The louderARTS Project started life as a weekly reading, open mic, and slam series called "a little bit louder," founded by three poets from the 1998 Nuyorican Poets' Cafe slam team: Lynne Procope, Roger Bonair-Agard, and Guy LeCharles Gonzalez. Their mission was to read, workshop, and perform their work with an emphasis on excellence; to improve the work and present it well. These core missions were expanded upon through public workshops, themed readings, and other public performances. They have managed to create a multicultural, multi-genre community of artists, writers, and educators from around the country, and many of them have come to view the reading series at Bar 13 in Union Square as the place to experience poetry as a transformative experience. The series will celebrate its tenth anniversary in April of 2008.

Building from the louderARTS model and from anecdotes of the old 6th Street Nuyorican Cafe, poets Oscar Bermeo and Sam "Fish" Vargas co-founded the Acentos Bronx Poetry Showcase in March of 2003 (I came on board in June of that year). There were precious few Latino poets active in the downtown poet scenes, so the intent with Acentos was to bring Latinos and Latinas into a new venue, in the South Bronx, where one could share work without the need to translate every nuance present in Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Four years later, we've built the series into a staple of the Bronx arts scene, a space where poets and audience regardless of nationality can come in, feel at home, and share new work in an open and honest environment. We've featured Latino/a poets of every stripe, from all parts of the country, and four of our core members (myself, Oscar, Fish, and Jessica Torres) participated in readings and workshops all around the region spreading the gospel of Latino poetry.

Fish and I continue to run the series along with a dedicated cadre of emerging poets who have claimed the venue as their home. We are working this fifth year to expand Acentos' mission into a Foundation for Latino/a poetry nationwide, modeled on Cave Canem. We hope to have a yearly Latino writers' retreat up and running by summer of '08, as well as writing programs for Latino/a youth in the Bronx. Point blank, poetry by Latinos has gone largely ignored by the literary establishment. We want to do our part to change that, and the best way we know how is to create the spaces necessary for writers to stretch, develop, and distribute their work.

What's it been like working collectively to maintain these projects?

I would not be able to run Acentos by myself, especially with these new growth ideas, were it not for the support of the following poets: Oscar Bermeo, Fish Vargas, Maria Nieves, Jessica Torres, Eliel Lucero, Ray Medina, Aracelis Girmay, John Murillo, John Rodriguez, Urayoan Noel, and Raina Leon.