“Writing. Witnessing. Wishing.” A Nonfiction Workshop with Award-Winning Author Norma Cantú

Join this non-fiction workshop with a focus on the notion of “time”: past, present, and future. Participants will be led through different writing exercises that elicit discussion on time, point of view, and navigating the personal or private alongside the public.

A daughter of the borderlands, scholar and creative writer, Norma Elia Cantú currently serves as the Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio. Dr. Norma Cantú states: “My life formation as a working-class Chicana shapes my intellectual and aesthetic endeavors and impels me to act to deconstruct the oppressive structures that exist in society. I passionately believe that words have power and that literature has the potential to create the change we need.”

Born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas and raised in Laredo, Texas, Cantú is intimately bound to the US-Mexico border region. As a scholar, she focuses on issues of borders and boundaries whether in academic disciplines or the geopolitical borderlands of Mexico and the United States, all through a Chicana feminist theoretical lens. She writes poetry and prose, what she calls creative autobioethnography, also with a focus on the borderlands and heavily rooted in the cultural traditions of the region. Her publications include Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, Meditación Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor, and Cabañuelas: A Novel.