Cultural Enrichment Center 2025 - 2026 Events

Fall 2026

Borderlands of Experience: Poetry Reading and Q&A with Laura Cesarco Eglin, Katharine Jager, and Stalina Villarreal
September 23, 2026
2:30 - 4 p.m.
40,000 Windows Cafe

At the crossroads of culture, UHD’s own Laura Cesarco Eglin, Katharine Jager, and Stalina Villarreal will read and talk about their newly published collections of poetry and poetry in translation. These works are widely different, but they are all shaped by life transformations and experiences. During the reading you will be able to inhabit a variety of worlds and spaces. You will reflect on what it means to be a migrant, on motherhood, on how music impacts life, on how it feels to speak different languages, and much more.

Lau Cesarco Eglin is a poet and literary translator from Galician, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Spanish. She teaches Creative Writing at UHD. Cesarco Eglin has published six poetry collections. She received the 2019 Best Translated Book Award and was longlisted for the PEN Award in Poetry in Translation and the National Translation Award in Poetry in 2023. She is the publisher of Veliz Books.

Katharine Jager is a poet and medieval scholar. She is professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown and has published widely on late medieval English poetry, gender, and identity. She holds an MFA from NYU, and her poetry has appeared in The Good Life Review, The Gettysburg Review, Found, Commonweal, Friends Journal, The Red River Review, among other places.

Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal is poet, an essayist, an artist, a literary translator, and an assistant professor of English. Her debut book Watcha is out now from Deep Vellum Publishing. Her latest translation is Minerva Reynosa’s we’ll go as i think of you between lines and the poor sense of smell from a landscape with drunkards or hanged humans.