Author Xochitl Gonzalez with her novel Last Night in Brooklyn In the opening pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of opulence and greed, The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, sums up his friend Jay Gatsby’s tragic fate: “Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” Of course, by now readers

The tone of the course is more seminar than lecture, and the benefits manifest in a constant engagement between professor, students, and text– all without the use of phones in the classroom.

View Adam Wingard's film "Onslaught: through the lens of the brown optic and discover the mother daughter Latina dyad.

Frederick Luis Aldama uses the brown optic to read Spiderman Brand New Day.

Yu’s prose flows as much for our reading pleasure as it does for easing us into the long histories and present realities of violence against Asian women. But it also delivers a valuable framework for unpacking traumas, unlearning harmful ideologies, and embracing one’s vulnerabilities after years of detachment and self-preservation. Fetishized brims over with disarming humor and honesty.

David returned home to build Reclamación Wines, a Mexican-American owned, sustainably farmed label: Reclamación. Reclamation.

Javier rebuilds his creator odyssey, showing how a bicultural kid in Whittier scavenged a Latino principia aestetica from whatever the culture left lying around.

Horror, more than any genre, lets you put people in extreme situations and watch their humanity shine.

Dan Johnson recaps BIPOC POP 2026!

Xavier Garza (Moderator), John Picacio (Illustrator-Author), Frederick Luis Aldama (Author and Editor) at the San Antonio Book Festival April 11, 2026 San Antonio has always felt like a city that holds memory in its bones. The riverwalk and historic el marcado hums with it. The food carries it. And every spring, the San Antonio Book Festival draws together the storytellers who know how to excavate that memory and put it on the page, the panel, the panel, the illustrated sprea

In this reflective essay, Erika Abad traces her years-long collaboration with artist Justin Favela, exploring what it means to let go of past selves, embrace rest, and build community through Latinx art, memory, and care. Moving between studio moments, family ties, and cultural connection, this piece considers how slowness, joy, and collaboration shape new beginnings.

Sam Ceballos and Henry Barajas get into the creating of noir comics. Through storytelling, digital art creation, and research Barajas breaks down what it means to be a comic writer.

Veronique Medrano and Paloma Martínez-Cruz map a vision of Latinx creative practice that is expansive, rigorous, and utterly alive.

Every piece of media makes an argument about who we are, and to interact with it means to internalize, consciously or not, the assumptions it carries. For Caribbean and Afro-Latinx communities, the stakes of these arguments run deep. Music, television, and film now ricochet across the globe at light speed, and with that reach comes a paradox: the pressure to include “diverse” characters often lands in the hands of creators who haven’t done the homework. The result? Representa

What happens when you build spaces where BIPOC creators, scholars, students, and communities can come together not just to consume stories but to make them?

Ex-Perimento is a book about love, healing family relations, and navigating womanhood.

The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

Stories where the drama isn’t “will they accept me?” but “how do we build a life together in a world that’s still structurally hostile?”

Bad Bunny performs at Superbowl LX and gives it a whole Brown Optic makeover.

The Underrepresentation of Latinx Bodies in Sci-Fi For decades, science fiction has imagined the future as a place where brown bodies either don’t exist or only survive as villains, aliens, or disposable labor. The genre loves to predict tomorrow, but it often does so by erasing Latinx/o/a people from it entirely. When we do appear, we’re trapped in a racialized past, tied to violence, intuition, and survival rather than progress. Sci-fi futures may look global, but their hi