The Evolution of a Poet

Experience the Episode

Presented by Institute for Latino Studies

Explore the intersections of art, identity, and resistance with award-winning Poet Laureate of Wisconsin Brenda Cárdenas in her second oral history interview with Letras Latinas, recorded nearly nineteen years after her first. In a follow up to the September 2025 launch of the six-part series “Poets & Art: Ekphrasis at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art,” Brenda sat down with Notre Dame English Ph.D. student Karla Yaritza Maravilla Zaragoza for a chat about the dialogue between poetry and visual art (ekphrasis), the power of cultural identity, and the essential role of the artist as an activist.

To view Brenda’s original oral history interview with Letras Latinas from April 4, 2006, please click here. To enjoy a reading of Brenda’s poems and her exploration of poetry and the visual arts in conversation with one another at the “Poets & Art” event at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, please click here. For more information about “Poets & Art: Ekphrasis at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art” and other ongoing initiatives of Letras Latinas, please visit the Letras Latinas website.

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Meet the Poet: Brenda Cárdenas

Current Wisconsin Poet Laureate Brenda Cárdenas has published ekphrastic poems in her two books Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023) and Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009), as well as in literary magazines, and anthologies, most recently in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology. Cárdenas is also co-editor of two anthologies, including Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017). She co-designed and co-taught the inaugural master workshop for PINTURA: PALABRA, a multi-year Letras Latinas initiative in partnership with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee where she taught undergraduate and graduate classes and seminars on poetry and the visual arts.

Meet the Moderator: Karla Yaritza Maravilla Zaragoza

Karla Yaritza Maravilla Zaragoza (she/her/ella) just completed her second year as a Ph.D. student in English and is a Joseph Gaia Distinguished Fellow in Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. As a scholar, her passion lies in advocating for greater representation of Chican@/Latinx experiences in literature and education. As such, she is interested in conducting research through Chicana Third Space and Postcolonial critical theories to explore storytelling as a cultural resource against trauma and discrimination, assess the role of spirituality within Chican@/Latinx culture, and implement a multidirectional feminist praxis within a broad analysis of 20th/21st-century literature. Her ultimate goal is to advocate for using Curanderismo (traditional Latinx folk healing) in the U.S. public health care system to increase accessibility for lower-income families.

In addition to conducting research and writing essays, she is a Washington-based poet whose work explores illness, myth, and sacrifice detailing the experiences of migrant farmworkers in the Yakima Valley, the borderlands, and across the United States. She was the first poet featured in Poetry Northwest’s “Presenting” series for up-and-coming poets, praised for her language and aesthetic, described as “an agricultural beat, a field worker’s beat, a hot beat—[that] becomes prayer.” Her poetry has also appeared in The Acentos Review, Palette Poetry, and Huizache. Her manuscript “La Casa Negra” was a 2022 semifinalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize through Letras Latinas at Notre Dame. Her favorite poets are Natalie Diaz, Xavier Cavazos, and Natalie Scenters Zapico.