Video by Josh Bulman
The Lit & Luz Festival is a one-of-a-kind series of events featuring renowned authors, visual artists, and musicians from Chicago and Mexico in cultural exchange and conversation. This series of readings, conversations, artist talks, and performances, including our signature event, the Live Magazine Show, highlights new translations and artistic collaborations—showcasing some of the most innovative contemporary artists from both countries. The festival takes place in Chicago in the fall, followed by the Lit & Luz Festival Mexico City in the winter. Click here to learn more.
The 13th annual Lit & Luz Festival of Language, Literature, and Art—as featured in, WBEZ’s Reset with Sasha-Ann Simons, Chicago Review of Books, Block Club Chicago, and more—takes on November 8 - 14, 2026 in Chicago. This one-of-a-kind cross-cultural, bilingual festival brings together writers, poets, and visual artists from Mexico and Chicago for a week-long series of public programming across venues in both cities.
This year’s festival—under the theme of “Edge/Borde”—asks writers, poets, and artists from Chicago and Mexico to explore social, geographical, and linguistic limits through tensions at the “edge of space”. The weeklong festival programming will consider the complexities of official borders, as well as the ways in which soft and hard edges are constructed within cities and regions—and within artistic practices themselves—through language, culture, identity, and policy.
The closing and signature event of Lit & Luz is the Live Magazine Show, a stage presentation in which pairs of artists from both countries—the Collaboration Cohort—debut new work that was jointly created in the months prior. The 2026-2027 Live Magazine Show is presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Museo Universitario del Chopo and will take place on Friday November 13, 2026 at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
