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
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.