Chismes Con Safos: Speculative Storytelling as Collective Resistance

Event date:
Saturday, May 30
Event time:
11:00am-12:00pm
Location:
Brower Center, Kinzie Room
Audiences:
Booksales:
Book Society, in the lobby of the venue

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.

Dan Alter

Dan Alter’s poems, reviews and translations have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles won the 2022 Cowan Poetry Prize. A volume of translations Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited, from the Hebrew of Yakir Ben-Moshe, was published by Ben Yehuda Press in September 2024, and Hills Full of Holes, a second collection of poems, by Fernwood Press in March 2025. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley. He works at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.

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