Claudia Castro Luna visits UW Bothell

Hosted by IAS and the Latinx Student Union, Washington State poet laureate Claudia Castro Luna was on the UW Bothell campus on Wednesday February 26th for a full day of activities. She visited BIS 258 “Introduction to Latinx Studies” in the morning to discuss her poetry collection Killing Marias (2017). Later she had an informal “meet and greet” with students who had the opportunity to talk to her about a range of issues. In the afternoon she presented a public lecture titled “Writing the Big Sky.”

In her talk, which she presented to a full room of roughly 150 people, she discussed her experiences as a refugee who fled her home country of El Salvador during its civil war, the difficulties and joys of learning to live and write in English at the same time that Spanish remains her language of family and home, and of the role her poetic practice has played in helping her find a sense of identity as a Latinx person in the United States, and in shaping her political and social justice commitments.