Panel celebrates Latina voices in the Carolinas

Women’s voices, specifically Latina writers with connections to the Carolinas, were part of a public discussion on the importance of creative writing and other artistic works that express ideas, personal identity and culture hosted by East Carolina University’s Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences.

More than 100 community members attended the panel event at Sheppard Memorial Library on March 19 in conjunction with Women’s History Month and International Women’s Month. It featured four Latina cultural creators and was sponsored by Dr. Amy Wright, Harriot College’s David Julian and Virginia Suther Whichard Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and visiting professor in the Departments of English and Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Adriana Pacheco, producer of the Hablemos Escritoras podcast, moderated the panel discussion. (Photos by Rob Taylor Photography and Design)

As the Whichard Distinguished Professor, one of Wright’s goals is to develop community-connected projects to promote public humanities, cultural identity and heritage, civic engagement and humanities advocacy, as well as oral history and storytelling.

“The voices we celebrate tonight are part of a vibrant and growing literary landscape here in the American South,” Wright said in her introduction. “All too often, conversations about literature overlook the remarkable work that emerges from Latino communities in our region. Tonight’s event highlights how these women writers, living and working in the Carolinas, help to reshape the stories we tell about the South — stories about identity, migration, memory and community.”

Panelists included Dailihana Alfonseca, a poet, writer, researcher, professor and UNC-Chapel Hill graduate; Von Díaz, an Emmy Award-winning documentarian and food historian born in Puerto Rico and raised in Atlanta, and a previous teacher at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill; Tita Ramírez, daughter of a Cuban exile and a Kentucky native, and an associate professor of English and creative writing at Elon University; and Stephanie Elizondo Griest, an author from the Texas-Mexico borderlands and professor of creative nonfiction at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The conversation was moderated by Adriana Pacheco, affiliate research fellow at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the founder and producer of the Hablemos Escritoras podcast and digital encyclopedia.

“The South is not just a place. It is a story,” said Pacheco. She said it is a region shaped by trauma, migration, race and the Civil War, but also changing paradigms, transnational memory and new voices.

During the event, the panelists shared their thoughts on what comes to mind when they think of the term South, stereotypes of Southern writers, how they view the writing of authors from the South versus authors from the North, gatekeepers of the American publishing industry and the effect on their writing and publishing, telling stories responsibly and ethically — especially in a changing digital landscape — and using their multicultural heritage and learning languages to tell their stories.

Dr. Amy Wright introduced the event to a group of more than 100 community members who came to hear from the guest creators.

“To me, the South is a witnessing,” Elizondo Griest said. “I believe that what we are doing in the South is documenting the views of our collective past. As Latinas, I think we are reclaiming the stories that haven’t yet been told.”

Díaz said she found her voice as a writer through food and feels food is a language all people and regions understand.

“A recipe is a guide to the creation of a delicious thing,” she said. “Cooking, describing food and describing the joy of eating, I find really universal.”

Ramírez thinks there is a vibe to the typical stereotype of Southern writers. She thinks Hispanic and Latina writers fit into the stereotype of the American Southern writer in a way they may not fit in other geographical places because that stereotype involves a love of place and of setting, an emphasis on community and family, dialect and language, and food.

“We have this stereotype of the Southern writer, but the whole point of this event is to break that down, expand it,” Ramírez said.

Alfonseca mentioned the media’s influence and how older, traditional news outlets are now owned by large media conglomerates. She talked about young people trying to mirror what they see on social media, specifically that “performative media is seen as tangible reality.”

The guests emphasized the importance of languages and that the world can open up when a person learns another language.

“If you have the capacity to learn another language, do it and hang on to it,” said Díaz. “It can be a point of pride, certainly, and it connects you to your culture, but it is also a gateway to other ways of being. If you want to live your life in some sort of storytelling capacity, or you want to understand other people, having this key to unlock their ability to represent themselves fully is a tremendous superpower.”

Elizondo Griest, who immerses herself in and learns new languages when she writes about them, said, “You have additional lives. I’m a very different person in Chinese than I am in Russian, than I am in Spanish. Why wouldn’t you want to have more than one life?”

The event moderator and panelists shared photo opportunities with audience members after the public discussion.

Alfonseca said, “Because I knew both English and Spanish, I was able to learn how to read medieval English, medieval Spanish and Germanic. I was able to teach myself Latin. I found out there was a language tree and it’s all related. Once you have one language, it will open so many more. Learn the tree.”

The evening’s discussion will form a future Hablemos Escritoras podcast episode, extending its reach beyond campus and into national and international literary networks. Hablemos Escritoras is a Texas-based podcast that describes itself as the largest encyclopedia and voice repository specializing in female writers, translators and critics in Spanish. The website and podcast enjoy a national and international audience of Spanish and English speakers. It fosters interactive discovery through book reviews and recommendations, and posts on literature, culture and society.

“The Whichard Distinguished Professorship is designed to bring humanities conversations into public spaces. By sharing this event beyond Greenville, we’re helping ensure that the voices of Latina writers in the South continue to reach broader audiences,” Wright said.

Wright has lived in Mexico and Spain and draws from her experiences to examine and explain how Mexican and broader Hispanic cultural narratives move across media. She explores how these stories shape identity, memory, nostalgia and belonging.

To learn more about Wright and this event’s featured participants, visit the Whichard Professorship website. To hear an interview in Spanish with Wright about her work and its importance to Greenville, listen to episode 692 of the Hablemos Escritoras podcast. View a gallery of photos from the event and reception taken by Rob Taylor Photography and Design.

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