In My Broken Language—the One Book, One Philadelphia 2022 selection—Quiara Alegría Hudes explores what it means to find her own expressive voice, as well as the multitudes that silence can contain. Writers of all experience levels and genres are invited to join this hour-long, online writing workshop that uses examples from My Broken Language to discuss, and then practice, character and scene development through the ways—dialogue, description, syntax—that sound and silence are conveyed in writing. 

Facilitator Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela is the recipient of a 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and many other recognitions. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have been published widely, and her hybrid “conceptual reggaeton” album, No Otro Lado, is available in digital and vinyl formats. She is the founder of Thread Makes Blanket press and teaches at Community College of Philadelphia. 

This event is co-presented by Blue Stoop.