“estallaré en mil y más auroras 
y seguiré amaneciendo 
en la conciencia afilada de todos.”

“I will burst into a thousand dawns or more 
and I will arise 
in the sharpened will of us all.”
—Amada Libertad, “Epitafio”

Smallest country on an isthmus, our homeland rose out of the ocean—a result of tectonic plates knocking skulls for millennia. To live in El Salvador, the rocking “valley of hammocks,” home to the highest volcano density in Central America (about one volcano per one thousand square kilometers), requires resourcefulness and a certain stubborn hope. “Not today,” we assure ourselves as we swim in a crater lake, build homes upon earthquake rubble, our capital city set on the skirts of a volcano. Somos tercos. We live between two seasons: wet or dry, thrive or survive. We take cues from bare-branched trees at the peak of the dry season: When threatened, our first act of resistance is to continue our work—as seed bursts to bloom in thick canopies of yellow and pink.

The absence of Salvadoran literature in English translation has limited access to our narratives and culture for both the diaspora and the broader literary community. As a publisher and editor, I have spent over twenty years working to bridge this gap—editing bilingual anthologies and fostering transnational connections among Salvadorans in the homeland and abroad. The handful of established publishing houses in San Salvador lack the infrastructure to distribute books beyond a half-dozen bookstores and impromptu fairs—often, new publications circulate from someone’s backpack. With no support from the government, writers, publishers, and cultural organizers work with minimal resources—often at personal cost—to write, edit, and bring books into the world. 

What I offer here is not an all-star round-up of canonical writers, but a snapshot of El Salvador’s present-day literary actors, those who take risks in both the creation and distribution of their work. They build community, aware that they are part of a literary continuum—charged and changing, like the thin bridge of land we stand upon. I’ve chosen not to arrange the works alphabetically or by genre, but instead to weave poetry and prose into a narrative arc. Read straight through, the folio becomes a collective story that offers a living, layered portrait of El Salvador today. I chose to create a braid of voices because this is what resonates most with our reality right now: scarcity of opportunity, abundance of talent. This folio gathers the work of eighteen writers and seventeen translators—and except for three translators, all are Salvadoran. These translations were carried out by writers and scholars, activists and educators, prize-winning authors and poets laureate, but not all of them are professional translators. In this context, translators are not just linguistic mediators but allies in preserving and disseminating suppressed voices. Diaspora networks, online platforms, and international publications become alternative spaces for creative exchange.

The writers in this folio approach language as invocation, confrontation, and survival. Their work orbits recurring concerns: memory and myth, the weight of history, and the ways violence etches itself into both personal and collective bodies. Lilliam Armijo, Ana María Rivas, and Lourdes Ferrufino draw from ancestral and spiritual frameworks to reclaim feminine genealogies and mythic time. Jorge López, Tania Pleitez Vela, and Jorge Galán reckon with war, exile, and inherited trauma, tracing how violence lingers across generations and geographies. The body, particularly the female, is foregrounded as both site and subject in poems and stories of motherhood, abuse, and survival by Lauri García Dueñas, Krisma Mancía, Elena Salamanca, and Michelle Recinos, as well as in expressions of silenced or prohibited desire, such as Alberto López-Serrano’s love poem. Vladimir Amaya, Josué Andrés Moz, and Miroslava Rosales wield irony and surrealism to expose the erasure of histories, mapping the psychic and physical violence of state terror, migration, and systemic forgetting. In several texts, the natural world emerges not as backdrop but as animating presence: Earth, sky, water, and fire echo internal states and ritual memory, as seen in the work of Derlin De León. Efraín Caravantes, Roxana Méndez, and Vanessa Núñez cultivate an ecopoetic sensibility in which land and sacred atmosphere blur the boundary between self and environment, casting nature as both mirror and medium for spiritual and emotional inquiry. The result is a chorus of voices, each distinct yet resonant, held together by urgency, risk, and imagination.

In addition to cultivating resilience, our precarious geography echoes our turbulent history, and right now, it’s hard to see the horizon. For Salvadorans, every day is like diving into a stormy sea; if we can see our outstretched hand, we’re assured at least one clear stroke forward. Yes, the country has seen a sharp drop in gang violence, but it’s the result of expanded state control and mass detentions under emergency powers. Underlying challenges persist: systemic poverty, entrenched corruption, and the long shadows of war and migration. Each poem and story in this folio kicks and claws its way above the waves.

In El Salvador, state censorship, surveillance, and control of the media have narrowed the space for free artistic expression. More than one of these texts has been banned or censored. Economic precarity and cultural conservatism further pressure artists, often leading to self-censorship or exile. And if it’s true that imagination is a utopian act, to transfer language from the internal to the external requires risk—because our names are sealed upon each word. In this setting, creatives work in a void; those with a slant for truth create under the threat of being disappeared. We operate within a system of perverse logic—a house of horrors masked by a sunny, slapdash façade crafted for the camera’s slick lens, reality-TV lighting, and panning drones. This folio doesn’t offer statistics, timelines, or names found in reports; instead, it stays rooted in imagination and memory, offering poems and stories that humanize the Salvadoran experience—texts that might, in turn, spur dialogue and action.

In this climate of surveillance and intimidation, the literal becomes perilous, so we turn to myth, metaphor, and parable to speak what cannot be said aloud. As Jorge López reminds us, “symbols acquire meaning as we put one foot in front of the other.” Fear of legal or social repercussions shapes not just content but form, inviting genre shifts into science fiction, magical realism, dystopian imaginaries. Yet within constraint, artists persist: blending genres, developing coded language, transforming fear into fuel.

The only way to see another day is to offer these—stone by stone—testimonies set against silence. Jorge Galán writes, “I keep writing, because storytelling has always mattered. If reality cannot bear the truth, literature must hold it.” Salvadoran poetry serves as a wellspring of resilience: an ever-renewing source that carries us through darkness and anchors us to ancestral legacies. That circularity is embodied in the serpent—in the words of Salvadoran poet Claudia Lars: “Vida, vida, y más vida, / poderosa serpiente cambiando su piel! Life, life, and more life, / powerful serpent shedding its skin!” We find solace in this ongoing tradition, in knowing our ancestors who inhabited this thin isthmus also faced invasions and upheavals—and yet, like the serpent shedding its skin, they endured and transformed. This folio underscores how, despite centuries of erasure, we continue to create, write, paint, and weave ourselves back together. So much of our literary tradition, from the poems of Claribel Alegría and Roque Dalton to the prose of Michelle Recinos and Derlin De León, embraces a circular vision of time and transformation. That creative act becomes a lifeline, a testament that our voices cannot be silenced. Salvadoran writing reminds us: We are part of something larger, something that can’t be destroyed by rhetoric or authoritarian moves. Instead, we renew ourselves in each new generation of writers, tercos, refusing to vanish.

—Alexandra Lytton Regalado

NOTE: Amada Libertad, born Leyla Patricia Quintana Marxelly in 1970, was a Salvadoran poet and revolutionary who died in combat on the San Salvador volcano in 1991.

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