Sala: A Living Room of Ideas (S2Ep1)

Tune in to Lumpen Radio on 105.5 FM for Sala: A Living Room of Ideas, a live radio broadcast presented by Silvia Inés Gonzalez, the administrator of POCAS (People of Color Artist Space). The program features poets Hilesh Patel and Christian Aldana in conversation about the personal and political poems that touch on love and building worlds worth living for. What balm do words offer us individually and in our collective struggle? What portals do poems create for us and how do they connect us to the radical imagination needed in our movements? What is revealed about love in our prose? 

Christian Aldana’s poetry is a safe space for wicked and sinister femmes who hate imperialism. She is the author of The Water We Swim In, a full-length collection of poetry published by Sampaguita Press in 2023. They are a queer, Filipinx, artist, educator, and community organizer based in Chicago. Though she has a soft spot for the Midwest, part of her will always be in South East Asia (Cebu and Saigon) where she grew up. She is the founder and Creative Director of Luya, a poetry organization that centers the stories and experiences of people of color. 

Hilesh Patel is a poet, consultant, educator, and member of the art group The Chicago ACT Collective (@thechicagoactcollective). He was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and has called Chicago home for most of his life. His work has been published in Passengers Journal, Relief Journal, Jaggery, AIOTB Magazine, and others.

Sala is an ongoing talk series anchoring the stories of artists in Chicago through topics such as grief, labor, immigration, and movement building. This multimedia project, which includes radio interviews, public programming, and an archival self-published zine, is supported by Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund as part of Art Design Chicago.