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THE CANTO MUNDO POETRY SERIES

EDITED BY DEBORAH PAREDEZ AND CELESTE MENDOZA

Every year, the University of Arkansas Press in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University accepts submissions for the Canto Mundo Poetry Series and awards the Canto Mundo Poetry Prize to the top submission. The editors of the series serve as judges for the prize of publication.

About The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) at Columbia University was founded in 1999 for the purpose of promoting discussions about race, ethnicity and indigeneity as they affect modern communities. To fulfill this mission, CSER engages the public through teaching, producing academic literature, and promoting the arts.

In response to a call for such a center by students of Columbia University in 1996, Professor Gary Okihiro founded CSER to offer courses dedicated to the study of ethnicity and race as well as to promote student and community engagement in such discussions. In 2006, Professor Claudio Lomnitz became CSER's second director; Professor Frances NegrÃ³n-Muntaner began her tenure as director in 2009. Those studies include Asian American Studies, Latino Studies, Native American/Indigenous Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies, and Individualized Study.

Other community building programs by CSER include "Artist at the Center"; the Caribbean Faculty Working Group and Native American/Indigenous Studies Project’s speaker series; the monthly "Workshop on Critical Approaches to Race and Ethnicity"; and a V-Log Series on the web.

About the Series and Prize
To further the mission of CSER and the press’ decades long support of poetry, one winner of the Canto Mundo Poetry Prize is published per year as part of the Canto Mundo Poetry Series. This series is named after the Canto Mundo workshops developed by Norma Cantú, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Celeste Guzman Mendoza, Deborah Paredez, and Carmen Tafolla. for the purpose of crafting poetry that focuses on the intersections of aesthetics and the sociopolitical underpinnings of Latina/o poetry. This poetry series brings academic, political, and public discussions of race and ethnicity together for the purpose of building stronger communities, recognition of diversity in those communities, and furthering human values of understanding and beauty.