An Exchange October 15–October 21
Programming in León, Ciudad Juárez, Matamoros, Mexico City, and Tijuana
In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Mexico, the International Writing Program (IWP) sent a delegation of three writers (Aubrey Hirsch, Donika Kelly, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest) to Mexico for a seven-day Lines & Spaces exchange, accompanied by IWP Director Christopher Merrill. The focal point of this exchange, which was made possible by support from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, was a trip to León, Guanajuato for the annual Festival International Cervantino. The writers attended the festival and participated in a panel entitled “Diversity, Inclusion, Accessibility, and Equality through US Contemporary Literature.”
After the festival, writers traveled to consulates in in Ciudad Juárez, Matamoros, and Tijuana, and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, for follow-on events including workshops, panels, readings, presentations, master classes, and "in conversation" events.
Delegation
Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her six books include: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands; and the forthcoming Art Above Everything: Global Women with a Singular Vision. Widely anthologized, she has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, VQR, and Oxford American. Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize, and has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. She is currently Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Visit her website at www.StephanieElizondoGriest.com.
Aubrey Hirsch is a writer and illustrator living in New York. Her stories, essays, and comics have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vox, TIME Magazine, American Short Fiction, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, The Nib and elsewhere. She's the author of a short story collection, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a flash fiction chapbook, and This Will Be His Legacy, and a collection of feminist comics forthcoming from Mason Jar Press in 2025.
Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium and the full-length poetry collections The Renunciations (Graywolf), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (Graywolf), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award.
Christopher Merrill has published eight collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.