Platica Y Poetics S3E9 w/ Liz Coronado Castillo

Queer Lineage, Landed Memory, and Healing Narratives were the themes in an intimate and layered platica inspired by Gabriela Mistral’s “Dame la Mano,” with playwright and poet Liz Coronado Castillo to explore the intersections of queerness, ancestry, and storytelling. Just as Mistral’s work offers a quiet but potent manifesto of unity and sensual resistance, Liz’s voice emerges from the soil of West Texas and northern Chihuahua, to honor the complexities of identity and belonging. She spoke of how her family's roots—working-class, resilient, and deeply spiritual—continue to shape her voice as a queer Chicana writer navigating the liminal spaces between cultures and generations. Liz illuminated the power of duality: Xicana and scholar, poet and playwright, grief and healing, she reckons with trauma and transformation, describing how poetry and playwriting serve as tools for liberation, not just personally, but communally. Her advocacy work as Director of Student Success at St. Philip’s College shines through in her art, championing students from historically excluded backgrounds, and this ethos of radical belonging pulses through her poems and plays. The importance of presence, silence, and witnessing—practices that inform not just how she writes, but how she holds space for others is visible and felt throughout page and stage, carving space for queer, brown, and nonconforming bodies to exist fully and fiercely—without apology.