Austin Latinx Micro-Book Festival Highlights Lone Star Lit

Resistance is the root of nonprofit Red Salmon Arts and their Casa de Resistencia Books store – it’s right there in the name. This year’s Austin Latinx Micro-Book Festival is a celebration of community, connection, and creativity, and it’s also inherently an act of political defiance. 

RSA Executive Director Lilia Rosas says the event is a way “to let folks know that Latinx literature, publishing, and authors are thriving, and they’re not just thriving in Austin, but really across the state.” Running Aug. 29-30, the festival brings in artists from the Valley, Houston, San Antonio, and West Texas. “To have everyone under one umbrella like that, it doesn’t happen every day,” she adds. A mentee of RSA’s founding poet and activist raúlrsalinas, Rosas has helmed the organization for many years and maintained its emphasis on building community and offering accessible programming. “It’s important to know that you can actually do things for free,” she says.

The inspiration for the festival comes from multiple places, including San Antonio’s Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and the Inter-American Book Fair. Austin-based poet Liliana Valenzuela recalls earlier efforts to gather Latinx, Chicanx, and Native American presses, writers, and organizations in Austin “but not quite a thing of this magnitude of what they’re planning right now, which is really exciting.” 

“This is [us] saying we are here. Texas is also our home,” says San Antonio-based performer and writer Barbie Hurtado. “Texas is also bilingual. Texas is also Latinx and queer.” Bringing people together in a space where they feel safe to be queer, to be an immigrant, and to speak Spanish, “it’s a different form of resistance,” they say. 

Hurtado and their partner, Violeta Garza, will be leading Sunday writing workshop Cositas Chismositas: Everyday Objects Spillin’ the Tea, inspired by a prompt from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cristina Rivera Garza. In addition to writing workshops, opportunities to get to know independent presses fill the schedule as do readings from writers with roots across the Lone Star State, including two former Texas poets laureate – Emmy Pérez and Carmen Tafolla – and current Houston Poet Laureate Reyes Ramirez. “This festival is a way to bring people together,” says poet-scholar mónica teresa ortiz, who leads a June Jordan-inspired writing workshop on Saturday called Living and Loving Under Empire, “and have dialogues and conversations that are not happening in the institution[s].” On that same note, Hurtado says, “people like my partner, Violeta, and other authors are able to bring their learnings [from] really big conferences or exclusive conferences that not everybody has access to into the community, into an accessible format.”

It’s impossible to talk about this festival without thinking about the ways national and Texan politics have attempted to silence or minimize immigrant voices. Stories about consolidating departments at UT-Austin, increasing ICE raids across the country and Texas in particular, and decreased protections for immigrants in academia and legal status have dominated the news cycle. “Migrant narratives are woefully needed right now,” event co-organizer and multihyphenate writer jo reyes-boitel says, “and Texas has been very good at removing migrants from our spaces, our physical spaces.”

“Texas is in the news a lot for a lot of things,” Hurtado says, “but it’s cool to be in the news for something amazing that is inclusive of all of us.” 

This article appears in August 28 • 2026.