LITERATURA CENTROAMERICANA

This year marks our fourth year hosting La Guagua Poetry Festival, which this year will feature 25 local, regional, and international poets and translators who have been invited to present their work at the festival. Like in previous years, where our festival focused on issues of translation, immigration, and social justice, we aim to celebrate language in a space where poets are welcome to present their work in their native “voices” or in the language they use to “translate” their reality.
The theme for this year’s La Guagua Poetry Anthology is borrowed from Antonio Machado’s poem, Canto XXIX, which includes the line: “Caminante, no hay camino.” The galleries of poetry and translations between the inscriptions invite readers to experience a diverse and bountiful selection of poetry in styles ranging from formal to free-verse and experimental poetry.
We work and exist within socio-cultural-political imperialistic structures and institutions. We need new paths. And “when praying is of no use to us,” as Joan Manuel Serrat tells us in a song which borrows from Machado’s poem, we must still go on, even when there is no where to go. When despair tempts us to succumb, when the heart whispers for its rescue, poetry invites us to create new paths ahead where there are non