from my email from MAKE
This summer at Make, YOU have two opportunities to support the Lit & Luz Festival!
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May Newsletter
Image: 2025 Chicago Live Magazine Show at the MCA after-party with Susy Bielak (2016-17 Collaboration Cohort), Maria Gaspar (2025-26 Collaboration Cohort), Kamilah Foreman (MAKE Board President), Edra Soto (2023-24 Collaboration Cohort) and Allison Cochrane (Hyde Park Art Center). Photo by Natasha Moustache
This summer at Make, YOU have two opportunities to support the Lit & Luz Festival!
MAKE Lit produces the international Lit & Luz Festival of Language, Literature, and Art a one-of-a-kind program in Chicago, presenting live, multilingual, multidisciplinary literary and art works and programs in collaboration with more than 17 universities and organizations, drawing more than 1,000 attendees. Lit & Luz CDMX, in partnership with Museo Universitario del Chopo, is the Mexico City edition of this cultural exchange with 400+ attendees.
Recently, MAKE Lit has developed residency partnerships with Chicago organizations and is expanding to similar partnerships in Mexico City. These residencies help serve artists, build new platforms, and connect with a broader community. By curating programming, partners, artists, and writers, and commissioning new multidisciplinary and bilingual works, we are celebrating Mexican, Latinx/e, immigrant, and multicultural artists.
Our 2025 Lit & Luz Chicago, in the height of anti-immigration policies by the US government, proved incredibly urgent for the community. Your support fuels more than a festival; it sustains a transcultural ecosystem where writers, artists, and performers can create new work, build international networks, reach broader audiences, and build bridges.
Scroll down to learn more about ways you can support cultural exchange today!
All individual tickets include heavy apps, two drinks, two raffle tickets, and a ton of fun:
Artist ticket: $50
Lit & Luz Supporter (general admission): $65
Lit & Luz Super Supporter (unlimited drinks and five raffle tickets—$25 value): $100
Sponsor a table! (six, general admission reserved seats to share with your organization and friends): $400
Not able to attend? Buy a ticket for an artist or a friend!
Get your tickets
Cocktails & Collaborators
Tuesday June 23, 5 PM - 7 PM
La Licor Panamericana — 2521 N California Ave, Chicago
Join MAKE Lit’s Board of Directors at Logan Square’s La Licor Panamericana, for our annual fundraiser, Cocktails & Collaborators. Always a pairing of two of our favorite things, this year’s event features a collaborative cocktail and invites you to join the collaboration.
At this convivial cocktail hour, enjoy a delicious and abundant assortment of La Licor’s empanadas and more, as well as two drinks. Choices include a signature cocktail created by La Licor’s Abraham Ramirez in partnership with Don Julio Tequila and Alicia Arredondo Mendoza, along with a featured mocktail, wine, and beer. (Cash bar for additional drinks.)
Named after the iconic Pan-American Highway, La Licor’s celebrated cuisine and cocktails symbolize the connection among diverse Latin American cultures in a beautiful setting.
Image: Luz at the Edge graphics by Irene Wa
SAVE THE DATE! Luz at the Edge: A Night of Music and Dance in Support of the Lit & Luz Festival
Saturday, August 8, 8 PM
The Empty Bottle — 1035 N Western Ave, Chicago
On August 8, we will come together to celebrate our culture and community in support of the artists, writers, and performers of Lit & Luz, as well as the ongoing work of building bridges between Chicago and Mexico.
A night of live music, poetry, performance, and dance at Chicago’s Empty Bottle. Your ticket purchase helps MAKE continue fostering international collaboration and offering free bilingual arts programming at accessible venues throughout Chicago and Mexico City!
100% of ticket sales, raffle sales, and donations will go toward producing the Lit & Luz Festival and compensating the performing artists.
A full lineup will be announced in June!
All proceeds from these events benefit MAKE Literary Productions’ Lit & Luz Festival, which seeks to:
Foster international collaboration between artists and writers from Chicago and Mexico through the Collaboration Cohort—an interdisciplinary, low-residency program centered on the creation of new work through partnerships and travel
Imagine and offer free, bilingual arts programming at accessible venues throughout Chicago and Mexico City
Build dedicated audiences for contemporary Mexican literature and multidisciplinary art in Chicago, and likewise for Chicago literature and art throughout Mexico
Listen to Lit & Luz on Lumpen this week
Lumpen Radio welcomes Lit & Luz as a new monthly show this spring!
This April, we launched our monthly hour of Spanish-language conversations with acclaimed writers, musicians, performers, and visual artists from Chicago and Mexico on Lumpen Radio, a community radio station in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood.
Join us on the 4th Wednesday of each month from 7 pm - 8 pm to hear intimate conversations with participants of the Lit & Luz Festival, facilitators, and members of our broader community on their creative processes and the transformative power of cross-cultural collaboration at 105.5FM Lumpen Radio in the Chicago area, or tune in anywhere from the Lumpen website or app.
Image: Ana Hernandez, Lit & Luz Festival Collaboration Cohort 2025-26 & Jackman Goldwasser Resident, Leticia Pardo and Mariela Acuña in conversation with translation support from Ashley Huicochea at the Hyde Park Art Center during Fall 2025.
Tune in TODAY, Wednesday, May 27, at 7 pm to hear about how Lit & Luz Chicago collaborates with over 17 cultural organizations across the city to help represent Chicago’s art ecosystem and its varied Latinx/e culture. The people at these institutions help nominate participants for the Lit & Luz Festival, enriching the organizational process by thinking through themes, the professional experiences participants bring, and how different artists can mutually benefit from collaboration. In this program, we will talk with curators Mariela Acuña and Alivé Piliado about their practices and their contributions to the Chicago Arts ecosystem, as well as the new residency partnerships we established with the Hyde Park Art Center and the National Museum of Mexican Art in order to support artists, build new platforms, and connect with a broader community in the lead-up to the festival.
SAVE THE DATE: Nov 8 - Nov 13, 2026
Image: Audience at the Lit & Luz Live Magazine Show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago . Photo by Natasha Moustache.
The 2026-27 Lit & Luz Festival of Language, Literature, and Art, our signature cross-cultural celebration of Language, Literature, and Art, will return to Chicago, November 8- Nov 13, 2026, bringing together artists, performers, musicians, poets, and writers from Chicago and Mexico around the theme of “Edge/Borde”. Participating artists in the festival's 13th edition will explore social, geographical, and linguistic limits through tensions at the “edge of space”. The weeklong festival programming will consider the complexities of official borders, as well as the ways in which soft and hard edges are constructed within cities and regions—and within artistic practices themselves—through language, culture, identity, and policy.
Save the date and join us in Chicago this fall!
Support the 13th Annual Lit & Luz Festival through a Sponsorship!
Image: Magali Lara presenting with the Open Practice Committee at The University of Chicago's Department of Visual Arts.
The magic of the festival could not happen each year without the generosity of our sponsors and partners. This fall, the Lit & Luz Festival will bring international artists to Chicago, introduce local audiences to creative practitioners from Mexico, facilitate community-based conversations about pressing issues through numerous events around the city, and support artists by commissioning new work that they present to new audiences, helping to grow their networks in the US and Mexico.
Sponsorship keeps these events free, making them accessible to a wider audience and connecting more Chicagoans, both in the city and abroad.
2026-27 Lit & Luz Festival Sponsors receive recognition on festival promotional materials, have additional avenues for advertising, including the opportunity to serve as the Presenting Publisher Sponsor of a festival event, complementary tickets to our signature event, the Live Magazine Show at the MCA, and more.
Interested in learning more about sponsorship? Get in touch with us at director@makemag.org.
During Lit & Luz Chicago 2025, we:
Commissioned four collaborative performances from the 2025-26 Collaboration Cohort and debuted the new work during the Live Magazine Show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago with music from Damon Locks.
We presented the work of 25 artists from Mexico & Chicago.
Image: Lit & Luz 2025 Keynote Address with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo at Pueblo Unido Gallery, Centro Romero in Chicago.
This & That
Join UNAM Chicago for a closing reception and silent auction of the exhibition De la misma habitación (Of the Same Room), works by Magali Lara (2025-26 Collaboration Cohort).
The exhibition includes mixed-media prints, which were commissioned for the commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of UNAM.
May 28, 6-8 pm
UNAM Chicago, 350 Erie St. Suite 100, Chicago IL
Sunday June 21 + Monday June 22: two performances of Days of Wonder by Marty McConnell (2022-23 Collaboration Cohort) at Elastic Arts in Chicago
Through language, music, and imagery, “Days of Wonder: it is time to be very tender with our grief” explores curiosity and interconnectedness as methods of moving into and through personal, societal, and global sorrow, survival, and co-evolution. An immersive performance experience by poet Marty McConnell with film by Lindsey Dorr-Niro and music by Patrick Wojtak.
Day for Night: Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, curated by Leslie Moody Castro is on view at Co-Lab Projects in Austin, Texas from May 23rd - July 4th, 2026.
Featuring the work of Fabiola Torres-Alzaga (2024-25 Collaboration Cohort), the exhibition investigates visual geographies and their thresholds, with a special emphasis on the manifestations of the invisible. Through an interdisciplinary practice, Torres-Alzaga revisits the scenic systems and their spatio-temporal languages of film, theater, and magic, articulating them within an expanded field.
Invest in cultural exchange!
Image: Gabriela Damián Miravete and Maria Gaspar, “What broken bones will we mend together now?” / “¿Qué huesos rotos sanaremos ahora?” at the Live Magazine Show, MCA November 2025. Photo by Natasha Moustache
Your support is invaluable as we continue to host free, multilingual events in the US and Mexico and facilitate cultural exchange between artists and writers in both countries.
Thank you for helping create spaces where our languages, stories, and creative visions can thrive!
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