From scholars to journalists, musicians to activists, URBAN-15 strives to present the best and brightest poetic voices for Mega Corazón every year. While many of these voices are returning from years past, the constant change in our world has inspired them to write and create new works. URBAN-15 challenged these poets to bring in their most impactful works. All poets met this challenge and exceeded every expectation. In light of the 250th anniversary of our great nation, as well as observation of our valued 1st amendment – the freedom of speech – URBAN-15 has titled the 2026 Mega Corazón Poetry Marathon “Unshuttered Voices.”

Learn more about each 2026 poet down below, and don’t forget to watch their performances!

Amalia Ortiz:

Tejana poet and playwright Amalia Ortiz appeared on three seasons of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO. Amalia was awarded the 2020 American Book Award for Oral Literature. NBC Latino named her book Rant. Chant. Chisme. one of “10 Great Latino Books of 2015.” It won the 2015 Writers’ League of Texas Poetry Discovery Prize. Amalia was chosen to speak at TEDx McAllen 2015. She won an Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Award and a writing residency at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. She is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Hedgebrook writer-in-residence alumna, and she was the inaugural performing-artist-in-residence at ArtPace in 2018. She was awarded a NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant to film music videos for her latest book The Canción Cannibal Cabaret & Other Songs (Aztlan Libre Press). She was awarded a City of San Antonio Individual Artist Grant in 2021 to fund the creation of a new poetry manuscript.

Working in collaboration with her band, Las Hijas de la Madre, she transformed poems from that project into songs. In 2024, Las Hijas de la Madre were awarded a Democratizing Racial Justice Artist Residency from the Mellon Foundation to complete music for their new album Diatribas Punk and a grant from the Alternate Roots Foundation to professionally record the album. Diatribas Punk was released in December 2025 and is now streaming on all platforms. The San Antonio Current listed the album as one of “San Antonio’s best music releases of 2025.” Amalia received her MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson:

Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson is a San Antonio native and a Poet Laureate Emeritus of San Antonio, TX. 2020-2023. Her dynamic style is a fusion of: poetry, hip hop and R&B. She is an award-winning voice actress and teaching artist who enjoys facilitating workshops all over the nation.  She has written commissioned works and opened up for Nikki Giovanni, Dr. Cornel West, and Phylicia Rashad. Vocab has authored two published books and is featured in numerous anthologies. A 2025 Pushcart Nominee, some of her awards include: Dream Voice 2018 (awarded by The Dream Week Commission), The Arts and Letters Award (2020), Impact Award (2023), and Literary Excellence Award (2024 by Gemini Ink). Best Local Poet 2024, 2023, and 2021, by the San Antonio Current. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her legacy project The Echo Project, which featured on KLRN. Her albums are available for streaming on all music platforms. 

 In 2022 & 2023, she received  Creation Fund grants from National Performance Network for her theatre production with Lubana Al-Quntar entitled, The Seasoned Woman, a production co-commissioned by The Carver and Art2Action. Vocab has collaborated with Centro San Antonio on public art pieces of poetry: Elevated Melanin, a tribute to that piece is located in Peacock Alley. Permission to Play, a multidisciplinary mural featuring the art of Barbara Felix is located on Commerce Street, in downtown San Antonio and also located at The San Antonio International Airport. Her collaborative piece Sunny Salutations is located at Poet’s Pointe Park, and Suds to Salvation in the Presence of the Past on San Pedro Creek.  For more info visit her website AndreaVocabSanderson.com 

Anthony “The Poet” Flores:

Anthony “The Poet” Flores is a 3-time San Antonio Grand Slam Poetry Champion who has represented our city in competition on six different occasions at the National Poetry Slam. He has performed his work all over the United States, from local schools and community centers to H.B.O.’s Def Poetry Jam to the famous Lincoln Center in New York City. He is a co-founder of Fresh Ink Under-21 Youth Poetry Slam, and he has been a judge for S.A.’s La Voz City-Wide Spoken Word Competition. Anthony The Poet has also recently completed his 14th year of serving as a judge for the San Antonio Public Library’s Young Pegasus Poetry Contest for kids and young adults.

He heads a collective of spoken word artists that has performed at some of the city’s most high-profile cultural events, including Una Noche En La Gloria, the Luminaria Contemporary Arts Festival, and the touring Matisse and Pablo Picasso Tapestries exhibits at the San Antonio Museum of Art, to name a few. His widely popular “Manu Ginobili” poem was published as part of the Manu Ginobili Tribute Poster by the San Antonio Express-News in September of 2018, and he was named “Best Local Poet” in the San Antonio Current’s “Best of San Antonio 2018” issue. His book, CINCUENTA: 50 Poems Celebrating Half A Century Of Life, was published in January of 2020. This past April, he completed his 11th year of serving as a co-organizer and emcee for VIVA POESÍA: Palabras, Música, y Cultura, which has become the official kickoff event for National Poetry Month in San Antonio. Every year, he helps bring to the community some of the biggest poetry events in the city, and he has worked with over 20,000 kids and young adults in the area in just the past 10 years. He is a full-time poet who lives and works on the Southeast Side of San Antonio.

Carmen Tafolla:

Loved throughout the world for her moving performances and readings, Dr. Carmen Tafolla is a poet, storyteller, performance artist, motivational speaker, cultural activist, Professor Emeritus, and a native of San Antonio’s West Side barrio. 

The author of 40 books, her work appears internationally in high school and university textbooks, newspapers, journals, magazines, and elementary school readers. Named State Poet Laureate of  Texas in 2015, Tafolla had also served from 2012-2014 as the first City Poet Laureate of San Antonio and presented at more than 300 schools, universities, professional conferences, and community arts centers in her two-year tenure. In 2018, she became the first Latina to be elected President of the Texas Institute of Letters. 

Called by Roots author Alex Haley a “world-class writer”, Tafolla has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Américas Award, presented to her at the Library of Congress in 2010, seven International Latino Book Awards, three Tomas Rivera Book Awards, three ALA Notable Books, a Charlotte Zolotow Award, the Art of Peace Award, Top Ten Books for Babies, and has been recognized by the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies for work which “gives  voice to the peoples and cultures of this land.

Don Mathis:

Don Mathis is a poet and journalist in San Antonio. His poems have appeared on national radio, local television, and in a hundred periodicals – as well as at dozens of festivals, museums, and galleries. Multiple times over the past ten years, Don has led a Writers Take a Walk expedition along the San Pedro Creek Culture Park. He is happy to announce that an anthology of poems collected from these adventures has recently been published. Find Don in the San Antonio Report and the Good Men Project. He can be reached at dondon213@hotmail.com   

Eddie Vega:

Eddie Vega is a poet, spoken word artist, storyteller, and educator. He is the author of Chicharra Chorus (FlowerSong Press, 2019) and Somos Nopales (FlowerSong Press, 2024). His poetry appears on a downtown San Antonio building, Poets Pointe, and along the San Pedro Creek Cultural Park. In 2022 he edited and published a collection of poems written by South Texans entitled, Asina is How We Talk. Vega is a Macondo Writers Workshop Fellow and currently serves as the 7th Poet Laureate of San Antonio.  

Vega writes about food, Tejano culture, social justice, and the intersections thereof. Known as the Taco-Poet of Texas, he hosts The Mouth Dakota Poetry Project, a bimonthly poetry open mic in San Antonio. 

Eduardo Garza:

Eduardo Cavazos Garza, founder of the Jazz Poets of San Antonio and longtime Chicano activist, artist, poet, musician, actor, drum-maker, mask-carver and Native American spiritual practitioner, was born in Kingsville, Texas in 1947 and moved to San Antonio in 1974. He served in Vietnam from August 1969 to August 1970 and returned to make use of the GI Bill by studying Art at the University of Texas-San Antonio.  He has acted in more than seven films, including The Newton Boys, The Bookie, Even Hand and several made–for–TV dramas, plus countless television and radio commercials.  He has also participated in scores of sweat lodges, is active in many indigenous ceremonies, and is an outstanding performance poet.  Garza has created hundreds of poems and paintings and thousands of drawings, in addition to many wooden faces carved from tree trunks. Garza continues to curate and organize art shows and poetry and music events as he has for decades and currently performs with the Jazz Poets of San Antonio for Brick’s Blue Mondays. 

Frances Treviño Santos:

Frances Santos is a poet, teacher, activist, and daughter of San Antonio.  She is the author of three books of poetry and has been teaching literature and writing to the students of San Antonio for thirty years.

Jennifer Yañez-Alaniz

Jennifer Yáñez-Alaniz is a Chicana Cúelcahén Ndé (Lipan Apache) scholar, poet, and educator. She is a PhD Candidate in Culture, Literacy, and Language at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In her role as a Graduate Teacher Assistant, she teaches courses in language and cultural equity, language policy, and second language teaching and learning. Her work is grounded in community engagement and cultural advocacy. Jennifer facilitates poetry workshops, open mics, and mentorship projects that center BIPOC voices, language justice, and creative expression. Her praxis extends into land-based and community-rooted collaborations that support literacy, cultural continuity, and collective care.

As a poet, Jennifer is the author of Surrogate Eater (Alabrava Press, 2023), with work recognized through multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Her poetry and scholarly writing engage themes of translingualism, embodiment, and relational knowledge-making. Her poetry is published in various journals and anthologies, and her developing poetry-theory, articulated through Lipan language, is forthcoming in academic journals and has been shared widely through national conferences and invited presentations.

Jessica Tilton “Tiltonica”

Jessica Tilton is a poet, artist and mother who is native to San Antonio. She has won lots of prizes and contests for having good words and putting them in the right places. She has recently been referred to as “the internets dream girl” after reaching vitality for drawing her dreams. Her mission is to consolidate truth into digestible content and feed the youth a new perspective. Follow her journey on tiktok and other social platforms as @tiltonica 

Jim LaVilla-Havelin:

Jim LaVilla-Havelin is the author of eight books of poetry, including recently released Mesquites Teach Us to Bend (Lamar University Literary Press, 2025) and A Thoreau Book (Alabrava Press, 2025).He is the co-editor for Houston University Press’ UNSUNG MASTERS volume on Rosemary Catacalos, and Literary Executor for Catacalos’ estate, assembling her collected poems for a volume, Sing! 

Educator, editor, and community arts activist, LaVilla-Havelin for over 10 years was the Poetry Editor for the San Antonio Express-News. He has been the Coordinator of National Poetry Month in San Antonio for 18 years (as of 2025). In 2019 he was awarded the City of San Antonio’s Distinction in the Arts for Literary Arts. 

A creative writing teacher for over fifty years  – in addition to his 12 years of teaching at  The Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center for Gemini Ink’s Partners Program, LaVilla-Havelin teaches senior citizens in the Go Arts Program through Bihl Haus Cultural Arts, and has been the Poet In Residence at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy, teaching high school students. He was Gemini Ink’s 2020 Writers in Communities Teacher of the Year. 

 Jim is a 2026 inductee into the Texas Institute  of Letters, and the 2026 Gemini Ink Honoree for Inkstravaganza this fall. 

John Phillip Santos:

John Phillip Santos is  Professor of Borderlands Humanities and Creative Non- Fiction at the University of Texas San Antonio. 

He is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker from San Antonio, Texas. His two memoirs, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (a National Book Award Finalist) and The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire, together tell the ancestral stories of his mother and father’s families, an American origin story of the centuries-long migrations that emerged out of Spain, Mexico, and the lands that became South Texas. His book of poems is Songs Older Than Any Known Singer. 

As an Emmy-nominated television producer, he has produced more than 40 broadcast documentaries and news programs on cultural themes in sixteen countries for CBS and PBS. His journalism and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Antonio Express-News, the Manchester Guardian, Texas Monthly, and other publications in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe. This work is archived in the Special Collections of the University of Texas San Antonio. 

During his six years as a program officer at the Ford Foundation, he directed the philanthropic program in media infrastructure and production, making more than $40M in grants to support the development of independent media networks in the US, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and to fund the production of documentaries around the world. 

A proud graduate of Texas public schools, Santos was the first Latino to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar and holds degrees in English Literature and Language from Oxford University, and Philosophy and Literature from the University of Notre Dame. 

After twenty-two years in Manhattan, Santos returned to his borderlands hometown of San Antonio in 2005, where he now lives with his wife, the poet Frances Treviño Santos and their daughter, Francesca de la Luz. 

In 2017, he was awarded the Texas Medal for the Arts in Literature. 

Johnny Rivers “Space Dragon”:

Johnny Major Rivers III, also known as Space Dragon , is an award-winning poet, author, and multidisciplinary artist from El Paso, Tejas. A Queer, Afrochicanx father, he uses his art as a form of activism, blending poetry, sound, and visuals to tell powerful, intimate stories. For over a decade, he has performed nationally, representing El Paso at major slams like Individual World Poetry Slam and Southern Fried. A finalist at Southwest Shootout and River City Rumble, he’s also been honored by UTEP as a distinguished Queer community leader and is a beloved presence on stages across Texas and beyond. 

Marisol Cortez:

Rooted in San Antonio, Marisol Cortez writes across genre about place and power for all the other borderwalking weirdos out there. She is author of the award-winning South Texas cli-fi novel Luz at Midnight (FlowerSong Press 2020), as well as The Bird Church (Finishing Line Press 2025) and I Call on the Earth (Double Drop Press 2019), a chapbook of documentary poetry that bears witness to the forced removal of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community.

She teaches creative writing at the University of Texas San Antonio and serves as Executive Editor at Deceleration, an online journal for environmental justice thought, praxis, and art (deceleration.news). Other projects and publications can be found at mcortez.net. 

Naomi Shihab Nye

Palestinian-American writer, editor and educator Naomi Shihab Nye grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she graduated from Trinity University and continues to live.  On faculty at Texas State University, she has been Young People’s Poet Laureate for the U.S. (Poetry Foundation), poetry editor for the New York Times magazine, and The Texas Observer, and a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities all over the world.

Her books include Grace Notes (Poems About Families), Everything Comes Next, The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air, Sitti’s Secrets, Habibi, This Same Sky, & The Tree is Older than You Are: Poems & Paintings from Mexico. Her volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Turtle of Oman and The Turtle of Michigan have both been part of the Little Read program, North Carolina. She has received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Texas Writer Award 2024, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Texas Institute of Letters, the Arab American National Museum, and the National Book Critics Circle. 

Natalia Treviño:

NATALIA TREVIÑO has won several awards for her poetry and fiction, including the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize the Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, and the Menada Literary Award from the Ditet e Naimet Poetry Festival in Macedonia.

She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Macondo, and a winner of the Academy of American Poets’ 2024 Ambroggio Prize for co-translating Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press).

She is the author of When You Were Human (forthcoming Flowersong Press), VirginX (Finishing Line Press), and Lavando la Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press). Her first novel, THE ROAD BACK is forthcoming from Arte Publico Press. Her work has been anthologized in Inheritance of Light: Contemporary Poetry (University of North Texas Press),Mirrors Beneath the Earth: Short Fiction by Chicano Writers (Curbstone Press),Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, (University of New Mexico Press), and journals includingPoetry, Plume, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Bordersenses, Sugar House Review, and RiverSedge. 

Octavio Quintanilla:

Octavio Quintanilla is the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate and the author of the poetry collections, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, and is a 2026 Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Most recently, he published Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets and winner of the Burdine C. Johnson Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letter (University of Arizona Press, 2025).

Octavio is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival, VersoFrontera, publisher of
Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Our Lady of the Lake University and was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.

Website: https://www.octavioquintanilla.com/
IG: @writeroctavioquintanilla  
Twitter: @OctQuintanilla

Rohn Bayes:

Rohn Bayes was born in 1950 in Fowlerville, Michigan, the son of a Baptist minister. His father John, and his mother, Thelma, raised Rohn and all 5 siblings to adulthood, and taught them the best they could. Rohn, however, wandered off to travel the world and became a poet. 

He began writing during his travels and published his first collection of poetry called Learning to Scribble in 1999. In the preface he recalls his earliest memory as a child: sitting on the porch of his Fowlerville, Michigan home and scribbling on a sheet of lined paper – all the way across and all the way top the bottom. Writing. 

The Nature Pool, his second collection of poetry, was written in the backyard, communing with nature, observing thunderstorms, bunny rabbits, buzzards and frogs, composing elegies for the land and requiems for the trees, odes to the brambles and bushes, diatribes about human evolution or the lack of it. 

Both books were handmade, stapled together or custom bound and printed at Kinkos. Stone tones and audible levers, published in 2009, was his first book to use self publishing technology and is available on Lulu. It’s a collection of poems curated from half a decade of writing. Subjects range from a mother’s funeral to epiphanies on the way to the store to adventures in India to his first blog post in 2004. 

Two collections of poetry have been published since then, what i want to say to you and poem picture, both available on Amazon. Poem picture has full color photos accompanying the poems. What i want to say to you is Rohn Bayes at his quirky best, simple and sublime. 

His full length book, The Ancient Book of Magic Secrets was published in the summer of 2023 and consists of a collection of essays on various subjects related to being human with a fictional narrative that runs alongside it the book. It calls on history, both local and global, myth and science to describe the arc of human existence. 

His latest project is publishing bi-weekly episodes of the rohn report on the Substack platform with an accompanying podcast. “Dissertations on almost anything about being human. contemporary and humorous observations, tips and quips, sermons” is how he describes the rohn report on his business card. 

Rohn also enjoys doing kids workshops with his handmade children’s book Little Turtle which he wrote and illustrated after living on the beach in Mexico for four years in the 1990’s. With a box of crayons and a few sheets of paper stapled together, kids can make their own books! 

Tomas Roque:

A San Antonio son, Tomás Julián seeks to speak to the constant mix of joys and woes through the lens of an Latino millennial seeking to recapture his heritage. Tomás has had the honor of performing his poetry internationally, as well various national and regional competitions.

He is a lover of dogs and butterfingers and is San Antonio’s 2013, 2016, and 2021 Grand Slam Champion. Author of Staying Home with Baby his work has been featured in Asina is how we Talk, Latino Luminaria Festival of Lights, MuertosFest, Fiesta Alegria and The 2024 San Antonio Mayor’s Ball. Upcoming works: Stay at Home, Dad; In (A) World; Feathered Serpent-tongue