Lina X. Aguirre
Lina X. Aguirre is originally from Colombia and now lives in Athens, Georgia. She is a writer, editor, scholar of Latin American poetry and animation, and curator of experimental animation. She has a PhD in Latin American literatures and cultures from Ohio State University. She is currently learning how to be a
wife and mother, and how to live as a Latina immigrant in the United States. The Deafness of Snow, initially published in Spain in 2017 (Editorial Ultramarina C&D), is her first individual book of poetry. Her writing explores aspects of the contemporary female experience, and the role that crafts, material
culture, traditions, and the transmission of memory between generations, play in it. She firmly believes in the creation of ties between women as an alternative, in order to counteract the isolation and violence of present-day life, and in the healing power of creative production.
Judith Santopietro
Judith Santopietro was born in 1983 in Córdoba (State of Veracruz, México), where she started to write
narrative and poetry. However, she also grew up between Ixhuatlán del Café and Boca del Monte, towns
from the Highlands where her family is from. There she heard the first stories about nahuales,
chaneques, flying women and other extraordinary beings from the Meso-American world. Her native
language is Spanish, but she learned Nahuatl due to political convictions, and also to honor her female
ancestors, who dreamed and lived in this language. Judith has a Master's degree from University of
Texas at Austin, and has done research residencies at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American
Studies (Texas), Leiden University (The Netherlands), and also in the Sierra de Zongolica and Tecomate
(Veracruz), New York and Bolivia.
She has published the following books: Palabras de Agua (Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura-Praxis) and a
first Spanish version of Tiawanaku. Poems from the Mother Coqa (Hanan Harawin Editores, 2017). Also,
the essay “Nahua Migrants Celebrate Santiago Apóstol: an exercise of commonality in New York”
(Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, 2017/ Leiden University Press, 2016). She received the National
Poetry Award Lázara Meldiú 2014, and was a finalist in the International Literary Award “Aura Estrada”
2017.
She has also published her poetry in Anuario de Poesía Mexicana 2006 from Fondo de Cultura
Económica, Rio Grande Review, La Jornada and The Brooklyn Rail, and has participated in a number of
festivals, including World Voices Festival from PEN America in New York, in 2018.
Some of her passions include the project Iguanazul: literatura en lenguas originarias, photography,
participating in traditional dances and rituals, observing hawks and looking through her book of poems
from the Tang Dinasty, written on rice paper with Chinese ideograms. Currently, she writes narratives of
migration about indigenous communities in the US.
@judesantopietro
Andrea Moro
The Staircase (Theater)
Fall 2019
Andrea Moro has a degree in Acting from Universidad Finis Tearrae in Chile, and a Masters degree in
Drama Therapy from New York University. She is author of the plays No soy la novia (I am not the Bride),
La escalera (The Staircase) and Zigoto, which have been staged mainly in Chile. In 2006, the Chilean
independent press, Cierto Pez, published the book No soy la novia; seguida de La escalera as part of a
collection dedicated to contemporary young Chilean women playwrights. Besides her career in theater,
Andrea has undertaken a long spiritual journey. She studied Mindfulness at Universidad del desarrollo in
Chile, is a Reiki master, has received training in several massage techniques and has carried out direct
transmission learning with Amazonic medicine healers. Currently, she runs a holistic center in the slope
of the Andeas precordillera in Santiago de Chile.
Mariana Betancur
The Invisible Route (Personal essays)
Mariana Betancur was born in Tabio, a small Colombian town in the Bogotá Savannah. She studied
literature with a minor in creative literature at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. She has lived in
this city for five years. The contrast between the place where she grew up and the overwhelming, yet
fascinating, speed of Bogotá, became, during her college years, the leitmotiv of her writing. La ruta
invisible (The Invisible Route) is her first collection of personal essays; in the book she explores, through
the experience of space and traveling, the intricacies of a changing identity. She currently runs her own
bookbinding workshop, where she makes handcrafted notebooks. Mariana declares that this craft has
strengthened her connection with writing, because through each notebook she makes, she is activating
the mechanism needed for all of us to return to writing.