Who is writing the island today?: This was the first meeting of the 2026 Season of Fundación Gente Brava

Santo Domingo.- On a Saturday morning, dozens of people gathered at Cuesta Libros to ask a question that is rarely asked in public: who, today, has the right to tell the story of the island. It was the kickoff of “Verse and prose: who writes the island today?”, the first discussion of the 2026 Season of the Gente Brava Foundation, moderated by Pedro Castellanos Hernández, editorial director of the Foundation.

The conversation opened with a question that ran through the entire panel: what is “the island”? For Miguel Yarull, writer and screenwriter, the answer is not geographical but one of sincerity.

“Whoever feels and approaches with sincerity has the right to tell the island,” she said, regardless of whether it is written from the Dominican Republic or from the diaspora. Arlene Sabaris, writer and co-founder of Proyecto Anticanon, went further: “the island has ceased to be a place about which one writes and has become a place from which one writes.”

Minerva del Risco, director of the Mar de Palabras Festival, pointed out with frankness the topics that still need to be addressed seriously in Dominican literature: “we don’t talk about Haiti because we are afraid of them. And that is what I am afraid of: silence”.

The panel also addressed the tension between what the publishing market expects and what the Dominican social reality needs to tell. Arlene Sabaris cited a figure that summarizes the imbalance: from a list of the 100 most important books written by Dominicans in recent years, only five were by female authors.

He/She also spoke about the work of Proyecto Anticanon, which for eight years has been researching and making visible untold stories of African descent, indigenous resistance, and Caribbean oral tradition.

One of the most personal moments of the afternoon came when Minerva del Risco spoke about her father, the poet René del Risco Bermúdez, who died at 35: “if one does not keep the dead alive, the dead are forgotten.”

The audience Q&A session, a central part of the dynamics of each Foundation meeting, left two of the most discussed moments of the morning. One of the attendees, a chronicler and researcher, connected his recent work on Caribbean popular culture with a reflection by Minerva del Risco on island identity, and asked how new generations continue to narrate the Caribbean when identifying as Caribbean is, in itself, an act of resistance. Another attendee, an international lawyer, posed a more uncomfortable question: despite the abundant literature and documentation on the Trujillo dictatorship, why does a generalized ignorance of that past persist, to the point that there is no exercise of historical memory comparable to that of countries like Argentina or Brazil?

“Verso y prosa” (Verse and Prose) is just the first of three meetings of the 2026 Season of the Fundación Gente Brava. The next one, “No te vas sin que te ponga algo” (You’re not leaving without me playing something for you), a listening circle with illustrator and DJ Poteleche, will take place on Sunday, November 1st at Swing Records.

“Each of these encounters documents something that, if we don’t record it now, could be lost: a literary conversation, a musical archive, or the criteria for using new tools without losing the essence of our work,” explains Laura Castellanos Hernández, cultural director of the Gente Brava Foundation.

All three events have free admission, with prior registration and limited spots, available at fundaciongentebrava.org or on Instagram: @fundaciongentebrava or @gentebrava.rd.

About the Gente Brava Foundation

The Gente Brava Foundation is a Dominican non-profit organization dedicated to the research, documentation, curation, production, and dissemination of cultural and artistic content from the Caribbean. It was born from the Gente Brava podcast, in circulation since 2019, nominated for the 2021 GARDO Awards, with more than 50 interviews available on all podcast platforms.