Launch of Wasafiri’s Presencia y Resistencia Issue
Instituto Cervantes in London hosts a unique evening to celebrate the launch of Presencia y Resistencia, the new issue of Wasafiri, dedicated to Latinx writing and visual art in the United Kingdom.
Presented by poet and Wasafiri editor Leo Boix, the event will bring together three powerful voices in contemporary poetry—Patrizia Longhitano, José Buera, and Luisa de la Concha Montes—for a night of readings that move across languages, territories, and lived experiences.
Their work explores migration, memory, identity, desire, resistance, and life in the diaspora, revealing the creative force that emerges from the meeting of cultures.
After the readings, there will be an open conversation with the audience, discussing what it means to write and live between languages, the importance of Latinx culture in the current British literary landscape, and how presence itself can become a form of resistance.
The magazine will be available for purchase during the event, and attendees will have the opportunity to speak with the poets.
Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet, born in Argentina and based in London. His second collection, Southernmost: Sonnets (Chatto & Windus, 2025), was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes and named book of the year by The Guardian and The Week. His debut English collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Boix is editor and lead translator of Hemisferio Cuir, introducing English readers to major Latin American voices.
Luisa De la Concha Montes is a writer and photographer from Mexico City who now resides in London. Her work attempts to bring shapeless states such as grief, diaspora, identity, and memory into physical form through visual poetry, documentary photography and digital curation. Her writing has been showcased at the National Poetry Library, and published in the collective zine Lenguas Enredadas, Shado Magazine, The Big Ship, amongst many other publications.
José Buera is a Caribbean/Latinx writer from the Dominican Republic. An alumni of the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme (24/25), his poetry appears in Magma, Propel, Southword, Wasafiri and elsewhere. José is the founder and curator of Empanada Poetry Salon, a bimonthly gathering of diaspora poets amidst their foods.
Patrizia Longhitano is a pansexual immigrant poet who spent her childhood between Brazil and Italy.
She is currently the manager of Poetry Pharmacy bookshop, a board member of Magma and the host of Venn Diagrams. Some of her work is found in Wet Grain, Rialto and Un Nuevo Sol anthology.