Horacio Castellanos Moya

He is a Salvadoran writer, author of thirteen novels, five books of short stories and three collections of essays. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. He worked in press agencies, magazines and newspapers for thirteen years in Mexico City. He has also resided in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Canada, Spain, Japan and Germany. In the latter country he was writer-in-residence for two years in a program of the Frankfurt International Book Fair. He currently resides in the United States, where he is a professor at the University of Iowa. The Chilean government awarded him the Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Prize (2014) for the whole of his work. His most recent novel is Cornamenta (2025).

Julián Herbert

Acapulco, Guerrero, 1971. Es poeta, novelista, cuentista y ensayista. Ha recibido el Premio Nacional de Literatura Gilberto Owen, el Premio Nacional de Cuento Juan José Arreola, el Premio Jaén de Novela y el Premio de Novela Elena Poniatowska, entre otros. Es autor de una decena de libros de poesía, entre los que se cuentan Kubla Khan (2005), Pastilla camaleón (2009) y Las azules baladas (vienen del sueño) (2014). Su libro más reciente es Suerte de principiante. Once ideas sobre el oficio (2024).

Other activities involving the participant:

Award Ceremony Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize 2025
The Poetry Room
Perreo, electro, and punk in literature

Claudia Neira Bermúdez

She has been the director of the Central America Festival since 2015, where she also coordinates the content curation. She combines her cultural management work with her experience in strategic communication and public relations.
Previously, she worked as an editor in media in Nicaragua; as a communication expert in the United States and Nicaragua, where she founded, in 2005, Crea Comunicaciones.

She holds a master's degree in strategic communication and public relations at Marshall University, West Virginia, United States. She is a fellow from the V class of the Central American Leadership Initiative (CALI, associated with the Aspen Institute). She has been a mentor at Voces Vitales and has been part of various cultural, business and leadership initiatives in Central America.

Nicaraguan born in Brazil, to a Peruvian father and a Nicaraguan mother. Since 2022, she has lived in Madrid.

Other activities involving the participant:

The Pleasure of Reading Gala
Latin America Viva

Elena Salamanca

She is a Salvadoran historian, poet, fiction writer and art curator based in Mexico City. Author of several multidisciplinary books of poetry, fiction and academic historical works. Graduated from the doctorate in history from El Colegio de Mexico, she is an  Honorary Fellow in Writing by the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa.
She was invited as a writer-in-residence of the Fall Residency of the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, in 2024. Her most recent books Kneeling before corn. Recuperating More-than-Human Intimacies on the Salvadoran Milpa (The University of Arizona Press, 2024) and [INCOGNITA FLORA CUSCATLANICA] (La Impresora, Puerto Rico, 2025) explore the relationship between more than human intimacies, grief, history and environmental memory. She has published three bilingual editions of narrative and poetry: Tal vez monstruos/Monsters Maybe (2022); Landsmoder (2022) and La familia o el olvido/Family or Oblivion (2017), her books have been published in the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Italy, Guatemala and El Salvador. She has twice received the LLILAS Benson research grant from the Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, in 2023 and 2015. In 2009 she received the FONCA-AECID Artistic Residencies for Creators from Latin America Writing scholarship in Mexico. Combines literature, performance, memory and politics in the public space, and she actively advocates for the rights of women and girls in Central America.

María del Carmen Deola

More than twenty years in the publishing world, in Central America, first at Prisa Ediciones and, since 2014, at Penguin Random House Editorial Group, as editorial and promotion manager.
Master's degree in publishing. Degree in geography and history, with a specialty in medieval history.
I live in Guatemala.

Carlos Wynter Melo

He questions gender, racial and identity norms with the psychological exploration of his characters. His stories usually narrate everyday events that, suddenly, are disrupted and reveal a commonly unknown reality. For this he uses parody, absurdity, Magic Realism, the fantastic, mirrors, doubles and similar mechanisms. He has received recognition from organizations such as the Hay Festival in London, the Guadalajara Book Fair, the Secretariat of Culture of Bogotá, the Ministry of Culture of Panama, the Technological University of Panama and the National University of Panama. His most recent books are Literatura olvidada (Octavio Méndez Pereira Award; Sudaquia Editores), Sueño con Tokio en el Darién (IPEL Awards; Editorial Uruk) and Los grandes dientes de Caperucita  (Ricardo Miró Award, 2024). He has been translated into English, Tagalog, Hungarian, Italian and German. In addition to being an author, he is a university professor and editorial consultant.

Other activities involving the participant:

What do authors live on?