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.

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

Popo the Xolo (2025), author Paloma Angelina Lopez, and author celebrating Día de Muertos at The Ohio State University Paloma Angelina Lopez is a Mexican-American author currently living in the US. Her family hails from Jalisco and Guanajuato on her mother's side and Zacatecas and Sinaloa on her father's side. Her debut, Popo the Xolo (2025), grew from the loss of her own abuela a few years prior. Written in Spanglish and Spanish, the book celebrates both modern Mexican

What I love about Las Hermanas Iglesias is the collaboration across coasts and generations that they embody as an articulation of how resisting erasure, of centering acknowledgement with extreme care, demonstrates the strength and determination possible within this state of uncertainty and the full embodiment of the ancestries and lineages we carry.

I.V. Marie’s Immortal Consequences is a young adult fantasy novel that explores the supernatural through the emotion-rich journeys of young people in a dark academia setting.

This is how I read Nacho's Taco, the latest entry in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series: as an invitation to ride along, to taste and think and remember.

Diego Rivera reviews LatinoLand through an insightful analysis and gets to the book's core arguments and delivery.

Daniel Chacón's fiction doesn't just cross borders; it questions the very nature of boundaries themselves.

Anzaldúa's work is central to my research interests, particularly materials related to children's and young adult literature, queer femininity, and water imagery in folkloric contexts.

This refreshing novel weaves together the story of forgotten Cuban artist Anita de Monte in the 1980s and Puerto Rican-American Raquel Toro in the late 1990s. Anita battles marginalization in the art world and oppression from her abusive husband—even after her death. A decade later, Raquel navigates her identity as a Latina at Brown University, constantly reminded of her supposed inferiority in elite spaces.

Living as I do, entre mundos/between moving worlds, I hope to continue to tell stories that illuminate, resist, and heal.

Chapa tells a new story for Malinalli, creating an environment where Malinalli has a chance to show herself in a way that history has not afforded her.

For too long, horror has spoken in a single accent—one that whispers of European castles, New England graveyards, and monsters born from traditions that never felt like home. But Our Shadows Have Claws (Hatchett, 2022) arrives like a long-overdue reckoning, and this time, the terror speaks in voices I recognize, in languages that feel like family.

Alejandro Heredia offers something far more valuable: the messy, beautiful truth of lives lived between languages, cultures, and identities

While the border is commonly depicted as a site of danger or crisis, Ruiz shows it as a place of community and care. Families move between cultures with ease, switching between Spanish and English, crossing bridges and borders not in fear but as a part of daily life. This depiction honors South Texas as complex, vibrant, and deeply American.

This is about stepping into a world of what-ifs and asking questions that can unravel everything.

It's a book for all time. It's the stories of working Chicanos who build the physical and cultural infrastructure of this country while being told they don't quite belong. Their stories will always matter. They will always need telling.

Genesis Stanley's Book Talk on Natasha Alford's Extraordinary Memoir, American Negra