Meet our Poetry Coalition Fellow

Gabriel Ramirez, 2024 - 2025 Poetry Coalition Fellow

Thanks to support from the Academy of American Poets, Gabriel Ramirez is CantoMundo's Poetry Coalition Fellow, one of six fellows positioned at similar organizations nationwide. Poetry Coalition Fellows gain first-hand experience managing a non-profit arts organization. His duties include guiding the selection committee to review and select new CantoMundistas and helping organize and host the off-site CantoMundo reading at the AWP Conference in Los Angeles. He is a CantoMundo fellow, and his direct experience with the organization makes his insights and suggestions invaluable.

Enjoy this short interview with Gabriel.

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CANTOMUNDO: When did you become a CantoMundista?

GABRIEL RAMIREZ: 2019 in NYC. I have some precious memories from that year. 

CM: What drew you to CantoMundo?

GR: I didn’t know many Latinx poets or writers that were my age. I was lucky to have had people like Willie Perdomo and Elizabeth Acevedo to look up to through Urban Word NYC. 

CM: Why did you want to be a Poetry Coalition Fellow, and what do you hope to accomplish?

GR: I attended CantoMundo for my second year at ASU in 2024, and in our community care circle, I was vocal about what I would like to see improved within the organization and retreat. Jackie Balderrama, the former director, and other CantoMundistas encouraged me to apply and believed my passion and vision were what CantoMundo needed. My goal during my term is to use my experience and feedback from other CantoMundistas to curate equitable and caring spaces for Black, Caribbean, Indigenous, Disabled, and Queer Latinx poets. With the brave and caring leadership of our new Director Belinda Acosta, our Advisory Board, and the great staff at the Virginia G. Piper Center, my goals are being greatly supported and seen to fruition. I am grateful for Belinda Acosta and her ability to hold the experiences of CantoMundistas like mine with care and a great conviction to bring CantoMundo to its fullest potential. 

CM: Tell us a little about your recent chapbook.

GR: The title, If Pit Bulls Had a God It'd Be A Pit Bull is a reframing of a Xenophanes quote. The poems explore friendship, grief, racial injustice, faith, family dynamics, and mental illness. I drafted most of the collection while participating in Cave Canem workshops at their Brooklyn office in 2017. The chapbook is a collaboration between myself and Rushawn Videl-Gevonte Stanley, or ‘Scum Lizard,’ who is an American illustrator and muralist. Paired through the Riverwards Chapbook Series, we merged our shared love for language and image with our expansive imaginations and meticulous attention to detail to assemble a collection that barks and sings through the pages. Huge gratitude to The Head and The Hand Press for seeing our vision, trusting us, and bringing the chapbook into the world. 

CM: What would you tell a Latinx poet thinking about applying to CantoMundo?

GR: This year and coming years will be the ones you will want to be your first, second, and graduate years. We are listening and changing in attempts to meet the needs of our fellows and generating resources for fellows and the greater Latinx community. CantoMundo is practicing being a brave space, and I invite you to be brave with us. I am beside you and holding space with tenderness for you, your song, and every breath.

CantoMundo Newsletter

January 2025 includes: Opportunities for CantoMundistas, AWP ambassador request, information about our 2025 CantoMundo faculty & keynote speaker, a note from the director, and more! Click on the image to read the entire newsletter.

January 2025 Newsletter

New face at CantoMundo

Meet CantoMundo’s new director, Belinda Acosta, succeeding Jacqueline Balderrama who served in that role until July 2024.

Belinda Acosta has a PhD in English with a specialization in ethnic studies from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and an MFA in fiction from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a long-time member of the Macondo community of writers founded by Sandra Cisneros. She has written and published plays, short stories, essays, and her journalism and creative nonfiction have appeared in the Austin Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News, NPR's Latino USA, and the Texas Observer among other publications. Her two novels are Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over, and Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz both published by Hachette Book Group. She comes to CantoMundo after serving as Director of Communications and Public Affairs at the Center for the People in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Meet her below in a quick Q&A interview:

CANTOMUNDO: Nebraska to Arizona. That’s quite a leap.

BELINDA ACOSTA: Yes, and it’s a leap I happily took. I will miss the four seasons, but I will not miss shoveling snow. And I wanted to return to the Southwest. I lived in Austin, Texas for much of my adult life, but moved to Arizona directly from Nebraska. The Southwest feels like home, so when this position opened, I had to apply.

I first learned of CantoMundo when I wrote feature articles about its inaugural year for the Austin Chronicle and Poets and Writers Magazine. I am honored to be able to bring my skills to help build the future iteration of CantoMundo which is significant in ensuring Latinx representation in the national literary landscape and in building supportive networks for Latinx artists.

CM: What makes you excited to come to work every day?

BA: Well, first, the Piper Center House where CantoMundo now calls home is lovely. I work alongside Piper Center Staff, who have been overwhelmingly supportive and approachable. I'm thrilled to meet colleagues across the ASU campus who are eager to collaborate. Finally, I've always liked the energy of a university campus and I’m glad to be working in the heart of one.

CM: Are you a poet?

BA: I am a writer with a life-long admiration for poets. I am constantly dazzled by how poets and poetry can distill a thought, an emotion, an experience. When poetry is great, it makes me forget I’m a writer, because I’m reveling in where the poetry takes me. I’m not examining its components like a writer or editor.

CM: At a reading you hosted, someone asked the presenters if poetry or poets were losing relevance nowadays. What do you think?

BA: If I didn’t think poetry had relevance, I wouldn’t have applied for or taken this job. I wouldn’t have moved across three states to work with artists refining an art form I think is relevant and crucial. Audre Lorde says, “Poetry is not a luxury.” In our current social climate, that is truer now more than ever.

In her first year, Acosta will be supported by Poetry Coalition Fellow, Gabriel Ramirez. A current CantoMundo fellow, poet, and community organizer in the literary arts, a Q&A interview with Ramirez will follow soon.

Acosta can be reached at Belinda.Acosta@asu.edu

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CantoMundo, founded around a kitchen table in 2009 by Norma E. Cantú, Celeste Guzmán Mendoza, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Deborah Paredez, and Carmen Tafolla, CantoMundo ["Song-World"] is a celebration of the worlds of song within Latinx communities, from its elders to its youth.

CantoMundo is dedicated to serving Latinx poets and poetry across regional, aesthetic, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and gendered spectrums. Its work is motivated by the understanding that Latinx voices, despite their historic silencing, have always resounded within the chorus of American poetry. Since its founding the organization has fostered supportive communities and professional networks among hundreds of Latinx poets who have, in turn, created support systems for other writers of color in their own hometowns, established their own publishing venues, and secured major book prizes and positions as poet laureates, editors, and contest judges. 

Since November 2023, CantoMundo has been housed at Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, a community-facing center directed by Alberto Ríos, ASU Regents Professor as the Katharine C. Turner Endowed Chair in English and  Arizona’s first poet laureate.