september, 2025
Event Details
“The transfronteriza writer is not confined by genre, by language, or by nation. Her writing is a crossing—un cruce—between worlds, voices, and selves,” Gloria Anzaldúa wrote.
We’re in a time of reckoning. A time of brutal force, continuously crushing the warmth of family and the safety of home. Through language and ritual, we rupture these chains and cross borders of the self and the state as we covenant to celebrate the launch of Juania Sueños’s debut collection, topography of a border / line bird (Mouthfeel Press)—a luminous hybrid poetry collection conjuring survival, migration, queer longing, ancestral wisdom, and matriarchal memory.
The event will include readings by Sebastian Páramo, SG Huerta, and Juania Sueños, whose work speaks on the intergenerational aching and lifeblood of family, raising consciousness of class, race, and gender.
About the authors:
Sebastian Páramo is the author of Portrait of Us Burning (Curbstone Books, 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Best First Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters. His poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in Poetry London, Gulf Coast, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. His work has received fellowships and support from the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at UT-Austin, CantoMundo, among others. He is the founding editor of The Boiler and is Assistant Editor at Texas Review Press. He lives in Dallas.Sebastian Páramo, PhD.
SG Huerta is a queer Xicanx writer and organizer who has called many different parts of Texas home. They are a Roots Wounds Words Fellow, Tin House Winter Workshop alum, and Poetry Editor for Abode Press. SG is the author of two poetry chapbooks and the nonfiction chapbook GOOD GRIEF (fifth wheel press 2025). Their debut poetry collection Burns is forthcoming with Sundress Publications in 2026. They are currently writing a transsexually Chicano South Texas novel, Haunted Latin@ Individual, coming soon from IR/Plancha Press.
Juania Sueños’ writing is shaped by growing up undocumented in the U.S., witnessing the deportations of loved ones, and her lived violence of immigration policy. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Texas State University. She’s a co-founder and Executive Director of Infrarrealista Review, through which Juania connects with other marginalized Tejanx creatives. She’s the author of UnAmerican Dreams: Interviews and Reflections of Dreams Interrupted by State Violence (Texas After Violence Project 2021). She works as a translator and documents stories of state violence. Her work appears in Acentos Review, New York Quarterly Review, Nat. Brut, Skink Beat Review, Porter House Review, and other places. She’s currently working on Generation X-Pat, a novel of intergenerational curses, and an ode to Latina women—radical feminists, artists, and agitators—whose lives and voices echo across Mexico and the U.S.
Praise for topography of a border / line bird:
In her debut collection, the brilliant Juania Sueños offers us multimedia poetry that cries from the depths of the soul. This book is what Gloria Anzaldúa names “autohistoria,” a genre of art in which the artist simultaneously narrativizes her own story and the story of the collective. Sueños’s art is rooted in compassion for the psychic pain in her everyday life as well as the historical pain she has inherited. It is a humble bow to our Brown ancestral and living relations, recognizing their intimate knowledge of violence as well as the violence of love and memory.
-Sara A. Ramírez, Ph.D., author of Chicana feminist literary criticism in Diálogo, American Studies, and Chicana/Latina Studies journals
This book is impossible to eject from your skull once Juania’s words take hold. Lines like “I fill up the bathtub & make sure to add enough bubbles / so I don’t have to see my body” underscore just how difficult self-love can be–but also make an argument for the importance of decoding ourselves. These pages often present someone self-diagnosed as “difficult” to love, but every poem, micro-essay, and collage in this book is the opposite: these entries are generous and inviting, an opportunity to sit down with a true artist. Don’t hesitate–take every devastating and lovely word here and hold them in the palm of your hand.
-Amber Isaac, author of Remember the Internet: r/WatchPeopleDie and Peppermint
In topography of a border/line bird, Juania Sueños traces dreamlike cartography of a life formed by migration, queerness, survival, and ancestral summoning. These poems challenge lineage, expose the harsh immigration policies, face matriarchs, and grief through enticing forms, tender—yet aching language that sings through pages. Through this honest collection, rooted in the voice of a daughter, undocumented migrant, and fierce granddaughter, Sueños reclaims her place in the archive—not through permission, but through fire, prayer, and poetry.
-Saúl Hernández, author of How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters
