Fifth Offering of TAMIU Border Voices Lecture Series April 17 Features Writer Dr. J Buentello Benavides
The fifth offering in Texas A&M International University's (TAMIU) Border Voices Lecture Series will feature a conversation with local writer Dr. J Buentello Benavides on challenges and stories that shape our shared realities in Laredo.
The lecture, "Border Girls: Reading Laredo with J Buentello Benavides," will be held Thursday, April 17 at 6:30 p.m. in the Academic Innovation Center, room 127. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Buentello Benavides, who is assistant professor of English at Belmont University in Nashville, TN, is an editor, translator, and Hedgebrook writer-in-residence alumna. Her prose and translations have appeared in The Florida Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.
Her writing has been named a finalist for the Newfound Prose Prize, a finalist for The Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work tackles crucial border issues and explores the realities of growing up on the border.
TAMIU assistant professors Dr. Adam Kozaczka and Dr. Zachary Hernández, faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences, department of Humanities, organized the Border Voices Lecture Series, which is made possible in part by a grant from Humanities Texas, the State affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the community partnership of the Laredo Public Library and the Webb County Heritage Foundation.
Previous Border Voices Lecture Series presenters have included Rick Jervis, journalist and author of Devil Behind the Badge: the Horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol Serial Killer, and Dr. Norma E. Cantú, author and Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, who conducted her “From the Self to the World: A Generative Writing Workshop.” Also, featured was a lecture by Elizabeth González James, the author of the novels Mona at Sea and The Bullet Swallower, and filmmaker Paloma Martínez.
For more information, contact Dr. Kozaczka at 956.326.3300 or email adam.kozaczka@tamiu.edu, or Dr. Hernández at zachary.hernandez@tamiu.edu, or 956.326.2582.
Visit the dedicated Border Voices Lecture Series website for additional details.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this speaker series do not necessarily represent those of Humanities Texas or the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Registration for TAMIU’s Maymester, Summer, and Fall 2025 courses begins Monday, April 7, 2025, at 8 a.m. online via Uconnect.
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