Looking Back at 20 Years of Letras Latinas: Susana Plotts-Pineda

Top Left: Susana Plotts-Pineda reading an introduction at The University of Notre Dame on October 16, 2024. Top Right: A panel conversation featuring Rigoberto González and Richard Blanco moderated by Susana Plotts-Pineda. Bottom Left: Letras Latinas Director Francisco Aragón, Rigoberto González, Richard Blanco, and Institute for Latino Studies Director Luis Fraga. Bottom Right: Rigoberto González reading.

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Letras Latinas has been incredibly generous in their support of the National Endowment for the Humanities programming initiative surrounding Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, which, as a fellow at Library of America, I helped coordinate. In addition to championing and co-sponsoring events with partners like Beyond Baroque and St. Joe County Public Library, Letras Latinas organized major launch events at MLK Library and in their own Notre Dame campus. I’m deeply grateful to them for placing their trust in me to moderate a conversation between the editor, Rigoberto González and Richard Blanco at the University. 

During this conversation, the poets discussed their own trajectory as well as the work of poets in the anthology who were influential to their writing. I was touched by the opportunity to discuss the ways poetry reckons with the past and the hauntings and gifts of cultural inheritances that can never be wholly apprehended; how it can gesture towards and fill in the what ifs of parallel lives outside of the United States or allow us to hold conversations with those who are no longer here, while always offering more questions than answers. And how, though often bittersweet, it’s in these questions, in all that can’t be fully reconciled, that it shimmers.

–Susana Plotts-Pineda