Four Poetas on Catholic Imagination

Experience the Episode

Presented by Institute for Latino Studies

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 12:00 pm

Experience a Letras Latinas reading and conversation featuring Adela Najarro, Natalia Treviño, Gina Franco, and Sarah Cortez at Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture fall 2024 conference Ever Ancient, Ever New: On Catholic Imagination. These writers of faith continue to draw on the wisdom, wonder, and beauty of the evergreen Catholic tradition to inform a particular mode of understanding and engaging with the world around them.

For more information on Letras Latinas at the Institute for Latino Studies, please visit the Letras Latinas website.

Meet the Poet: Sarah Cortez

Sarah Cortez is known as “the cop poet.” One of her favorite photos of herself features a mischievously smiling Cortez showing off her gun in its shoulder holster. Her work includes short stories, essays, and a memoir as well as poetry, and much of it centers around her later-life career as a police officer in her native Houston. (She graduated from that city’s police academy in 1993.) Her first collection of poetry, How to Undress a Cop (2000), published by Arte Público Press, was described by Publisher’s Weekly as “[b]y turns erotic, tender, and gritty” and “powerfully direct.” The poems, some of which had such titles as “Rosie Working Plain Clothes” and “Christmas With the Vice Squad,” bore witness to another of her literary strengths: a sly and observant sense of humor.

Her latest collection, Tired, Hungry, Standing in One Spot for Twelve Hours: Essential Cop Essays (2018) won a 2019 award from the National Federation of Press Women. In that book Cortez wrote of “the endless boredoms and dirt” and the “tiny, stark terrors” of police work, but also the “hidden rewards of intense camaraderie, sense of mission, and the fulfillments of justice and duty.” Her 2013 collection of poems about policing, Cold Blue Steel, was praised by Booklist for displaying “a frank language in sharp lyrics charged with weary passion.”

Cortez’s literary—and above all, religious—roots run deep. After graduating from Rice University with honors (majoring in psychology and religion) in 1972, she taught herself ancient Greek and obtained a master’s degree in classics from the University of Texas-Austin, and then another master’s degree, in accounting, from the University of Houston, which launched a corporate career that paid well but never satisfied her.

After four years as a full-time officer on the Houston police force specializing in sexual-assault investigations, she moved to reserve-officer status in order to devote herself to a literary career: writing, editing, and teaching creative writing courses as well as promoting the experiences of the Latino-Americans of Texas.

Not long after taking up police work, she returned to the practice of the childhood Catholic faith in which she was raised.

Sarah Cortez is currently the founder and president of Catholic Literary Arts a Houston-based nonprofit that offers workshops in spiritual journaling, poetry and fiction writing and hosts an annual Fearless Catholic Writers Camp for high school students. Find out more about these and other Cortez adventures at CatholicLiteraryArts.org.

Meet the Poet: Gina Franco

GINA FRANCO’s recent book, The Accidental, winner of the 2019 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, was published with the University of Arkansas Press in October of 2019. Set primarily in the borderlands of the American southwest, the collection reflects on accident and its role in creating the lives we are born into—and in determining how those lives end.

Her first book, The Keepsake Storm, published with the University of Arizona Press, interrogates the uneasy alliance between the vehemence of memory and the surrealism of narrative, especially in light of language, place, faith, and identity.

She keeps a journal of photographs at reli[e]able signs that reflects her travels between Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas—where her family lives—and Illinois, where she and her husband live and work most of the year.

Her writing has been widely published in literary journals, including: 32 Poems, America, Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, BorderSenses, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Diagram, Drunken Boat, Image, The Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review, Narrative, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Saint Katherine Review, Seneca Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Tuesday; an Art Project, West Branch, Zocalo, and Zone 3. 

Her work is also anthologized in A Best of Fence: the First Nine Years; Lasting: Poems on Aging; The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry; Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing; and The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity. 

She earned degrees from Smith College and Cornell University, and was awarded residencies and fellowships with Casa Libre en la Solana, the Santa Fe Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and PINTURA:PALABRA, sponsored by Letras Latinas, Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame. 

She served as art editor for several years to Pilgrimage Magazine, and she taught at Image Journal’s 2017 and 2018 summer Glen Workshop. 

She teaches poetry writing, 18th & 19th-century British literature, Gothic literature, poetry translation, Borderland writing, religion and literature, and literary theory at Knox College, where she was awarded the Philip Green Wright-Lombard Prize for distinguished teaching. 

She is an oblate with the monastic order of the Community of St. John, and she is married to Christopher Poore, who is currently a Regenstein Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. 

Meet the Poet: Adela Najarro

Adela Najarro is the author of four poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over, My Childrens, a chapbook that includes teaching resources, and Volcanic Interruptions, a chapbook that includes Janet Trenchard’s artwork. The Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Collaborative has selected Variations in Blue for publication in 2025. 

The 2024 Int’l Latino Book Awards designated Volcanic Interruptions as an Honorable Mention in the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award category.  The California Arts Council recognized her as an established artist for the Central California Region and appointed her as an Individual Artist Fellow.  

Adela Najarro is a poet with a social consciousness who is working on a novel. Her extended family left Nicaragua and arrived in San Francisco during the 1940s; after the fall of the Somoza regime, the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. She serves on the board of directors for Círculo de poetas and Writers and works with the Latinx community nationwide, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice. 

She holds a doctorate in literature and creative writing from Western Michigan University, as well as an M.F.A. from Vermont College, and is widely published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. 

Her poetry appears in the University of Arizona Press anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, and she has published poems in numerous journals, including Porter Gulch Review, Acentos Review, BorderSenses, Feminist Studies, Puerto del Sol, Nimrod International Journal of Poetry & Prose, Notre Dame Review, Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere.  She currently calls Santa Cruz, California, home.

Meet the Poet: Natalia Treviño

Born in Mexico City, Natalia Treviño grew up in a Texas where her mother taught her Spanish and Bert and Ernie gave her lessons in English. 

Her work captures the voices and lives of women who emerge despite everything that works tirelessly against them.  

Natalia has won several awards for her poetry and fiction including the 2004 Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2012 Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. 

Her first novel in progress, Drinking the Bee Water, is a testimony of an immigrant mother’s journey to make a life as a servant in the U.S while separated from her daughter.

Natalia became a naturalized U.S. citizen at the age of fifteen after living in San Antonio, Texas since she was four. She graduated with a BA in English when she was 21 from The University of Texas at San Antonio. Two years later, she received her Masters of Arts in English from the same university. After a almost two decades of teaching, she went back to school to study fiction writing. She graduated the University of Nebraska’s MFA program in Creative Writing in 2010.  Her jobs have included teacher, stay-at home mom, a single mom, small business owner/book-keeper, and now, assistant professor of English at Northwest Vista College where she works with students of all levels. 

Natalia’s fiction appears in Mirrors Beneath the Earth (Curbstone Press), The Platte Valley Review, and her non-fiction appears in in  Wising Up Anthologies, Complex Allegiances and Shifting Balance Sheets: Women’s Stories of Naturalized Citizens. Her first book of poetry, Lavando La Dirty Laundry, is available from Mongrel Empire Press and most online bookstores.

Natalia’s poems appear in several publications including Bordersenses, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, The Houston Literary Review, Sugar House Review, Sliver of Stone, burntdistric, Voices de la Luna, and North Texas State’s,  Inheritance of Light. 

A member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Natalia has been working to increase young adult literacy since 1992 in her teaching career and through programs sponsored by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, Gemini Ink, and the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center.