For National Hispanic Heritage Month, observed annually from September 15 to October 15, we asked our members to share with us some of the literature they recommend reading in celebration. (Learn more about National Hispanic Heritage Month here.)
Nonfiction, Drama & Multi-Genre Works
Ruin & Want by José Angel Araguz
Sundress Publications | 2023
ISBN: 9781951979539
Araguz’s memoir contains “a series of gripping, episodic prose pieces centered on an illicit relationship between a student and his high school English teacher.”
53rd State Press | 2024
ISBN: 979-8986581439
Baisch’s play is “a twisting, twisted work of intricacy, density, and despair netted in kidnap, virtual utopias, upended borders, and Freddy Krueger cosplay.”
Eating Moors and Christians by Sandra M. Castillo
CavanKerry Press | 2016
ISBN: 978-1-933880-39-6
This memoir “utilizes the Cuban Revolution as a springboard from which to discuss what is at the center of exile literature—liminality.”
Letters to Yeyito: Lessons from a Life in Music by Paquito D’Rivera
Restless Books | 2015
ISBN: 9781632060198
In this memoir, D’Rivera writes “about persevering under Castro’s brand of socialism for years before defecting to New York; collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Yo-Yo Ma, and other greats; and lessons learned during his six-decade-long journey in the arts.”
Bobbito’s Book of B-Ball Bong Bong! A Memoir of Sports, Style, and Soul by Bobbito García
Akashic Books | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63614-230-2
In this basketball-themed memoir, García “chronicles his unlikely experiences in and around the game as a Latino raised on hip hop.”
53rd State Press | 2020
ISBN: 978-1732545229
Lopez’s monologue “is at once a coming-of-age story, a horror story, and a highly theatrical experiment in radical empathy.”
Fiction
W(h)ine and Cheese by S. Atzeni
Read Furiously | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-960869-12-8
In this campus novel, “a broken heart, something to prove, and discounted dairy products create a perfect storm of disaster at a party.”
Slant Books | 2019
ISBN: 9781639820184
In this YA novel, “Llorona is the only girl Güero has ever loved. A wounded soul, she has adopted the name of a ghost from Mexican folklore.”
Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand by Stephen D. Gutierrez
University of Tampa Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-59732-203-4
In this novella, “Captain Chicano is out to save the country! White supremacy is on the rise and he is the only one capable of beating it with a secret weapon. Love. But will it work?”
Crocodiles at Night by Gisela Heffes
Translated from the Spanish by Grady C. Wray
Deep Vellum | May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781646053766
Heffes’s novel explores “familial ties, memories and images of places that are no longer the same.”
The Best People by Robert Lopez
Dzanc Books | 2025
ISBN: 9781938603242
Completing Lopez’s novels-in-stories triptych, The Best People “follows a man who made the mistake of being born and is trying to make the best of that mistake.”
The Ballad of Gato Guerrero by Manuel Ramos
Arte Público Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-55885-992-0
Originally published in 1994, this second installment in the Luis Montez Mystery Series “takes readers on a wild ride through Denver’s mean streets and deadly encounters with young gangbangers.”
Urban Folk Tales by Y. Rodriguez
Read Furiously | 2023
ISBN: 979-8-9861199-0-8
Inspired by oral storytelling traditions, this collection of stories explores “the miraculous and the mundane scenes that play up and down the avenues of New York City.”
Litany of Saints: A Triptych by Diana Rojas
Arte Público Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-55885-994-4
In this debut collection, “Rojas’ characters grapple with their self-perception as they consider what they’re supposed to be and who they want to be.”
Poetry
Now in Color by Jacqueline Balderrama
Perugia Press | 2020
ISBN: 978-0997807646
Balderrama’s debut poetry collection “explores the multigenerational immigrant experience of Mexican-Americans who have escaped violence, faced pressures to assimilate, and now seek to reconnect to a fragmented past.”
The Azure Cloister by Carlos Germán Belli
Translated from the Spanish by Karl Maurer
Swan Isle Press | 2022
ISBN: 9780997228793
The thirty-five poems in this bilingual edition “explore public and domestic spaces of confinement and freedom, from paralysis to the ease of a bird in its ‘azure cloister.’”
Frivolous Women and Other Sinners / Frívolas y Pecadoras by Alicia Borinsky
Translated from the Spanish by Cola Franzen and Alicia Borinsky
Swan Isle Press | 2009
ISBN: 9780974888149
In this collection, Borinsky “brings to life reluctant mothers, slightly mad teachers, selfless wives, neighborhood witches, best friends, sworn enemies, torturers, vamps, cheats, and lovers—a gallery of characters who wink and boldly gaze back at us.”
Flight Plan by M. Soledad Caballero
Red Hen Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781636282527
Flight Plan “charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between.”
Clap for Me That’s Not Me by Paola Capó-García
Rescue Press | 2018
ISBN: 978-0999418635
According to Anna Joy Springer, Capó-García’s collection “choreographs the plot-twisting costume-changing ad-riddled complexities of contemporary identity in genre-blurring acts of literary brilliance.”
the past is a jean jacket by Cloud Delfina Cardona
Hub City Press | 2025
ISBN: 9798885740593
The speaker of these poems “explores their gender through sex and relationships, searches for belonging in their family lineage, and copes with depression using movies, indie bands, cigarettes, and Tumblr.”
The Devil’s Workshop by Xavier Cavazos
Cleveland State University Poetry Center | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-7348167-8-5
According to Lucas De Lima, The Devil’s Workshop “finds its lifeblood in the throes of exorcism, modeling an antidote to the paths of redemption and respectability politics.”
All Were Limones by Luisa Caycedo-Kimura
The Word Works | 2025
ISBN: 978-1944585891
According to Jennifer Oakes, the voice in these poems “is one that both sings and scours, wades into toughness to get to vulnerability and then doubles back to double down—all while lifting music from language and beauty from rubble.”
The Happy End / All Welcome by Mónica de la Torre
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937027-73-5
This collection is “set in a job fair inspired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma from Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika: the largest theater company in the world is recruiting all kinds of employees.”
Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man by Jose Hernandez Diaz
Red Hen Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781636282404
In addition to celebrating the Mexican American experience, this collection “explores surreal prose poetry both in the suburbs and barrios of Los Angeles and the larger American landscape.”
Music Notebook by Mariela Dreyfus
Translated from the Spanish by Gabriel Amor
Cardboard House Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-945720-30-7
According to Urayoán Noel, this collection develops “processually into an expansive poetics of pain, thirst, flight, the mother’s womb, the girl’s rebellion, the lover’s body, the burning city.”
Where My Umbilical Is Buried by Amanda Galvan Huynh
Sundress Publications | 2023
ISBN: 978-1951979430
In this collection, Galvan Huynh “asks us to consider the intersections of our heritage and to reflect on our mothering as it nests within our present selves.”
Indifferent Cities by Ángel García
Tupelo Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1961209329
Indifferent Cities “traverses both distance and time to reconcile the most confounding reality of family: our people, sometimes, are the people we know least.”
First Matter Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-958600-11-5
According to Yesika Salgado, this collection “explores the constant question of belonging, of too-much-ness, of the understanding of the misunderstood—a bilingual love letter to home, self, and the beyond.”
Mayapple Press | 2007
ISBN: 978-0932412-539
This collection makes real “the struggles of war, becoming an expatriate and the alienation that accompanies the immersion in a new culture.”
Trio House Press | 2021
ISBN: 9781949487107
Hincapié’s poems “pull us into a hazardous and tropical swampland of a speaker consistently confronted by the violence and wonderment of being alive.”
banana [ ] by Paul Hlava Ceballos
University of Pittsburgh Press | 2022
ISBN: 9780822966937
These poems “reveal the extractive relationship the United States has with the Americas and its people through poetic portraits of migrants, family, and personal memories.”
The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani
Perugia Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-0997807677
Hotchandani’s debut poetry collection “is a study in shifting cultural and personal identities as well as in belonging—to our bodies, our memories, our stories, ourselves, our families, our cultures.”
[gamerover] by Giancarlo Huapaya
Translated from the Spanish by Ryan Greene
Phoneme | 2025
ISBN: 9781646053759
Huapaya’s collection charts “the history of geography through the historic movement of its residents’ bodies and complicated habits.”
Rimonim by Aurora Levins Morales
Ayin Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-961814-17-2
“Rooted in tradition and flowering in the tumultuous present,” the poems in this collection “will both accompany specific Jewish practices and offer inspiration for the sacred work of human liberation, where joy meets justice.”
Disaster Tourism by Rena J. Mosteirin
BOA Editions | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-960145-77-2
Disaster Tourism “gives us a lens to re-imagine our dangerous surroundings in the hopes that we strive toward a better existence, even when it hurts.”
Barrow Street | 2021
ISBN: 9781736607503
According to Wayne Koestenbaum, Murphy’s poems offer “traces of a heroic, louche tradition, where Novarro, Genet, Lorca, Pasolini, and other role models still make possible new discoveries about martyrdom and ecstasy.”
Atlas of an Ancient World by Violeta Orozco
Nomadic Press & Black Lawrence Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-62557-084-0
Embodying “the threshold between Mesoamerican and Chicanx mythologies,” Atlas of an Ancient World “traces the futurist cartographies of an ancestral world.”
Querida by Nathan Xavier Osorio
University of Pittsburgh Press | 2024
ISBN: 9780822948377
In this collection, “a choir of speakers navigate the fraught inheritance of memory frayed by the generational trauma of migration, coloniality, and the exploitative labor of late-stage capitalism.”
A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign by Gabriel Palacios
Fonograf Editions | 2024
ISBN: 979-8-9875890-4-5
In his debut collection, Palacios “reckons with the cultural heritage of the Southwest border region by sifting through its detritus.”
From the Founding of the Country by Cristina Pérez Díaz
Winter Editions | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-959708-13-1
Pérez Díaz’s debut collection “tells a fragmentary narrative of two lovers—one languid and liquid, the other sharp as exclamation points—who are also two nations bound in a horrendous love.”
Album of Fences by Omar Pimienta
Translated from the Spanish by Jose Antonio Villarán
Cardboard House Press | 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945720-12-3
According to Rae Armantrout, Pimienta “documents what living on either side of a militarized border does to a community, how it distorts, breeding suspicion and lies.”
Return Against the Flow by Susana Praver-Pérez
Nomadic Press & Black Lawrence Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-62557-083-3
Praver-Pérez’s poems “move between English and Spanish, and capture the tempo of ambient sounds, such as drumbeats of bomba, or a black-plumed chango chirping at dawn.”
Brutal Companion by Ruben Quesada
Barrow Street | 2024
ISBN: 9781962131032
Quesada’s collection “probes the brutality and beauty found in relationships with lovers, friends, family, and the self.”
El Rey of Gold Teeth by Reyes Ramirez
Hub City Press | 2023
ISBN: 9798885740197
Ramirez’s collection “breaks open notions of destiny, in humorous and devastating ways, to reimagine the past and present a new future where lack transforms to abundance.”
The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez by Iliana Rocha
Tupelo Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1946482648
This collection “chronicles an obsession with the 1971 unsolved murder of Rocha’s grandfather while interrogating the true crime genre, tabloid culture, immigrant identity,” and more.
The Lost Nostalgias by Esteban Rodríguez
CavanKerry Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-960327-11-6
According to Felicia Zamora, the speaker of these poems “seeks refuge in undoing youthful lamentations of wielding English as a weapon to reclaim his diasporic lineage.”
Third Winter in Our Second Country by Andres Rojas
Trio House Press | 2021
ISBN: 9781949487053
In this collection, Rojas “captures the essence of the experience of settling into a new land, in all its strangeness and sometimes, ridiculousness.”
My Perfect Cognate by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Copper Canyon Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781556597275
Scenters-Zapico’s collection “interrogates the connections and contrasts at the sharp edges of her in-betweens: violence and softness, motherhood and isolation, the border between the United States and Mexico.”
Against the Regime of the Fluent by Natasha Tiniacos
Translated from the Spanish by Rebeca Alderete Baca
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-946604-22-4
The poems in this collection are “fragments that dream of becoming ruins of a present still unfolding against the systems of power, (the) body, language or all the systems.”
Kadupul Flower by Kimberly Vargas Agnese
Green Writers Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9914134-4-2
This social-environmental justice collection “invites readers to ponder: What rights ought to be afforded to the people, creatures, and landscapes that comprise the world in which we live?”
Poemas Callejeros / Streetwise Poems by Johanny Vázquez Paz
Mayapple Press | 2007
ISBN: 0-932412-46-7
These poems explore “one of the many strands of contemporary Latino immigrant experience, dancing the tropical sensibility of Puerto Rico among Chicago’s concrete and broken glass.”
Literary Magazines
“Why Don’t You Write About Joy?” by Yael Valencia Aldana
West Trestle Review | 2024
This poem begins, “Why do you keep writing about all this brown girl suffering? / Because when my mother was last pregnant, fate bathed her in blood…”
“Kind of Monster” by Ciara Alfaro
Southeast Review | 2024
This essay begins, “As girls, it started with Selena, Malinche, and La Llorona. Stories of bullets and blood, heartbreak hauntings that helped us understand our identity.”
“sanctuario: sanctuary” by María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado
Multiplicity | 2025
This poem begins, “2023 / cada libro que compro de segunda mano / es un mundo & una hermana / every book I buy second hand / is a world & a sister…”
“the hourglass (time’s up, fool)” by M. S. Blues
Wellspringwords | 2025
This poem begins, “she remembered the rules / the rules mother sewed in her resistant heart / (despite the acrid smell it brought) / with that whetted needle—”
ANMLY | 2023
The poem “Immigrant Story” begins, “In 1969, Cabo Rojo, Dominican Republic, / he worked as a mechanic for an American company / mining for a mineral called bauxite.”
“Read Me in Atmosphere” by Melina Casados
Adi Magazine | 2025
This story begins, “With great prosperity came great suffering in NATION. People were either born into prosperity or suffering, and sometimes in between.”
“The Red Bandana” by Kenneth Chacón
Southeast Review | 2024
This poem begins, “This is a portrait of the cholo as a young man, / lying on his bed, hand under head, bare feet crossed / at the ankles.”
“Secrets of the New York City Subway” by John DeVore
Open Secrets Magazine | 2024
This essay begins, “I met a stranger on a train from Virginia to Texas about twenty-five years ago. We talked for hours.”
The Cincinnati Review | 2025
This story begins, “Lydia did not vacuum the floors or dust the overloaded bookshelves when the men started returning three years later, in small groups of fifty or five hundred at first.”
Two Poems by Joan Angel Estrada
beestung | 2022
The poem “MASCULINITIES” begins, “Summer wants me fully grown and tender / tendergrown and short haired. I cut myself loose / fall right into the warm and broken mouths…”
“I Am Too Much” by Melissa Flores Anderson
Epistemic Literary | 2024
This poem begins, “When I say those words / what I mean is / your arms will never reach / around the span of my center…”
“Exhibition Notes: Portrait of Arapaima at the All-Night Diner” by Loren Maria Guay
beestung | 2025
This poem begins, “Oil upon oil. The arapaima is dressed for a night on the town: spangled slab of muscle, scales laced with neon. A fry cook is hollering…”
“And One Day the Work Dies” by Angelo Hernandez Sias
The Drift | 2024
This essay begins, “A man dies while out clubbing, then watches as his body is brought to the home of a famous fashion designer, who fondles it. This is the plot of ‘The Return,’ a late story by Roberto Bolaño.”
National Hispanic Heritage Month Playlist
Shō Poetry Journal | 2025
This playlist features eleven poets recently published in Shō Poetry Journal, including Jenna Martínez, Nina C. Peláez, Alejandro Lucero, Nathan Xavier Osorio, and more.
“To the Man Who Killed My Poem” by Rolando André López
Off Assignment | 2022
This essay begins, “We meet on a rainy evening in early March. Earlier that week, I had been lying in Dolores Park listening to a John Lennon song, and I thought of Kahlil Gibran…”
“(FG+FD+FM+FB) =” by M. E. Macuaga
The Cincinnati Review | 2025
This story begins, “‘Look, Mama!’ My daughter lifts her bouncy ball high over her head, small shoulders framing her grin. With a flourish, she smacks it down…”
“Queen of the Dead” by Guadalupe García McCall
West Trestle Review | 2024
This poem begins, “Persephone tugged and pulled and twisted / until she had him trained—on a leash. Not / me.”
Wellspringwords | 2024
The poem “Study in Pink” begins, “It’s not called baby pink. For a quinceanera dress, it’s called champagne. / It will finally be thrown out in a pandemic.”
New Books in Conversation: Eduardo Martínez-Leyva and Felicia Zamora
The Hopkins Review | 2025
In this second installment celebrating new and forthcoming books that include work first published in The Hopkins Review, Martínez-Leyva and Zamora discuss their new poetry collections, Cowboy Park and Interstitial Archaeology.
“Men Who Are Strong” by Jon Negroni
IHRAF Literary Magazine | 2025
“Men Who Are Strong” is published in IHRAF Literary Magazine’s March 2025 issue, The Evolving Gaze: Society’s Voice for Masculinity.
“Portal of Breaking Cycles” by Mateo Perez Lara
ANMLY | 2024
This poem begins, “I do not want to feel the privilege in a man’s spit or in the way he says my name I want to feel his hands trace my stretch marks over brown body…”
“Mexican Goodbyes” by Dino Enrique Piacentini
One Story | 2025
Piacentini’s story “Mexican Goodbyes” is featured in Issue 325 of One Story.
Reading List: Latinx & Hispanic Heritage Month
The Common
This reading list features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by Francisco Márquez, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, Alfredo Aguilar, and more.
“Goodbye to the Chicago Intersection Where I Was Reborn” by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Off Assignment | 2025
This essay begins, “In August of 2022, I rode the purple line from Evanston into Chicago. I was going to Madison and Halsted. Madison and Halsted is a mythical place in my imagination.”
The Drift | 2024
This essay begins, “In February, before the Democrats swapped candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump separately visited Texas on the same day to present their respective plans for cracking down on border crossing.”
Writing & Art from the Farmworker Community
The Common | 2024
This portfolio features fiction by Helena María Viramontes, nonfiction by Nora Rodriguez Camagna, poetry by Miguel M. Morales, and more.
