About Hispanic Heritage Month Festival - Topeka, KS

 The first Latino poet laureate emeritus of Kansas will share poetry, stories, and the lesson's learned throughout his journey of exploring the boundaries between identity and location in Kansas. 

Huascar was born in Killeen, TX, and has lived artfully in Kansas for over two decades.

As a second-generation immigrant living in the Heartland, Huascar considers himself a New American exploring the boundaries between identity and location, focusing on cultural empathy, social cohesion, class structures, first-generation trauma, mental health, and internalized diasporic longing and belonging.

Huascar Medina served as the Poet Laureate of Kansas from 2019 to 2022 and became an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, in 2022. Huascar Medina has authored three books of poetry: Protest As Love Poem (Meadowlark Press, 2026) Un Mango Grows in Kansas (Spartan Press, 2020) and How to Hang the Moon (Spartan Press, 2019).

His forthcoming collection of essays, The Prairie Fool (Plainspoken Press, 2027), is a lyrical meditation on politics, class, and culture.

He is the Lit editor for seveneightfive magazine, a staff editor at South Broadway Press in Denver, CO, and a contributing op-ed writer at Kansas Reflector.

His work has appeared in The Flint Hills Review, Gasconade Review, Green Mountains Review, Inscape, Kansas Magazine, Latino Book Review, The New York Times, and other publications.

  The momentous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case dismantled racial segregation in public schools. Yet, the segregation experienced by Mexican and Mexican American students is often overlooked. This presentation looks at the ways the Latino communities banded together to fight discrimination and demand equal protection under the law, focusing special attention on Kansas examples.