“The chance to see Él Mató [a un Policía Motorizado] for free in Kessler Theater, right here in Dallas, is amazing,” says Southwest Review Editor-in-Chief Greg Brownderville.
Frontera will showcase literature, music, arts and film starting at 5:30 p.m. on April 11 at bookstore/bar The Wild Detectives (314 W. 8th St.) with a conversation between acclaimed American cartoonist Lynda Barry and fiction writer Mary Miller. The evening continues at Kessler Theater with performances by Él Mató a un Policía Motorizado, Karly Hartzman of North Carolina’s alternative rock band Wednesday and Washington D.C’s garage rock band The Paranoid Style.
“This is not like a stuffy, stodgy, formal literary affair that people should feel bashful about joining,” Brownderville says. “...It's very approachable, and that's by design.”
Founded in 1915, Southern Methodist University’s Southwest Review is the third longest-running quarterly literary magazine in the U.S., trailing The Sewanee Review and The Yale Review. The literary magazine has long been revered for its roster of prolific authors, including five Nobel Prize winners and the late Larry McMurtry, whose work first appeared in Southwest Review in 1961.
“It's a magazine that is a pleasure to read,” says Brownderville. The editor-in-chief is enthralled in the arts as an SMU English professor who has penned three poetry books, created the multi-medium narrative series Fire Bones, and fronts indie rock duo Beekeeper Spaceman.
Frontera, which is financially backed by the SMU Department of English, could have been hosted on campus, but for the Southwest Review team, Oak Cliff was more fitting.
“There's a conversation there that's naturally happening between English speaking ... the English-speaking USA, and the Spanish-speaking Latin America and the kind of bilingual section of the USA here in the Southwest,” Brownderville says. “... That cultural conversation is happening already, and it happens in Oak Cliff in particular.”
Now an Oak Cliff resident, the professor notes that conversations with neighbors are just as likely to be in Spanish as in English. The area's bookstores, artists and cultural community reflect this bilingual dynamic, making it one of the most creative hubs in Dallas.
“It’s very important that the art, the books and the stories, not the academic part, go to the streets and go to the regular people,” says Southwest Review associate editor Sylvia Georgina Estrada.
Estrada, a Mexican-based writer and publisher who began working with Southwest Review in 2023, recalls Oak Cliff’s hospitality during Frontera's inaugural year. She says the community was embraced by Latin American voices already deeply embedded in the neighborhood.
One For the Books
“The U.S. readers are interested in Latin American stories,” Estrada says, noting the international translated-fiction award The Booker Prize's increased recognition of Spanish to English translated titles such as 2024’s shortlisted Not a River by contemporary Argentine writer Selva Almada. The interest is mainstream.In December 2024, Dua Lipa recommended Zlmada's book and Argentine-American writer Hernán Diaz’s In The Distance for Vogue’s “In The Bag" video series.
“At the end of the story, we all feel love, anger and happiness,” Estrada says. “Latin American stories are very close to the feelings that many readers are experiencing.”
Southwest Review’s spring issue debuts a new design tied to Frontera. The issue features work by Mexican writer Brenda Lozano, who will join a rapid-reading lineup on April 12 at The Wild Detectives following a Texas Theatre screening of Blood Simple.
The action-packed reader lineup features Mateo García Elizondo, a profound writer who is the grandson of Colombian Nobel Prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez; national-bestselling author of We Were the Universe Kimberly King Parsons; poet and polyglot literary translator Patricio Ferrari and Mexican-writer Brenda Navarro whose timely themes span motherhood, the fear of losing a child and identity. Frontera’s full schedule is available on Southwest Review’s website.
“You can tell at a reading if people are going to sleep and being bored. That did not happen last year, and it won't happen this year,” Brownderville says.
He says Frontera is more than a place to “take your intellectual vitamins. " It’s a space that physically brings cultures together, both on and off the page.
“There's nothing like that to help people understand each other,” Brownderville says.
