Meet Our Grantee-Partner: Cardboard House Press
Cardboard House Press is dedicated to the creation of Spanish-English bilingual spaces through small-press publishing, community workshops, and bilingual events.
Recent titles from Cardboard House Press. Photo courtesy of Cardboard House Press.
Mission: Cardboard House Press is a 501c3 nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of Spanish-English bilingual spaces through small-press publishing, community workshops, and bilingual events. Our work acts as a platform for the exchange of ideas, uplifting new meanings that provoke connection and social action.
Cardboard House Press edits and publishes bilingual and trilingual editions of poetry originally written in Spanish or Indigenous languages of Latin America that have never been published in English in the United States. It was founded in 2014 in Bloomington, Indiana, by Peruvian poet Giancarlo Huapaya and Chilean geologist Cristian Medina, who gathered with the community in public libraries, community spaces, and a garage to make handmade books and facilitate workshops on Latin American poetry. The Press currently publishes three series: paperback books, chapbooks, and Cartonera Collective art books, and has a growing catalogue of more than 50 titles.
Despite a large Spanish-speaking population in the United States, Spanish-language literature is not widely available, and publishing opportunities for Spanish-language poetry are even less available. As one of just a few Spanish-bilingual poetry publishing houses in the country, Cardboard House Press publishes legacy and emerging Spanish-language poets. Cardboard House Press is a space for dialogue between poetics that investigate social, environmental, political, cartographic and linguistic formations. Its catalogue widens the audience for titles from racially diverse Latin American and Spanish poets writing on themes of social, racial, environmental, and economic justice, indigeneity, gender and LGBTQ issues, migration, and more. This cultural work responds directly to stigma and racialized violence against minoritized communities by promoting more nuanced transhemispheric literary conversations.
Xavier Valcárcel de Jesús and Roque Raquel Salas Rivera read from “Anthem of Evaporated Tears” at an AWP 2026 Offsite Reading. Photo courtesy of Cardboard House Press.
Cardboard House Press creates vital openings in the United States literary market for authors and translators in the diaspora and Latin America—predominantly BIPOC, immigrant, and queer voices. The Press has published authors from the historical avant-garde who self-exiled because of their queer identities, including Peruvian poets César Moro and Jorge Eduardo Eielson, as well as contemporary poets such as Tilsa Otta, who challenges gender through danceable poems and the rhythm of perreo. A contemporary queer Puerto Rican classic on facing the violence at the heart of domesticity and gender, Anthem of Evaporated Tears by Xavier Valcárcel de Jesús and translated from the Spanish by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, appeared recently in a handmade, bilingual Cartonera edition.
For each book it publishes, Cardboard House Press works with a different literary translator or translation team, with submissions made directly by translators. Believing in the cultural importance of translation, the Press ensures its manuscript development, editing, compensation, and promotion practices center and support the translators it works with so that every publication elevates not only an author, but the translator behind the work. The Press opens submissions each summer.
Among recent titles, Bodies Found in Various Places by Chilean poet Elvira Hernandez and translated by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher was shortlisted in 2026 for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Antuco by Carlos Soto-Román and Carlos Cardani Parra, and translated to the Spanish by Judah Rubin, one of the press’ newest titles, is a major work of Latin American documentary poetry.
Cardboard House Press’s programs are designed to increase access to Latin American literature in the United States, while reducing traditional institutional and socioeconomic barriers to poetry. Its bookmaking workshops and literary events have taken place in collaboration with Spanish-speaking communities throughout the United States. By partnering with local bookstores such as Palabras Bilingual Bookstore in Phoenix, cultural centers like des/centro de poesía in Providence, local public libraries, queer and BIPOC-centered printing studios, and Hispanic-serving institutions such as Arizona State University, Cardboard House Press connects with a diverse bilingual community.
The press’s workshops impart practical bookmaking skills to majority Latinx participants at a time of increasing resource scarcity in the publishing industry. Its Cartonera Collective art books are assembled using techniques that include hand sewing and binding, making marbled endpapers, linocut printing, and creating book covers from recycled cardboard. The press has hosted nearly 150 bilingual bookmaking workshops across the United States, where participants also read poetry and engage in dialogue on Latinx and Latin American poetry. Spaces for language justice, these workshops not only expand the audience for the books the Press publishes, they also provide a hands-on experience in which community members widen their horizons of poetry and culture.
Receiving a general operating support grant from the Poetry Foundation has allowed Cardboard House Press to continue publishing during a challenging period for small press publishing, and a critical moment for disseminating Spanish-language poetry in the United States. Support from the Poetry Foundation also increased press capacity for in-house printing of chapbook and Cartonera Collective book art and supports paying those who make its books possible.
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