In the past few months, The Acentos Review has shifted, grown, transformed.  We said goodbye to beloved editor, Eliel Lucero, and said hello to The Acentos Foundation executive directive, Rich Villar, as the fiction and nonfiction editor.  Dr. Raina J. León continues to work as the poetry and arts editor and webmaster.  The review celebrated its second anniversary.  It has outgrown its submission process and now uses SUBMISHMASH as its submission manager.  Still, what has not changed is the quality of the work represented here. 

At various times in its life, sometimes simultaneously, Acentos has been a reading series, a literary journal, a workshop series, a grassroots organization, and a fledgling non-profit with a fiscal sponsor.  At its heart, even as our tastes in literature changed, the premise has stayed the same:  providing a community for Latino/a poets without translation or apology.  We've been having this conversation since 2003.

The Acentos Review stretches and redefines this community in ways that continue to surprise and fill us.  Here you will find seasoned writers, beginning writers, poets of both the ear and the eye, essays and interviews with both stateside and international focus, all intertwined with a focus upon community and the much-needed complication of matters of identity.  We are not interested in being the other.  We are interested, rather, in the complexity of the American story.  For that matter, we are interested in the complexity of the Latino story.  Neither stories are monolithic.

The dynamic selections for this edition likewise look away from the easy story. Three separate genres dive into the wrecks of masculinity, place, history, parental responsibility, prejudice, and politics.  They speak to their audiences -- all of their audiences, wherever and whoever they are -- unflinchingly.  They resist easy resolution and delight in playing with our intellects.  And as they are laid out in this edition of The Acentos Review, they represent a needed diversity of Latino/a voices and authorship that Acentos will always strive to maintain.

As we ease into our second year, into a new fiction editor and submissions process, we invite you to read, listen, and join the conversation.  Bienvenidos.