Immigrant

Joaquín Zihuatanejo is the proud descendant of migrant field workers. He is a poet, author, spoken word artist, and award-winning teacher. Born and raised in the barrio of East Dallas, Joaquín strives to capture the duality of the Chicano culture in his work. He has been called “one of the most dynamic and passionate performance poets in the country, melding equal parts comedy, poetry, and dramatic monologue into a crowd pleasing display of verbal fireworks.” Joaquín was the Inaugural Poet Laureate for the city of Dallas and a recipient of a $50,000 Laureate Fellowship Prize by the Academy of American Poets in honor of his outstanding work as Dallas’ first poet laureate. He is a two-time World Poetry Slam champion and HBO Def Poet. His work has been featured on NBC, HBO, and NPR. Joaquín received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the author of Arsonist, which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry as selected by Eduardo C. Corral. Joaquín’s 2023 groundbreaking collection, Occupy Whiteness, is a collection of hybrid erasures, but more than that, it is an act of rebellion that reclaims spaces and highlights a history of erasure of Brown life. His first children’s book, Something That Lives Between the Two, is expected in early 2028. Joaquín has two passions in his life: his wife Aída and poetry—always in that order.David Bowles is a Mexican American writer and translator from South Texas, where he teaches literature and Nahuatl as a professor at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. Among his more than forty award-winning books are They Call Me Güero; My Two Border Towns; Ancient Night; Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Maya Poetry; The Prince & the Coyote; and Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico. His work has also been published in multiple anthologies and textbooks, plus venues such as The New York Times, The Emancipator, School Library Journal, Rattle, Translation Review, and the Journal of Children’s Literature. In 2019, he co-founded the hashtag and activist movement #DignidadLiteraria, which successfully fought for greater Latinx representation in publishing. He is a past president of the Texas Institute of Letters.