Camilo Montoya is a Nicaraguan writer, poet, and cultural worker based in Washington, D.C. His work lives at the intersection of memory, migration, and resistance, blending poetry, essays, music, and community practice to explore how culture not only survives but thrives in the face of displacement and injustice.

As the founder and host of Poema Abierto, Washington DC’s first Spanish-language open mic, and a performer with Los Locos and Orquesta Manplesa, Camilo has built platforms for Latino voices to take root, gather strength, and reshape the cultural landscape. Years of documentary work and cultural programming demonstrate his consistent vision: art as both a mirror of identity and a tool for survival.

Raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, after his family’s migration from Nicaragua, Camilo learned early that survival meant holding on to culture as fiercely as possible. With few resources but a deep inheritance of language, music, and memory, he found in art both refuge and resistance. That lived experience shapes his work today - not as theory, but as necessity.

This site is his anchor: a place to root himself as a writer, thinker, and cultural worker. Camilo’s vision is uncompromising: to create and protect spaces where Latino culture is not tokenized or reduced to spectacle, but where it breathes, leads, and belongs.