While certainly fascinated by AI (who isn’t?), these professors were all humanists and creatives, and their research focused primarily on narrative as the key to understanding human behavior and connection. The professors included Anne Brubaker, senior lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, who researches American literature through the lens of science, technology and gender studies; Jonathan Adler at Olin College, who explores storytelling in the domain of social science; and his colleague Gillian Epstein who helps people harness the power of narrative to communicate in their own unique ways. Additionally there was Beth Wynstra who teaches performance and public speaking at Babson, and Kristi Girdharry, also at Babson, who researches storytelling in community spaces and archives. 

Girdharry opened with a brief introduction to her academic cohort about how they developed the idea for the event, which grew from an ongoing collaboration between these five professors. Friday’s workshop marked their first in-person event, as well as the group’s first foray into exploring AI. Inspired by Charles Yu’s short story, “Systems,” the group hoped to create a collective story with the help of AI, with all of us gathered at the event as authors. Girdharry acknowledged an important question, now at the forefront of my mind: if storytelling is such a human experience, why are they bringing in AI?

“We’re exploring AI as an idea generator for further human connection,” Girdharry said. “We don’t know unless we try, right? It’s very experimental. You have front row seats to something brand new.” 

Participants were asked to come up with questions to search, effectively replicating the processes AI undergoes when it is given a question: chiefly, making connections between separate pieces of information in order to come up with a coherent answer. 

After the group reflected on these exercises and how they impacted our thinking on AI and storytelling, the crowd trickled out of the room. My group and I stayed behind, continuing our conversation about AI and how our institutions have been acknowledging this innovative technology in various ways. 

There are, however, aspects of AI which went unmentioned; the professors leading the workshop did not leave room to discuss, say, AI’s extreme demands on natural resources or concerns regarding plagiarism and misinformation presented by models such as ChatGPT. Despite these concerns, I applaud the approach taken by the professors leading this workshop, focusing on each individual’s agency as a storyteller and our unique contributions to the systems we are both a part of and witness to, as Yu explores in his story for the “New York Times Magazine.”

If we are to integrate AI into our practices as writers, humanists, and storytellers, the boundaries need to be clear.  Although I would have appreciated a more direct statement from the Babson, Olin, Wellesley (Babson, Olin, Wellesley (BOW) professors on where those boundaries should lie, we must acknowledge that they, too, are still figuring this out. The most important thing is remaining open to exploring this innovation, while also practicing healthy criticism of a technology which we seem to be growing reliant on.

Contact the editors responsible for this article: Anabelle Meyers, Ivy Buck

A correction was made on Feb. 10, 2025: An earlier version of this article misidentified Jonathan Adler as a visiting lecturer at Wellesley this year. He is a Professor of Psychology at Olin and the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Wellesley this year.

The play, which Upstage performed in Mandarin with English subtitles, had three showings, with the opening night on Friday followed by two shows on Saturday. After the Saturday matinée, Professor Mingwei Song of Wellesley’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures gave a talk on the play’s context in mid-20th century China and its author, Cao Yu, whom Yihan Ling ’27, the director of Upstage’s production of the play, calls “China’s Shakespeare.”

“Sunrise” was written and first performed in 1936, and is the second installment in Yu’s classic trilogy of Huaju (“spoken drama”). It follows Chen Bailu (Grace Yuan ’28), an educated young woman from the country who, after her family suffers a blow to their status, moves to the city and becomes a prostitute. Living in a hotel managed by her wealthy clients, she indulges in parties and entertainment, unbothered by the city’s debauchery. But when an abused young girl shows up on her doorstep, Chen Bailu is forced to face the suffering around her and reexamine the life she is leading.

Ling and Eliza Mai ’27, who both co-chair Upstage, knew they wanted to stage a play by Cao Yu due to his iconic legacy in Chinese theater. Before Cao Yu’s works, Peking Opera –– a form of opera which involves music, dance, martial arts and acrobatics –– was the dominant form of theatrical entertainment. It was Yu who first popularized the spoken drama in China, and changed the way audiences viewed drama. 

Initially, Upstage considered staging “Thunderstorm,” the first drama in Yu’s trilogy and perhaps his most famous work. However, because they were driven by an interest in class issues, the team decided to go with “Sunrise” instead. “Thunderstorm” focuses on one family, all of the same social class, while “Sunrise” follows the lives and interactions of several different characters from all kinds of class backgrounds. It was important for Ling and Mai to explore a range of class struggles and how these struggles relate to other global issues, such as patriarchy and poverty. 

For Ling, “Sunrise” still feels strikingly relevant today. Although the play was written almost a hundred years ago, she says, “things haven’t changed … That’s what made me want to put on this show. After one hundred years, you can see that people in the lower classes, they’re still being exploited.” Ling felt that the questions that the play explores are ones of interest to Wellesley students, and as a result, it was clear that “Sunrise” was the perfect choice for the production this fall.

Ling and Mai had wanted to put on a play in Mandarin at Wellesley for a while. They were inspired to make their dream into a reality after seeing “Rhinoceros in Love,” a Mandarin-language play staged by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Wuming Theater Club last April. According to Ling, there are Wellesley students who are interested in participating in theater in their native language of Mandarin — they just choose to go to MIT or other nearby schools to get involved, because Wellesley does not have a history of supporting theater in languages other than English. Nevertheless, it was precisely because of the lack of multilingual theater at Wellesley that Ling and Mai were determined to stage “Sunrise” as soon as possible. 

“There definitely are students who are interested in putting on Mandarin plays at Wellesley,” Ling said. “So we thought, why can’t we do it here?” 

As an actor whose native language is Mandarin and who has been involved in multiple plays at Wellesley, Ling is incredibly proud to have been a part of the college’s first non-English language theater production. “When you’re doing theater that’s not in your native language, it can be a bit weird sometimes,” she said. “For the [bilingual students] here, I want to tell them that there’s a chance for you to make theater in your native language. English is not the only language for theater.”

Contact the editors responsible for this story: Anabelle Meyers, Ivy Buck

The writer-director discussed how many of their works, including “F to 7th” and “Her Kind,” originated as exciting projects to collaborate on with their friends and loved ones — for example, Jungermann’s girlfriend is the star of “Her Kind.” They emphasized the fun, communal aspect of filmmaking and the creative process more generally. No matter how you make the project, Jungermann said, “if the writing is strong, people will respond to it and want to do it with you — people that you might be surprised would say yes.” 

After sharing a scene from “Women Who Kill,” they reflected on how making their films has impacted their understanding of their own identity. “[Women Who Kill] was very much about the binary I was finding within the queer community. Not surprisingly, later, I was like, Oh, I’m non-binary. Cool,” they said. “I do think that making these personal things helps me to the next step of figuring out who I am. If I didn’t have them, I don’t know where I’d be.”

One student asked about how Jungermann decided to infuse their personal experiences into their work, how they have dealt with the vulnerability that comes with that process and how it has affected their writing.

“I think the only way to do it, to make something really beautiful, is to tell your secrets and be very vulnerable. It’s so uncomfortable and I’m so scared every time I put something personal in there — I kind of panic,” said Jungermann.

“I think part of the reason I’m drawn to genre … is that I can hide behind that genre. It’s not me and the audience. It’s me, and a joke, and the audience; it’s me, and a scare, and the audience … I can tell a fuller truth about myself, and expose myself in a way that’s much more intimate if I can hide behind genre.” 

Jungermann was frank about how frightening it was to honestly expose their struggles through fiction. “I was talking about things that other people weren’t talking about, and I didn’t know if it would be hated … But then I found that all these people felt like I did [about sexuality and gender], and I was shocked.” This reception to their work, even from those outside of the community, helped them to overcome those moments of doubt and remain authentic to their experiences. 

Jungermann concluded their talk with some pertinent advice for Wellesley students. “There’s work, there’s self, and there’s art, and sometimes those things aren’t overlapping. Work sustains you financially, and art sustains you. You have to balance those two things.” 

Contact the editors responsible for this article: Anabelle Meyers, Ivy Buck

The energy was high in Jewett Auditorium on Friday night. As Suazo and his bandmates took the stage, a soft green light fell over the room and bathed the audience in its glow. After a brief silence, the group jumped right into the performance — a hypnotic union of sounds that ranged from playful to melancholy, tranquil to invigorating. 

Suazo led the band on the sax, with Nadia Washington on vocals, Ian Ashby on bass, Ely Perlman on guitar, Guilhelm Fourty on drums, Harold Charon on piano and David Rosado performing on the Conga, a Puerto Rican drum, as the group’s percussionist. Throughout the show, Suazo and Washington danced to the music of their peers, losing themselves in the harmony they had all created together. Suazo is a deeply empathetic leader, holding eye contact with his bandmates, nodding to them encouragingly as they dived into the most difficult segments of the music, and smiling brightly when they seamlessly carried each and every note. His joy is contagious; soon enough the musicians were exchanging grins between themselves, speaking in a language of their own. This was a band in sync.

About halfway through the performance, I glanced around at my fellow attendees and was delighted to notice the contentment emanating from all sides. Students, faculty and visitors alike were bobbing their heads along to the music, their smiles as cheerful as Suazo’s. Several people had closed their eyes and allowed themselves to be transported from this cool September evening to another world. Suazo, too, paused his playing now and then to enjoy his bandmates’ work and experience the music in its entirety. At one point, he also asked the audience to participate by calling out a few lines from one of the songs. The responses were rather quiet, perhaps due to shyness, but the audience was clearly enraptured by this powerful concert. 

After the show came to a close, attendees trickled out of the auditorium and gathered outside the doors. When Suazo came out, a crowd of admiring students flocked around him immediately, eager to ask him questions, talk about the music and, of course, get his autograph. 

I was fortunate enough to speak with Forty, the drummer collaborating with Suazo for this show, for a few minutes after the performance. Fourty originally met Suazo while at Berklee College of Music, their shared alma mater. He was drawn to the project’s blend of Puerto Rican and Dominican musical traditions, both of which he had long been curious about but unable to study professionally. 

“When I discovered this fusion of music, I was like, Whoa, what is that?” Fourty said. “For me, it’s very inspired, because I’m from France and we don’t learn anything like that. So it’s kind of me going in his direction and learning about his culture, his rhythms, his music.” 

Fourty emphasized that his role was to accent the percussion and let Rosado lead on the conga, a traditional Puerto Rican drum. “I’m sort of highlighting on the drums,” he explained. “The rhythm was not written for the drum set, it’s meant to be played by percussion. So every time we play together, it’s very tricky to find the perfect balance between him playing the actual rhythm and me floating around and adding a jazz flavor.” 

I mentioned a moment where it seemed as if Fourty and Rosado were responding to one another through their instruments, like they were improvising a conversation. Improvisation, Fourty said, is a crucial part of jazz language. “[You listen] to what the improviser is telling and then you respond to that. You compliment it,” he explained. “It’s all about telling a story together.”

Later, after the crowd had dissipated and Suazo had signed his last autograph, I interviewed the musician as he packed up for the night. He explained the origins of “RICANO,” how the project really goes all the way back to his childhood. It was Suazo’s father, also a saxophonist, who introduced him to the world of jazz, and specifically smooth jazz, raising him on a steady diet of Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz. 

Suazo attended Berklee’s Global Jazz Institute, where Washington currently teaches, and where he conceived of “RICANO,” his final project for the program. “I started digging into my roots, [thinking that] maybe there’s something there for me based on three basic questions: Who are you? Where do you come from? And why music?” 

Suazo’s reflections on each of these questions led him to connect with his two of his cultural roots — he is both Puerto Rican and Dominican — and also to reconnect with his late father, who passed away in 2011. Suazo found an abundance of inspiration while exploring Puerto Rican and Dominican folk music, and felt inspired to fuse these new discoveries with his work in jazz. 

“It ended up being a magical journey that resulted in a beautiful debut album last year,” he said. “And now we’re in the process of getting the music for “RICANO: Volume Two”… It’s going to come out next year, hopefully.”

Suazo expects that “RICANO: Volume Two” will be more experimental than its predecessor, pushing the traditions it’s drawing on in a more innovative direction. “I’m taking larger leaps [to] … showcase what it can be, and the different things that live within myself … trying to find a home.” At its core, “RICANO” expresses Suazo’s journey to rediscover his cultural roots through music, pushing boundaries by creating a multifaceted sound unique to his own vision. 

The Wellesley community’s ecstatic reception of “RICANO” spells out a great start to the semester for the Wellesley College Concert Series. Suazo’s performance will be followed by “Wings to Fly,” a Music Faculty concert on Oct. 19. If the response to “RICANO” last Friday is any indication, “Wings to Fly” will be a performance you would not want to miss.

Contact the editors responsible for this story: Norah Catlin, Anabelle Meyers

Carter Jackson began the event with the reading of two excerpts from “We Refuse”: one which discusses how a white doctor denied her great-grandmother a life-saving medical treatment, and another which examines the story of Carrie Johnson, a Black teenage girl who, during a riot in Washington, D.C. in 1919, armed herself with a gun and shot at white mobsters to defend her neighborhood. Carter Jackson exemplified these stories in “We Refuse” as different forms of Black resistance throughout American history. 

In an interview with The Wellesley News, Carter Jackson described the origins of “We Refuse,” highlighting the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 as a key inspirational factor for the book. After months of worldwide physical and online protests against racially-motivated police brutality, Carter Jackson reflected on how little had truly changed:

“It felt like we got to the fall … and we didn’t achieve anything we sought out to accomplish,” she said. “I felt like all of this momentum was very symbolic, and I also felt like it was very limiting.” 

Carter Jackson began to think about the perceived binary of resistance — violence and non-violence — and how Black people subvert this limitation to combat white supremacy. She settled on five expressions of resistance that she believes have been particularly important to the survival of Black people in the United States and beyond: revolution, protection, force, flight and joy. However, Carter Jackson hopes that those who interact with “We Refuse” will take it upon themselves to add more tools to the list that she has started.

Dendere and Carter Jackson opened their discussion with revolution, the first expression of resistance on Carter Jackson’s list and the primary theme of “We Refuse”’s opening chapter. In the book, Carter Jackson defines revolution as an act of “replacing a broken system with a just one.” She holds that the American Revolution in 1776 was “actually not that revolutionary,” and that it was only with the abolition of slavery in 1865, and the Reconstruction period that followed, that the country underwent a real revolution. “America was not born in 1776, it was conceived of in 1776,” she said. Even with the progress made in the years after the Civil War, Carter Jackson argued that “the revolution is still incomplete.” 

During their subsequent conversation on protection, Dendere asked Carter Jackson to discuss the story of Margaret Garner, a young enslaved woman in the American South who, in 1856, killed her baby to protect the child from future enslavement. Garner’s act made national headlines, and became the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel “Beloved.” 

“A lot of times, parents saw death as a form of deliverance … If [your children] are separated from you, you only have your imagination to think about what might be happening to them,” Carter Jackson said. “I put this story in this chapter because I do see it as an act of radical love, and radical protection.” 

Carter Jackson went on to discuss the complexity of flight as a form of resistance, and what makes it different from the other tools which she analyzes in “We Refuse.” Firstly, she noted that it is incredibly difficult to flee a bad situation, particularly for Black people. She pointed out that the United States requires visas for entering individuals from every country in Africa, unlike those coming from European countries such as Germany or Italy. 

“What white supremacy does is it prevents Black people from having mobility, from leaving the space you’re in — whether that’s the ghetto, the Caribbean, or the continent,” she said.

In addition, Carter Jackson argued that flight is about the individual or the family unit, rather than the community at large, making such action a more complex, but no less important, form of resistance. 

“While I’m a person of means, and I can move freely, my individual mobility does not uplift the collective … It is a reprieve, but it is not a permanent or collective solution,” she said.

Dendere and Carter Jackson ended their conversation on a lighter note with a discussion of joy,  the focus of the final chapter in “We Refuse.” 

“For me, joy is a weapon,” Carter Jackson said. “Joy fortifies me, and everyone I know.” 

She described how laughter and mockery, and “poking fun at the ridiculousness of racism,” provides a refuge from the sting of societal inequality. Carter Jackson expressed that it is crucial for the health and happiness of Black people for them to seek refuge in spaces that have nothing to do with whiteness or white supremacy. In her concluding remarks, Carter Jackson recalled howling with laughter after she and her husband found a video of their young daughter singing off-key, a moment she holds close to her heart. “What does that have to do with white supremacy?” she asked. “Nothing. That’s the point.”

Contact the editors responsible for this story: Ivy Buck, Norah Catlin