This week, our editors direct us towards the profound and plentiful artistic productions emerging from border crossings, diverse encounters, and cross-genre interpretations. From a festival celebrating multicultural writings, novel adaptations of classic canons, and the newly elected fellows to a prestigious international residency, these developments in world literature remind us that within the schematics of difference, shared passions grow and proliferate to create unities.
Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States
Between June 21 and 23, Hispanic and U.S. literary enthusiasts gathered in San Francisco for the International Flor y Canto Literary Festival. Originally founded by Latinx poet Alejandro Murguia, acclaimed poet and professor at San Francisco State University, this year’s lineup featured a diverse variety of poetry readings, literary workshops, and movie screenings—all open to the public. Participants included Latinx and Mexican writers, poets, and directors dealing with topics such as identity, multiculturalism, language, and resistance. Most of the events took place at the legendary Medicine for Nightmare bookstore, a unique promoter of Latin American and Latinx literature in San Francisco.
One of the most exciting events was a poetry workshop led by the Mexican poet Minerva Reynosa. Titled “¿Quieres escribir pero te sale espuma?” (Do you want to write a poem but only foam comes out?), the workshop encouraged new writers to try out different techniques to overcome writer’s block. In another event, Reynosa read from her most recent book, Iremos que te pienso entre las filas y el olfato pobre de un paisaje con borrachos o ahorcados. The collection portrays life around the Mexico-U.S. border in the nineties, told from the perspective of a bicultural family dealing with gender violence. The works in the book are long poems of mostly short unrhymed verses, using colloquialisms endemic to the north of Mexico, in a fast paced and highly rhythmic prosody. They also include fragments from songs by the iconic Latinx singer Selena. In her reading, Reynosa usually sings these musical portions, highlighting the sonic elements in the poems and their cultural significance.
Another important and internationally-minded event was a poetry reading in solidarity with Palestine. The featured writers included the Palestine-born poet Lorene Zarou-Zouzounis and the Lebanese-American writer Elmaz Abinader. Their writing explores themes such as multiculturalism, multilingualism, and the complexities of cultural identity. Featured in a Latinx festival, their reading embodied transcultural collaboration and unity, highlighting communities coming together in support of justice, peace, and a shared passion for literary art.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines
Avant-garde Filipino poet, scholar, and publisher Conchitina Cruz has been named as one of the twenty-five writing fellows to the 2025-2026 seasons of Civitella Ranieri, an international artists’ residency located at a fifteenth-century castle in the central Italian region of Umbria.
Amongst her many achievements, Cruz has authored Dark Hours (University of the Philippines Press, 2005). which won the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry in English in 2006; elsewhere held and lingered (High Chair, 2008); There is no emergency (Youth & Beauty Brigade, 2015); Partial Views: On the Essay as a Genre in Philippine Literary Production (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2021). For Cordite Poetry Review in Australia, Ivy Alvarez delineates Cruz’s œuvre as “enumerative poetics … mov[ing] smoothly between many forms, from spatially-oriented poetry, prose poetry and micro-fiction, to letters, lists and invocations, to forms that take their cue from reference texts. All the while, invoking a language of the hyperreal, the mythic, dramatic, and the routine.”
With an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, Cruz is also one of the co-founders of indie publishing initiatives such as Paper Trail Projects and BLTX, a trailblazing small press expo that was held across the country, from Baguio to Davao, from Cagayan de Oro to Naga. To this day, her PhD dissertation at The State University of New York in Albany, titled “Authoring Autonomy: The Politics of Art for Art’s Sake in Filipino Poetry in English”, remains instructive in the role of Anglophone writings in the Philippines vis-a-vis the impact of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the postwar, CIA-funded New Critical mode—a dehistoricized literary movement that had emerged in the US, striking a particular chord in the Philippines by cultivating a literature of “political impotence”. Having served as a co-editor of Bloomsbury Academic’s book series “Research in Creative Writing”, she is often-cited in recent articles regarding canon-making in the postcolonial Anglosphere, proxy imperialism via post-Cold War knowledge production, and creative writing pedagogical reforms.
Currently, Cruz teaches creative writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, where she also serves as research dissemination director.
Joining Cruz as writing fellows are, among others, Asymptote contributors Korean-American poet-translator Don Mee Choi, Indonesian prose writer Intan Paramaditha, Bangladeshi novelist Mashiul Alam, as well as Isabella Hammad (UK-Palestine), Mary Rokonadravu (Fiji), Idza Luhumyo (Kenya), Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia), Brandon Taylor (USA), and Raymond Antrobus (UK).
Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Greece
Recently, Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli’s vital work, Minor Detail, was translated into Greek by Kapetanaki Eleni, and published with Plithos Editions. Written in 2017, the novel is divided into two sections: the first recounts a real-life 1949 gang rape and killing of a young Arab Bedouin-Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers, while the second is a fictionalised account of a Palestinian woman in the present day as she looks into this event.
In May, the Hellenic Comics Academy presented writer Tasos Apostolidis with a lifetime achievement award during the Hellenic Comics Awards 2024, held in Technopolis, Athens as a part of the 2024 Comicdom Con. In translating various historical stories into the comic form, Apostolidis’s works include adaptations of Aristophanes’ Comedies, the Odyssey, and the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece. His latest, surrounding Aristotles’s philosophy, won the White Ravens award in 2023.
On June 20, the magazine TEFLON welcomed Pavel Arseniev, one of the most influential voices of contemporary Russian-language poetry, at Kobrai bookstore in Exarcheia. Ηis poetry, translated into Greek by Niki K., can be read in the latest issue of TEFLON. In addition to his profound influence as a poet, Arseniev’s work as editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Транслит (Translit) has also contributed greatly to the promotion of contemporary underground Russian-language poetry.
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