Workshop

In a time when our stories—and our futures—face increasing attempts at erasure, Chismes Con Safos: Speculative Storytelling as Collective Resistance invites participants into a vibrant creative space where community-rooted narratives become tools for liberation. Guided by Rosanna Alvarez—Chicana writer, scholar-artist, and founder of Ocote Libre Press—this workshop blends culturally grounded storytelling practices with speculative worldbuilding.

Participants will explore how personal memory, cultural knowledge, and everyday conversations—our chismes, our cuentos, our testimonios—hold the seeds of radical imagination. Through guided prompts, reflective writing, and gentle community dialogue, attendees will practice transforming lived experience into visionary narratives that challenge authoritarianism and reimagine what justice, belonging, and liberation could look like in the futures we are actively shaping together.

This is the space at this year’s festival for teens looking to write and share and connect with other young poets from throughout the Bay. Come through to this generative poetry writing workshop especially for you. Led by the SPOKES youth advisory board from Youth Speaks, you will be guided through a fun series of writing prompts and activities to help you practice putting pen to page and saying something meaningful about the world around you. Do you want to share your work on stage? All participants at this workshop will get first choice preference to sign up to perform at the Youth Poetry Open Mic happening 1:45pm-3:45pm Sunday, May 31st at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza Stage. All experience levels are welcome! Just bring your favorite writing utensils and we’ve got the rest. This workshop is only open to teens age 13-19 years old.

If you are a new writer looking for tips on how to live a writer’s life in service to your community, this is the panel for you. Join three working poets and organizers doing exciting things in the fields of music, publishing, activism, arts education, and beyond for a discussion on ways new authors can apply their craft in impactful ways once they’ve chosen the writer’s life. Walk away inspired and with a clearer sense of direction as authors Giovanna Lomanto (Game Over Books), Aleah Bradshaw (aka Nyfe of musical duo “Closegood,” Youth Speaks), and Darius Simpson (When the Smoke Comes, SFJAZZ) share advice from each of their unique paths through the literary world beginning as alums of youth and college writing programs. This panel discussion is open to all, especially alums of the Bay’s rich tapestry of youth literary arts organizations and emerging artists looking for advice on what’s next.

Self-publishing your work can be empowering and uplifting! We’ll briefly cover zine history and culture, then dive in to writing an 8-page microzine. What limitations and freedoms are afforded by a short zine format? Who is your audience and how does that affect what you write? Is there a narrative arc?

Participants will create their own one-page zine that they can copy easily and fold and distribute!

Maker, Mentor, Muse is an online teaching platform founded in 2022 by Dawn Angelicca Barcelona, Mary Volmer, and Maw Shein Win. Hailing from three distinct backgrounds, generations, and spiritual traditions we believe community is essential to building a satisfying and sustainable literary life and that true success requires balancing all three artistic roles: maker, mentor, muse. In this free one-hour workshop, we offer guided writing experiments for poetry and prose that invites participants to explore how their sacred traditions, rituals, and belief systems inform and inspire their writing processes. Join us! Maker, Mentor, Muse

In this workshop, we will focus on setting development which plays a crucial role in situating your reader as well as invigorating and enriching your prose. Participants will leave with a better understanding of the setting’s impact on their writing through reading examples, conversation, and generative writing prompts. Exercises and readings will focus on Bay Area locales. This session is designed to help writers of all levels explore how setting can be a powerful element in their storytelling.

Join award-winning narrators in this workshop to explore the diversity of a voice acting career! Learn from Elisabeth Lagelée, a multilingual Audie Award-winning voice actor and improviser based in San Francisco, who records from her professional home studio and specializes in fantasy, romance, and historical fiction. With experience in audiobook narration, production and teaching, Society of Voice Arts finalist and Earphones Award-winning Ann Richardson will guide attendees through the process of putting their work into audio via various platforms. This informative workshop, moderated by author Pamela Kelly, is welcome to all who are curious about voice acting!

Overview

How do we write futures that don’t yet exist? How do we map territories we’re still dreaming and discovering?

In this hands-on, generative workshop, participants will create new work across three experimental approaches—speculative memoir, multilingual poetry, and hybrid forms. Designed as a space for exploration rather than mastery, the workshop invites writers to take creative risks, work across boundaries, and imagine new literary possibilities together.

Through guided exercises and creative constraints, writers will produce fresh pieces that break conventional forms and chart unknown terrain. Led by three writers whose practices are rooted in experimentation, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary thinking, the session offers prompts, models, and frameworks for writing into the unknown.

Opening Conversation (20 minutes)

A brief panel discussion exploring how experimentation in form, language, and genre can open pathways to futures that traditional narratives cannot reach. Faculty will share generative techniques from their own work before participants choose a breakout workshop.

Three Breakout Mini-Workshops (40 minutes each)

1. Speculative Memoir: Writing Your Alternative Futures
   Led by Faith Adiele
   Participants will write new memoir pieces that blend memory with speculation—generating parallel narratives, alternative outcomes, or projected futures from lived experience. Through prompts that ask “what if?” alongside “what happened?”, writers will explore how speculation can deepen truth rather than abandon it. Leave with a draft that reimagines a pivotal moment from your life through multiple possible timelines.
2. Tongues of the Future: Multilingual & Diasporic Poetry
   Led by Zeina Hashem Beck
   Writers will create poems that incorporate multiple languages, experiment with code-switching, or use linguistic hybridity as a generative constraint. Drawing on models from contemporary translingual poets and adapted traditional forms, participants will write pieces that reflect how we actually speak, think, and imagine across cultures. Generate new work that envisions futures where such mixing is not marginal but central.
3. Hybrid Forms for a Digital Age
   Led by Eric Olson
   Participants will produce experimental pieces using constraints, collage, and unconventional structures that respond to our fragmented, multimedia contemporary moment. Through timed writing exercises and formal experiments influenced by visual art and digital culture, writers will generate work that resists traditional narrative expectations and invents new shapes for new realities.

What You’ll Take Away

All participants will leave with new drafts, fresh techniques, and concrete generative methods to continue experimenting in their own practice. This session is especially well-suited for writers drawn to risk-taking, cross-genre work, and expansive notions of voice, form, and belonging.

The past and the future are linked, nowhere more so than in story. In this session, we will play on the tightrope between past and present, exploring how nailing the details of the past in a story builds a foundation for future worlds, allowing you to believably take the reader anywhere. We will also investigate the empowering role of the narrator, who often speaks from the future of the story. Through four sets of dynamic, generative exercises, attendees will leave the hour with a bevy of new tricks/tips and insights for their writing tool belts.

Our workshop will start with a panel discussion, comprised of BIPOC writers who are part of the Rooted & Written program, on how we integrate our histories into our work.

This session will blend conversation and craft on how we listen to, record, and honor ancestral knowledge on the page, without flattening it for mainstream expectations. Then we’ll talk about writing. Using guided prompts, participants will draft ideas for new work that gathers memory, place, language, and family stories into poems, micro-essays, or short scenes.