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.

Being a writer can be very isolating. You spend hours alone in a room with a bunch of imaginary people, and it’s next to impossible to explain to anybody who isn’t a writer, exactly what you’re doing there.

That’s why having a writing community is so important.

We’ve invited representatives from six Bay Area writing communities—the Writers Grotto, the Ruby, Left Margin Lit, Decentered Arts, SF Writers Workshop, and Page Street—to come and talk about their organizations, and explain how you can become a member.

We’ll also talk about how to create your own writing community, whether online or in-person.

And of course, leave time for questions.

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.

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!

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

Join the Creative Writing professors of San Jose State University for a combined panel and workshop where the professors will discuss the ins and outs of MFA programs and lead attendees in a series of writing exercises for prose writers and poets. SJSU MFA program coordinator Nick Taylor and faculty members Keenan Norris, J. Michael Martinez and Brook McClurg have guided numerous aspiring writers through graduation and on to publication and they look forward to sharing tools of their trade with the public. Whether you’re an aspiring MFA student, a long-time writer, or simply an interested reader, consider yourself invited.

Being a writer means coming up against self-doubt. But what if it doesn’t have to be so scary? What if the blank page felt more like an invitation than a cliff?

Does it sometimes seem like your novel is trying to kill you? Have you considered divorcing a story? Me too.

In this gathering we will work through a few exercises designed to bring joy and a sense of possibility and invention so that you and your writing will once again be besties (or at least unlikely to murder each other).

Based on my new book UNSTUCK: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page (Tin House, 4/14/26)

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.