Launch of Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color

Duriel E. Harris, Ching-In Chen, Ruben Quesada, and Francisco Aragón help celebrate Volume 1, Number 1 of a new literary magazine dedicated to queer poets of color. 

Nepantla is a new poetry e-journal being curated by Christopher Soto in collaboration with The Lambda Literary Foundation. The mission of Nepantla is to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community. The journal will be a groundbreaking collection of some the best poetry from the Queer Poets of Color community. 

A poet, performer, sound artist and scholar, Duriel E Harris is co-founder of the Black Took Collective and has been awarded grants from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. A MacDowell Colony and Pan African Literary Forum fellow, Harris is an associate professor of English and teaches creative writing and poetics at Illinois State University.

Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart's Traffic and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. A Kundiman, Lambda and Callaloo Fellow, they are part of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities, and have been a participant in Sharon Bridgforth's Theatrical Jazz Institute. They have been awarded fellowships from Soul Mountain Retreat, Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Colony, and the Norman Mailer Center. In Milwaukee, they are Cream City Review's editor-in-chief, senior editor of The Conversant, and serve on the board of Woodland Pattern. 

Ruben Quesada is founder and publisher of Codex Journal, poetry editor for Cobalt Review, and poetry curator for Luna Luna Magazine. He teaches English and Creative Writing for the Performing Arts at Eastern Illinois University. He is at work on a second collection of poetry and on an anthology of Latin@ poetics. 

Francisco Aragón is the author of two books: Puerta del Sol and Glow of Our Sweat. Recent journal publications include MiPoesias, Mandorla, and Great River Review. A faculty member at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, he is also the editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry.

Co-sponsored with the Lambda Literary Foundation