Next month, Texas Southmost College will host its 21st annual “Letras en el Estuario,” a conference that will feature 16 award-winning writers from across Texas and Mexico reading excerpts from their most recent works.
“Some of the writers that are going to participate in this occasion, apart from [keynote speaker] Eduardo [R. Langagne], come from other regions, like Guillermo Berrones de Monterrey, Mexico, and also Daniel Barrera from Matamoros, Tamaulipas,” said Ramiro Rodriguez, president of Ateneo Literario José Arrese in Matamoros and one of the 16 writers to be featured.
Rodriguez, one of the founders of the conference, will present his most recent book of haikus.
“They are framed by the art of Eduardo Vargas Lopez, who is a Tamaulipan poet and painter … originally from Mexico City,” he said. “We are going to be presenting this book of which I feel very happy and very proud to have edited.”
This will be the second year the event is back on campus after being on hiatus for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, said Juan Antonio Gonzalez, a Spanish professor at TSC and one of the organizers of the conference.
The event will take place from 3 to 8 p.m. Feb. 10 in the SET-B Lecture Hall on the Texas Southmost College campus in Brownsville.
Beginning in 2003, the conference started as an opportunity for local writers to show off their work to the community and gradually grew to be able to bring in keynote speakers.
In 2008, Gonzalez was able to recruit the first keynote speaker, Chicano award-winning writer and novelist Rolando Hinojosa-Smith.
Langagne, this year’s keynote speaker, is an award-winning author and poet who Gonzalez met at a conference in Los Angeles about 20 years ago.
In 2022, he won the National Letters Award for Sinaloa.
The event will have four panels of four speakers each. Each panel will be about 45 minutes with 16 speakers presenting first, each having about 10 to 12 minutes to read their chosen work.
“So, they can read a short story, they can read several poems or they can read part of a long poem,” Gonzalez said.
As the guest speaker, Langagne will have 45 minutes to an hour available to present his literature.
The event will start at 3 p.m. but the auditorium will be open at 2 p.m. for guests to get some coffee and have the opportunity to meet and talk to some of the authors.
“I feel very proud to participate in these [conferences] because, well, it is also a way to publicize what one writes and learn about the work of other writers, not only from here in the Valley or from the northern border of Tamaulipas, but also from writers who come from other regions such as Houston, San Antonio, Ciudad Victoria, Monterrey and, well, this time with the presence of maestro Eduardo Langagne, from Mexico City,” Rodriguez said.
Gonzalez said Letras en el Estuario is family oriented, free and open to the public.
“The goal is to have our students engaged in writing, as well, and for them to get to know people that have dedicated their lives to and that it is possible to be a good writer,” Gonzalez said. “It’s a lot of editing and a lot of work, but good things can come out of it and it’s a great satisfaction to be able to write something that you share as well.”
