of celebration and commemoration has been so fitting. I was joking with a friend that I could imagine a future historian of poetry coining an era designation, “BLL” & “ALL,” if you will, for before and after Letras Latinas had done its galvanizing work to expand the poetic conversation, to include the full breadth and depth of modern Latinx poetry. Letras has not been alone in this, but it's hard for me to point to another initiative that has been as effective, and endured as long, and accomplished so much, to alter the consciousness of Latino poetry. As writers and readers and travelers in life, we are all better for it.

That work is far from over, and more important than ever as the climate changes in so many perilous ways. But we have each other in ways that simply didn't exist twenty years ago. We are much stronger writing and working and wondering alongside each other as we struggle, and blossom, and bloom in the future ahead.

— Dan Vera

Dan Vera reading on November 12, 2024 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. for an event titled "We the People of the United States…Ensure Domestic Tranquility."