'There’s a disconnect between what students are interested in and what is valued in the classroom'
HAYS COUNTY — For most students, required writing in the classroom may not always be enjoyable. A local publishing house and nonprofit is working to break the standard and promote literacy through poetry.
Infrarrealista Review was founded in 2020 by Cloud D. Cardona and Juania Sueños, out of the Texas State MFA Creative Writing Program to highlight underrepresented Texan voices through a Hays County Youth Poet Laureate Program. The publishing house is searching for the 2023 Hays County Youth Poet Laureate (YPL). The winner will receive a $1,000 cash prize, the YPL title for a calendar year and a chapbook publication through Plancha Press.
Contestants can prepare their portfolios by attending free virtual workshops, held in both English and Spanish, starting at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 26, taught by various poets: Cardona, Sueños, Bianca A. Perez and Anthony Issac Bradley. The workshops will be held weekly on Wednesdays through June 30.
With the sponsorship of the Burdine Johnson Foundation, Cardona and Sueños created the workshops keeping in mind the things they would have wanted to learn during their educational career, as creative writing was not encouraged by instructors or parental figures as a viable or possible career option.
“It’s a curriculum built around getting these young students to explore their creative potential and take themselves seriously as an artist, specifically as a writer. Writing is typically an art that’s not encouraged to become a career for kids,” Sueños said. “It’s such a good outlet for them to get to know themselves better as well. The second aspect of the workshops that we do also involves a self-narrative. We ask the kids what sort of narratives they’ve created about themselves, maybe they are coming from external sources, that may not be so positive and then we challenge those things.”
“We do that by introducing them to artists from similar backgrounds, so they are able to see this near endless artist and have a role model that they can aspire to fill their careers in a similar way,” she added.
Sueños believes these workshops will help students in their regular classes.
“There’s a disconnect between what students are interested in and what is valued in the classroom. I think they have a real distinction between academia, or you know the academic realm, and art. I think that, hopefully, this can be a bridge for them to be more interested in their English classes because a lot of times, the high school and middle school curriculums are full of these very old texts that are part of the literary canon but that have been used and reused. These kids don’t have a deep connection to these texts,” Sueños said. “I think they tend to get a little bit frustrated or bored with the material … Hopefully, getting them to see that there’s a classroom environment for that sort of outlet for that specific creativity when it comes to writing will then transfer to their classrooms, where they can start to appreciate other kinds of writing like essays and reading texts in a different light.”
The deadline for application submissions is Sept. 22. The YPL will undergo an editing process of their book which will be released in late March 2024 and celebrated with a reading and book signing at the Katherine Anne Porter House.
The YPL will be required to attend and speak at three city council or Hays County Commissioners Court meetings while they hold this title. They would assist-edit one issue of Infrarrealista Review, meeting with the editors three times. They will also be invited to Infrarrealista Review’s and/or When The River Speaks (San Marcos Library) monthly poetry readings and encouraged to read at two of them.
The full application requirements are listed below.
•15-20 pages of poetry in 12-point, sans serif font. Each piece should be on its own page and saved as a PDF. It can be non-traditional, prosaic, mixed-media, illustration, etc. If you’re unsure if your work qualifies, contact [email protected].
• Cover Letter: This is a brief document that should include your contact information, be addressed to contest judge Natalia Treviño and state why you think you would be a good candidate to represent your county as Poet Laureate.
• Biography
• Statement of Purpose: This should be a 200-500 word document explaining why you write, what inspires you as a poet and how you plan to honor your title as the Hays Youth Poet Laureate if you win the contest.
Find out more at www.infrarrealistas.org/workshops.
