Speaking Our Truths
As a new school year begins, check out these stories from our CPS youth who participated in the Speaking Our Truths Author Circle
Our New Home
We made a big move and can’t wait to invite Authors and our community into our new home! We need your help in transforming this historic building, and turning our vision of a Storytelling and Healing Center into reality.
Ways to Tell: Memoirs Meet Art
Ways To Tell is a community-based Author/Artist led journey seeking to amplify voices directly from communities on Chicago’s South and West Sides, help Authors/Artists expand their work & creativity, and inspire others to use their stories as tools to help unify and transform their neighborhoods as part of the City of Chicago’s “Arts 77” initiative.
About Our Work In Chicago
Right now, Chicago is being described as a violent city; We need to change the way our City’s story is told. Violence is not just gunshots and homicide statistics. Trauma is a collective, not individual, experience that ripples through families and neighborhoods. Transactional services that address the root causes of violence are essential: housing, workforce development, education. But we aspire to a bigger solution, where the people of this city, especially those who are underestimated, ignored and more affected by violence, don’t just survive – they thrive.
ConTextos provides the opportunity for people affected by violence to write and publish their personal stories in order to heal as individuals, families, and communities, to build empathy and change assumptions, and to author a new story of Chicago that lifts all voices.
Chicago Programs
ConTextos uses the power of personal narrative to foster reflection and healing.
Authors Circle
The Authors Circle is a co-created space for exploration and discovery, that uses reading, writing and engaged dialogue as vehicles for transformation. Participants “read as writers” as they draft, revise, illustrate and publish their memoirs. Throughout the process, individuals learn to take and accept critical feedback, improve reading and writing skills, and reflect upon the past to imagine a different future.
Visual Arts
The ConTextos community has grown in so many ways, particularly our creative community and the need to supplement written memoirs with other creative outlets. Our outreach and engagement with Authors and Artists is intended to generate powerful new works focused on equity and justice that marry the potential of the literary and visual arts and spark dialogue across the city, with a focus on South and West side neighborhoods.
Alumni Programs
We recognize that after our youth graduate as Authors they continue to engage in the ConTextos community in order to receive additional support, access additional programming, engage friends, family and the broader community in the healing power of story.
Blogs
July 24, 2019
Salon Speaker: José Olivarez
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the prestigious PEN/ Jean Stein Award…
July 24, 2019
Salon Speaker: Alex Kotlowitz
For September’s Salon brought in Alex Kotlowitz, a writer, journalist, and storyteller. He is the author of four books, including his most recent, An American…
There Are No Events at the moment.
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated on future events
- Chicago News Letter
- El Salvador News Letter
Popular Books
Be Still and Know
English 
Spanish