Explicitly exotic heavy flavor mesons

In this talk, I summarize the highlights of our recent and ongoing work on exotic hadrons involving explicitly exotic heavy-flavor mesons. By heavy flavors, I refer in particular to strange and charm quarks. As discussed in this manuscript, several puzzle-like features appearing in recent experimental data can be understood in terms of coupled-channel interactions. The main result is the prediction of an exotic meson carrying both charm and strangeness quantum numbers, whose properties cannot be explained as those of a simple quark-antiquark bound state. I also discuss the future prospects of our research program on this topic.