College of Liberal Arts - Spanish Creative Writing Initiative

Spanish Creative Writing Initiative

What We Do:

The Spanish Creative Writing Initiative brings a creative component to our curriculum by facilitating workshops for students with well-known Spanish and Latin American writers. We offer fellowships to enhance students' writing skills and enable them to work on topics of their interest. We engage with Austin's Spanish-speaking community by organizing public readings once a month at Alienated Majesty, a local bookstore. We also organize the annual Enrique Fierro Writing Contest, which is open to all UT-Austin students.

How Your Gift Will Support Our Work:

Your gift will support the organizing of writing workshops with well-known writers from the Spanish-speaking world, and allow us to offer summer fellowships for young writers to work hand-in- hand with writers/journalists in Latin America.

Our Publications:

Our book, Contar Historias: Escritura Creativa en el Aula (Tower Books - UT Press) is the first volume written in Spanish by graduate and undergraduate students and published by a university press. The authors are heritage speakers, native speakers and students for whom Spanish is the second, third and even fourth language. This collective work celebrates students´ stories in the language they love.

Our Previous Workshop Guests:

Among our guests are writer and screen writer Laura Esquivel who helped launch The Spanish Creative Writing Initiative to keep the creative spirit of Spanish alive at UT; Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (Booker Prize finalist 2020); Chilean/Argentine writer Cristian Alarcón (Alfagurara Prize Winner 2021); Mexican writer/screenwriter Julián Herbert; Mexican writers Socorro Venegas and Isabel Zapata, Mexican award-winning journalist Daniela Rea as well as Argentine journalists Leila Meysinger and Maria Mansilla.