Rowena Alegría (she/her) has built a career around serving community in journalism, public service and engagement. She specializes in words and has produced everything from inaugural speeches to newspaper columns, social media content to documentary films, talking points to annual reports. She believes in the power of storytelling and story-listening and is exceptional at engaging and collaborating. She seeks out opportunities for storytelling in community, particularly projects with an eye for including new voices in the conversation and toward narrative change, as well as projects that involve research, writing and community empowerment. Ro was Denver’s Chief Storyteller from 2018-2024, leading a team that brought resident voices and histories out of the shadows and onto big and little screens for more than half million people. She was Naropa University’s 2024 Cobb Peace Lecturer and among the urban thought leaders at the first Bruner Debates on Urban Excellence in 2025. She was the 2021 Ricardo Salinas Scholar in Fiction at Aspen Words and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Victor LaValle Fellow in 2019. She is writing a novel that plays with time and the history of the Southwest.