Meet our Grantee-Partner: CantoMundo
Pictured above from left to right in the back row: Norma E. Cantú, Jacqueline Balderrama, Alberto “Tito” Ríos, and Pablo Miguel Martinez. From left to right in the front row: Sheila Black, Carmen Tafolla, Deborah Paredez, Christie Swedbergh, and Celeste Guzmán Mendoza.
Mission: CantoMundo is a national poetry organization that cultivates a community of Latinx poets through workshops, symposia, public readings, and publications.
Founded around a kitchen table in 2009, CantoMundo, which means “song-world” in Spanish, is a celebration of the worlds of song within Latinx communities, from its elders to its youth. Based in Tempe, Arizona, CantoMundo aims to serve Latinx poets and champion Latinx poetry across regional, aesthetic, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and gendered spectrums. CantoMundo’s founders, Norma E. Cantú, Celeste Guzmán Mendoza, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Deborah Paredez, and Carmen Tafolla, were deeply inspired by and received mentorship from the visionaries who created Cave Canem, Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte; and Kundiman, Sarah Gambito and Joseph Legaspi. Like these successful pioneering poetry organizations, CantoMundo aims to democratize the space of American poetry.
Their 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, CantoMundo 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 hometowns, established their own publishing venues, and secured major book prizes and positions as poets laureates, editors, and contest judges. These CantoMundistas are enriching and reshaping the landscape of the poetry of the Americas.
CantoMundo’s dedication to Latinx poets and poetry among a diverse range of Latinx communities seeks to nurture generations of bi- and multi-lingual writers and readers. Since 2010, CantoMundo has hosted and sponsored in-person and online workshops, readings, lectures, and professional development opportunities for Latinx poets that aim to bring various Latinidades (Latinx identities) into conversation with each other. These represent diverse poetic styles and heritages in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Indigenous languages. The organization’s primary annual event is a four-day poetry retreat that provides a space for the creation, documentation, and celebration of Latinx poetry. Over the course of the retreat, CantoMundo fellows have the opportunity to take poetry workshops from established Latinx poets and participate in public readings, panel discussions, and informal conversations.
For too long, some publishers, literary critics, academic researchers and faculty, and general readership did not take Latinx letters seriously. With the community of CantoMundistas, every draft, critique, and suggestion for organizational change is taken seriously—thanks to the unwavering, mutual respect and shared belief in Latinx greatness and joy and possibility that exists within the community of CantoMundo poets and all those who connect with us.
—CantoMundo Leadership
CantoMundo recognizes the need to overcome divides caused by divisive political rhetoric. In defining its vision of Latinidad, CantoMundo pledges to be anti-racist, accessible, and intolerant of all homophobia and anti-trans rhetoric and to sustain a community in which all members are fully respected. This dedication is manifested in a commitment to ensure representation, be open to multiple voices and perspectives, and take steps to make the organization’s networks of support accessible for all. In its annual retreat, CantoMundo is dedicated to creating a space of mutual respect and dialogue.
After a hiatus of two years and with the support of COVID-related emergency funds and an Equity in Verse grant from the Poetry Foundation, CantoMundo resumed implementing new leadership models and found a new home at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University where it will be resuming its retreat in 2024.
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