Mexican author speaks to kids at Institute of Mexico book fair

By William Ysaguirre (Freelance Writer)

BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Apr. 23, 2026

   Belizean schoolchildren learned the challenges and rewards of becoming a creative writer from a professional Mexican author and short story writer Claudia Cabrera Espinosa, when the Institute of Mexico partnered with the Belize Book Science Network in hosting a book fair as part of Book Week at the House of Culture in Belize City on Wednesday and Thursday, April 22-23.

   Executive Director of the National Council on Aging, Ix-Chel Poot, is also a prize-winning author with several published works, including a book of poems, and she shared her experiences in publishing her first book.

   Montse Casademunt, vice president of Cubola Productions, introduced Cabrera, who said she began to write at age 5 in 1989, when she began keeping a diary. Her parents’ bookshelves included the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and as her curiosity grew, she found Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Doestoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and The Diary of Anne Frank.  Her readings and participation in literary workshops led her to the works of Oscar Wilde and Truman Capote.

   At university, she majored in Literature, expressing her romantic disappointments in verse. She subsequently pursued graduate studies in Madrid, and later France.

   Upon her return from Europe, she decided to turn her art into a money-making enterprise when she entered a writing contest, and she drew inspiration from the sea and her father’s hometown, Acapulco, for her first collection of short stories, The Undulations of the Seas, which she completed in 2016 but did not publish until 2020. Disappointed by the reception among Mexican publishers, she returned to academia to pursue her doctoral studies. Her grandmother’s death gave her focus, and the isolation that accompanied the COVID pandemic helped her redirect her creative energies, as her writing became an obsession. Her collection of short stories, Possibility of Words, won her a $10,000 prize and gave her a bit of financial freedom.

   Her literary recognition and post-doctoral work won her tenure as a lecturer at a metropolitan university, which gave her a baseline income to pursue her writing of her first novel, The Reader of Balzac, which will soon be published. Now she continues to teach, determined to stand on her own, with hopes of writing a second novel sometime in the future.    Paul Cathers of BRC Printers also explained the challenges of the local publishing scene for the young readers. BRC publishes a number of English workbooks and math textbooks used in some of our primary schools.