#DignidadLiteraria: Writers and Organizers Unite: Our Stories, Our Power!
Session Type(s): Panel
Starts: Saturday, Aug. 15 12:00 PM (Eastern)
Ends: Saturday, Aug. 15 12:50 PM (Eastern)
In light of systemic racism and anti-immigrant narratives in U.S. publishing, #DignidadLiteraria founders will discuss how to lead powerful campaigns seeking literary dignity for Latinx communities. Latinx people working in publishing amount to a dismal 6%, and only around 1% of books published each year are written by Latinx authors. After securing an unprecedented commitment from Macmillan USA (publishers of American Dirt) to transform publishing its practices and include substantial increases in Latinx titles and staff, the #DignidadLiteraria movement keeps building momentum to take on the “Big 5” largest publishing conglomerates in the U.S.. Join the conversation to see how Latinx people and allies can drive national/translocal offline and digital organizing campaigns to combat major players in the culture sphere, and win!
Moderator
Nancy Treviño
Nancy Treviño is a community organizer, trainer, and campaign strategist from Miami, FL. She is the Director of Power at Presente.org. Prior to her role at Presente.org, Nancy worked alongside hundreds of grassroots community organizations across the U.S., collaborated and campaigned with national and international human rights organizations, and continues providing strategic organizing, digital, and communications support to advance social justice movements. She has trained hundreds of activists across the country, won multiple local and national human rights campaigns, and is a contributor to the book, “Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency.”
Panelists
David Bowles
David Bowles is a Mexican American author from south Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. He has written several award-winning titles, most notably The Smoking Mirror and They Call Me Güero. His work has also been published in multiple anthologies, plus venues such as The New York Times School Library Journal, Strange Horizons, English Journal, Rattle, Translation Review, and the Journal of Children’s Literature. In 2017, David was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. In 2020, he co-founded the #DignidadLiteraria movement with Myriam Gurba and Roberto Lovato to combat inequities in publishing.
Myriam Gurba
Myriam Gurba is a writer and artist. She is the author of the true-crime memoir Mean, a New York Times editors’ choice. O, the Oprah Magazine, ranked Mean as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time. Publishers’ Weekly describes Gurba as having a voice like no other. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Paris Review, TIME.com, and 4Columns. She has shown art in galleries, museums, and community centers. She lives in Long Beach, California, with herself.
Roberto Lovato
Roberto Lovato is the author of the forthcoming Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas (Harper Collins). He is also an educator, journalist and writer based at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco, California. Lovato is also a Co-Founder of #DignidadLiteraria, the movement advocating for equity and literary justice for the more than 60 million Latinx persons left off of bookshelves of the United States & out of the national dialogue. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has reported on war, violence, terrorism in Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Paris and the United States. Until 2015, Lovato was a fellow at U.C. Berkeley’s Latinx Research Center and recently finished a teaching stint at UCLA. His essays and reports from around the world have appeared in numerous publications including Guernica Magazine, the Boston Globe, Foreign Policy magazine, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel, La Opinion, and other national and international publications
Matt Nelson
Matt Nelson is the Colombian-born, Midwestern-raised Executive Director of Presente.org—the nation’s largest online Latinx organizing group; advancing social justice with technology, media, and culture. He is a seasoned campaign strategist who has won hundreds of local and national campaigns and a skilled community organizer who has trained thousands of activists. Before his work at Presente.org, Matt was the Organizing Director at ColorOfChange.org and has co-founded several cooperative enterprises in multiple Midwestern cities. He is a long-serving community organizer who was featured in the first major book on the Ferguson Uprising, entitled, “Ferguson is America: Roots of Rebellion”. He also contributed to the book, “Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice and Democracy in Perilous Times”, and is an editor of the recently released book: Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency (Routledge Press, July 2020) EmergencyElection.org.