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Ignatius Valentine Aloysius
Host & Curator
Photo: (IG) sandra_wong_geroux
WELCOME TO CHICAGO'S POPULAR READING EVENT
SERIES, NOW IN ITS 21st YEAR!
WELCOME TO CHICAGO'S POPULAR READING EVENT
SERIES, NOW IN ITS 21st YEAR!
SERIES, NOW IN ITS 21st YEAR!
Thank you for your support! We're excited that our readings can take place at Roscoe Books & on Zoom to include authors near & far.
Our next reading is a Zoom event on April 27, 2025 at 6 pm CT featuring Maggie Paul, Liz Rose Shulman, Sudha Balagopal, Wendy Wisner, and Todd Cirillo. They'll be reading from their recent writings and/or published works. See their bios below.
Register for the Zoom event HERE
Sunday Salon events are always FREE. And we are happy to collaborate with Roscoe Books for the sale of authors' book titles during our in-person events. TY Roscoe Books! www.roscoebooks.com
Our readings alternate between in-person one month & online the next (on Zoom), always on the last Sunday of the month. On key holidays, we run a week before. Special Pop-Up events take place in August.
Our April 27, 2025 readers on Zoom are:
Maggie Paul is the author of Scrimshaw (Hummingbird Press 2020), Borrowed World, (Hummingbird Press 2011), and the chapbook, Stones from the Baskets of Others (Black Dirt Press 2000). Her poems appear in Poetry Miscellany, Moonstone, Red Wheelbarrow, SALT, The Jung Journal of Culture, Porter Gulch Review, Journal X, and others; her interviews can be found in The Catamaran Literary Reader. Maggie was a co-founder of Poetry Santa Cruz and a writing instructor at UCSC, Cabrillo, CSUMB and DeAnza. She interviews poets and painters for publication, and writes book reviews.
Website: https://www.maggiepaulpoetry.com
FB: https://www.facebook.com/maggiepaulpoetry/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maggiepaulpoetry/
Maggie Paul
Liz Rose Shulman is a writer and a teacher. She is the author of Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad, published in 2025 by Querencia Press. Her writing has also appeared in HuffPost, Slate, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, Identity Theory, Another Chicago Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Witness Magazine, and Tablet Magazine, among others. Her essays have received special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and have been nominated for Best of the Net. She teaches English at Evanston Township High School and in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago.
Website: lizroseshulman.com
FB: Liz Rose Shulman
IG: @lizroseshulman
Liz Rose Shulman
Sudha Balagopal's fiction straddles continents and cultures, blending thoughts and ideas from the east and the west. Her novella-in-flash, Nose Ornaments, runner up in the Bath contest, 2024, was recently published by Ad Hoc Fiction (June, 2024). Prior to that, her highly commended novella-in-flash, Things I Can't Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021. She is the author of a novel, A New Dawn, and two short story collections. Her flash fiction can be found in CRAFT, Smokelong, Split Lip and Flash Fiction Online among other journals. Nominated for several awards, her work was selected for Best Small Fictions, 2022, 2023, 2024.
Website: www.sudhabalagopal.com
Bluesky : @sudhab.bsky.social
X: @authorsudha
Sudha Balagopal
Wendy Wisner is the author of three books of poems, most recently The New Life, published by Cornerstone Press (University of Wisconsin Stevens-Point) and named a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year. Wendy’s poems and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Passages North, THRUSH, Verse Daily, The Washington Post, Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere. Wendy is currently an Associate Editor at Rise Up Review.
@wendywisner.bksy.social
www.instagram.com/wendywisner
www.facebook.com/wendywisner
Wendy Wisner
Todd Cirillo was born of bastard lineage. He has many books and misdemeanors. Books include: Sucker’s Paradise, Burning the Evidence, ROXY, Three for the Road, Kisses from a Straight Razor, and his latest, Disposable Darlings. His poems have appeared in numerous national and international literary journals, magazines and on cocktail napkins everywhere. He is editor and co-founder of Six Ft. Swells Press and has hosted numerous poetry series and events across the United States. Todd lives in New Orleans, Louisiana where he seeks out shiny moments and strange wisdom while looking pretty.
Website: www.toddcirillo.com
Instagram.com/suckersparadise
Facebook.com/toddcirillo
Todd Cirillo
SUNDAY SALON CHICAGO
A POPULAR READING SERIES NOW IN ITS 21st YEAR.
BE A PART OF IT. BE A LITERARY CITIZEN & JOIN US.
IT'S A BEAUTIFUL THING!
BE A PART OF IT. BE A LITERARY CITIZEN & JOIN US.
IT'S A BEAUTIFUL THING!
www.sundaysalon-chicago.com
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Our March 23, 2025 reading at 7 pm CT took place at Roscoe Books, featuring Gayle Brandeis, Tony Trigilio, Kristin Tenor, Kurt Baumeister, and Joseph Harrington. They read from their recent writings and/or published works. See their bios below.
Our March 23, 2025 reading at 7 pm CT took place at Roscoe Books, featuring Gayle Brandeis, Tony Trigilio, Kristin Tenor, Kurt Baumeister, and Joseph Harrington. They read from their recent writings and/or published works. See their bios below.
Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss. Earlier books include the memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis, the novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns, shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award, the poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body, the craft book Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, and the novels The Book of Dead Birds, which won the PEN/Bellwether Prize, Self Storage, Delta Girls, and My Life with the Lincolns, chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Rumpus, and numerous other venues. Gayle teaches in a variety of academic and community writing programs, including Story Study Chicago and the University of Nevada, Reno low residency MFA program. She currently lives in Highland Park, IL and owns Secret World Books with her husband Michael.
Instagram: @gaylebrandeis
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gayle.brandeis
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/gaylebrandeis.bsky.social
Threads: @gaylebrandeis
Gayle Brandeis
Tony Trigilio is the author and editor of seventeen books, including, most recently, The Punishment Book (BlazeVOX [books], 2024), the fourth installment in his multivolume cross-genre project, The Complete “Dark Shadows” (of My Childhood). His books of poetry and prose also include Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press, 2023); Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (2021); and Ghosts of the Upper Floor (BlazeVOX, 2019), among others. A volume of his selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published by Guatemala’s Editorial Poe in 2018 (translated by Bony Hernández). He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014), and coeditor of Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2008). Trigilio co-founded the poetry journal Court Green in 2004, and is poetry editor of Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches at Columbia College.
Tony Trigilio
Kristin Tenor finds inspiration in life's quiet details and believes in their power to illuminate the extraordinary. She is the author of the flash fiction chapbook, This Is How They Mourn, which won Thirty West Publishing House’s 8th Wavelengths Chapbook Contest. Her fiction has appeared in Best Microfiction 2024, Wigleaf, Bending Genres, X-R-A-Y, 100 Word Story, and various other literary journals and anthologies. Kristin’s work has also been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize, as well as longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. She currently serves as the Reviews Editor at Story.
Website: www.kristintenor.com
X: @KristinTenor
Facebook: @KristinTenor
Instagram: @kristintenor_writer
Bluesky: @kristintenor.bsky.social
Author photo credit: Kim Elzinga
Kristin Tenor
Kurt Baumeister’s writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, Rain Taxi, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Weeklings, and other outlets. An acquisitions editor with 7.13 Books, Baumeister holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. Twilight Of The Gods is his second novel.
Website: https://kurtbaumeister.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kurt.baumeister/
Bluesky: @kurtbaumeister.bsky.social
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kurt.baumeister/
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@kurt.baumeister
Kurt Baumeister
Joseph Harrington is the author of Disapparitions (BlazeVOX Books 2024); Of Some Sky (BlazeVOX Books 2018); Goodnight Whoever’s Listening (Essay Press 2015); Things Come On (an amneoir) (Wesleyan UP 2011); and the critical work Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan UP 2002). His creative work has appeared in BAX: The Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Colorado Review, The Rumpus, Hotel America, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. From 2019-2023, he maintained a real-time verse-chronicle of the climate crisis, at The Poem of Our Climate and Writing Out of Time. He teaches at the University of Kansas (Lawrence).
Disapparitions on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61556106508781
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joeharrington70/
Bluesky: @joeharrington7.bsky.social
Joseph Harrington
Our February 23, 2025 reading at 6 pm CT was a Zoom event, featuring Mary Kay Zuravleff, Mary Biddinger, Laura Van Prooyen, Francine Witte, and Pat Boomsma. They read from their recent writings and/or published works. See their bios below.
Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, chosen for Oprah’s Spring Reading List. Her novel Man Alive! was a Washington Post Notable Book, and she is the winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award. She lives in Washington, DC.
Website: mkzuravleff.com
Instagram: mkzur
Facebook: Mary Kay Zuravleff
Mary Kay Zuravleff
Mary Biddinger’s most recent poetry collection is Department of Elegy. She is also co-editor of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers. Biddinger teaches creative writing at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program, and serves as poetry editor for the University of Akron Press. Her novella-in-flash, The Girl with the Black Lipstick, is now available for pre-order directly through Black Lawrence Press. Biddinger’s current project explores feral 1980s childhood in a close-knit Chicago neighborhood and walks the line between prose poetry and microfiction.
linktr.ee/marybid
https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/the-girl-with-the-black-lipstick/
@marybid.bsky.social
Mary Biddinger
Laura Van Prooyen is author of three collections of poetry: Frances of the Wider Field (Lily Poetry Review Books), Our House Was on Fire (Ashland Poetry Press) nominated by Philip Levine and winner of the McGovern Prize, and Inkblot and Altar (Pecan Grove Press). Van Prooyen is the Managing Editor for The Cortland Review, facilitates free online workshops with Community Building Art Works for healthcare workers (www.cbaw.org), and is the founder of Next Page Press (www.nextpage-press.com). She lives in San Antonio, TX.
https://www.facebook.com/lauravpc/
https://www.instagram.com/lauravanprooyen/
https://nextpage-press.com/index.html
https://www.instagram.com/nextpagepress/
Laura Van Prooyen
Francine Witte is an award-winning poet, flash fiction writer, and playwright. She is the author of 12 books of poetry and flash fiction and her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a native New Yorker and attends and produces poetry events in the vibrant NYC scene. She is the co-host and co-curator of the online reading, The Prose Garden and the host of the long-running FBOMB Global Flash reading. She is the flash fiction editor for FLASH BOULEVARD and South Florida Poetry Journal. A former high school English teacher, she now leads writing prompt sessions on zoom. Witte holds an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Vermont College and an MA from SUNY Binghamton. Visit her website at francinewitte.com.
My social media is @francinewitte on Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram
Francine Witte
Patricia Boomsma is a former Chicago resident and now a retired Arizona lawyer with degrees in English from Purdue University, in law from Indiana University in Indianapolis, and in Creative Writing from Queens University in Charlotte. Her stories have appeared in Scarlet Leaf Review, Persimmon Tree, and Vignette Review, and her poem “Arc of the Apocalypse” appeared in the anthology “Poems From the Aftermath” (Indolent Press). Her first novel, The Way of Glory (Edeleboom Books 2018), won the 2019 Bill Fisher Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association. Bedazzled Ink Publishing published her second novel Flotsam in September of 2023 and her third novel, Crosswind, in October of 2024. You can find her online at patboomsma.com
Patricia Boomsma | Facebook
Pat Boomsma (@writenaz.bsky.social) — Bluesky
Pat Boomsma
Our January 26, 2025 in-person reading at Roscoe Books took place at 7 pm CT
featuring Rosa Kwon Easton, Virginia Bell, Christopher Stewart, Tommy Dean, and
David Allen Sullivan. See their bios below. They read from their recent writings
and/or published works.
Rosa Kwon Easton is a Korean American lawyer, library trustee, and author of the debut novel, White Mulberry, an Amazon First Reads Editor’s Pick and a #1 Best Seller in Historical Fiction. It has been named a “Best Book” by Parade Magazine, BookBub, and BookRiot. Easton is an Anaphora Writing Residency Fellow, and her work has been published in CRAFT Literary, Electric Literature, Writer’s Digest and elsewhere. A graduate of Smith College, Columbia University, and Boston College Law School, she resides with her husband and Maltipoo in sunny Southern California. Her sequel, Red Seal, is due out in 2026.
@rosakwoneaston on IG, FB, Threads, Twitter & LinkedIn
Author photo: Karin Fuire
Rosa Kwon Easton
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021), and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press, 2022). He lives in Indiana, where he is currently the editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and numerous litmags.
@tommydeanwriter.bsky.social
Twitter @TommyDeanWriter
https://tommydean.substack.com/
https://www.facebook.com/tommy.dean.90/about
Tommy Dean
Virginia Bell is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around (Glass Lyre Press 2025) and From the Belly (Sibling Rivalry Press 2012). She won NELLE Magazine’s Nonfiction Prize in 2020 for the personal essay, “Chicken,” and her poetry won Honorable Mention in the 2019 RiverSedge Poetry Prize, judged by José Antonio Rodríguez. Her work has appeared in New City Magazine, Five Points, Denver Quarterly, SWWIM, EAP: The Magazine, Hypertext, The Night Heron Barks, Kettle Blue Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Rogue Agent, Gargoyle, Cider Press Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Nervous Breakdown, The Keats Letters Project, Blue Fifth Review, Voltage Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. Virginia Bell is Co-Editor of RHINO Poetry, and she teaches at Loyola University Chicago and DePaul University.
IG: vabellwriter
Facebook: www.facebook.com/virginia.bell.712
Virginia Bell
Christopher Stewart is the author of What Came After (The Calliope Group) and co-author (with Quraysh Ali Lansana) of The Walmart Republic (Mongrel Empire Press). His poems have recently appeared or will appear in RHINO, Midwest Quarterly, Oberon, Bryant Literary Review, Connecticut River Review, and others. He is the recipient of the 2025 RHINO Poetry Founder’s Prize and a 2023 finalist for the Iowa Review Award, among other recognitions.
Christopher Stewart
David Allen Sullivan’s poetry books include Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, Black Ice, & Salt Pruning, a collaborative collection with Ignatius Valentine Aloysius. He won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing. Black Butterflies Over Baghdad was selected for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection by Tim Seibles, & published by Word Works. Seed Shell Ash—a book of poems about his Fulbright year teaching in Xi’an, China—is forthcoming from Salmon Press. He’s the former Santa Cruz county poet laureate & teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students.
PGRSubmissions@gmail.com.
https://dasulliv1.wixsite.com/website-1
David Allen Sullivan
Our Nov 24, 2024 in-person reading at Roscoe Books took place at 7 pm CT and featured Audrey Niffenegger, Rachel Shteir, Rachel Robbins, and Lois Baer Barr. See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Audrey Niffenegger is a writer and visual artist. Her novels The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry were international bestsellers. She has also published graphic novels, including The Night Bookmobile and Raven Girl. The Time Traveler’s Wife was adapted into an HBO TV series by Steven Moffat. She is currently working on the The Other Husband, the sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife. Ms. Niffenegger is married to the graphic novelist Eddie Campbell. They collaborated on a collection of graphic short stories, Bizarre Romance, in 2018. They live in Chicago with their cats and an increasingly unmanageable collection of odd books. Ms. Niffenegger has been involved in the book arts as an artist, printer, bookbinder, occasional papermaker, type fiend, and teacher for more than forty years. She recently founded a new Chicago literary and book arts center, Artists Book House. With her friends and supporters, she hopes to welcome you to this new haven for book arts in 2025.
Twitter: @AANiffenegger
Bluesky: @audreyniffenegger.bsky.social
Instagram: aaniffenegger
Artists Book House FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/artistsbookhouse
Audrey Niffenegger
Rachel Shteir is the award-winning author of four books: Striptease: The Untold History of The Girlie Show; Gypsy: The Art of The Tease; The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting, and Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter. She has also written for many newspapers, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Her first book, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show won The George Freedley Memorial Award. Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter was a New Yorker best book of 2023 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. She teaches at The Theatre School at DePaul University.
Photo: Doug McGoldrick.
www.rachelshteir.com
Facebook @rachelshteir
Rachel Shteir
Rachel Robbins received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a tenured assistant professor at Malcolm X College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. A visual artist and two-time Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, her paintings have materialized on public transit, children’s daycare centers, and Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. She is the author of In Lieu of Flowers, available through Tortoise Books, and The Sound of a Thousand Stars, available from Alcove Press, Penguin Random House Audio, and Hodder & Stoughton, an imprint of Hachette UK. She lives in Chicago with her husband, children, and Portuguese Water Dog.
https://www.rachelrobbins.net/
Facebook/Rachel Robbins
Instagram/Threads @rachel.slotnick
Twitter @rlslotnick
Twitter @rlslotnick
Rachel Robbins
A professor emerita of Spanish, Lois Baer Barr, taught at Lake Forest College and teaches creative writing there whenever they ask her back. The Tailor’s Daughter, is about her mother the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Louisville, Kentucky. Her chapbook, Tracks: Poems on the “L,” documents the Red Line before Covid19. Biopoesis, another chapbook, won first prize at Poetica Magazine. Her flash fiction, Lope de Vega’s Daughter, reinvents the lives of iconic rogues and saints of Spanish and Latinx culture. Barr was a finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Prize and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, cream city review, Letralia (in Spanish), Rattle, and Valley Voices. From 2022-2023 she co-curated and performed in evenings of short stories at Oil Lamp Theatre. Barr tutors at Forging Opportunity for Refugees in America and is a student of flamenco.
www.loisbaerbarr.com
Facebook/peachy.queen.7
Lois Baer Barr
Shown below:
Our ZOOM POP-UP reading event took place on October 27, 2024 at 6 pm CT, featuring Lisa Dordal, Hannah Sward, Amber Caron, and David Cazden. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Lisa Dordal is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University and is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; Water Lessons, a Lambda Literary most-anticipated-book for 2022; and Next Time You Come Home, a Lambda Literary most-anticipated-book for 2023. Lisa is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, and the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, Narrative, Image, Best New Poets, Christian Century, CALYX, and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry.
Website: https://lisadordal.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.a.dordal and also
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087212446409 [Lisa Dordal author]
Instagram: lisa.dordal
Lisa Dordal
Hannah Sward, daughter of the late poet Robert Sward, is the IAN awarding-winning author of Strip: A Memoir. Strip, Sward's first book has received the attention of authors such as Nobel Prize winner, J.M. Coetzee, Melissa Broder, and NYT Bestselling novelist Caroline Leavitt who called Sward, “One of the most moving and honest memoir writers. So eloquent, so brave.”
Sward has spoken on dozens of podcasts and panels with special appearances on NBC CA Live and C-SPAN BookTV. Published in literary journals for the past twenty years, her most recent work can be read in the LA Times, NY Times (TLS), Huff Post, The Rumpus and others. Sward lives in Los Angeles where she is working on a short story collection.
Website: hannahsward.com
IG: @hannahswardauthor
Threads: @hannahswardauthor
Hannah Sward
Amber Caron is the author of the story collection Call Up the Waters and the recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Southwest Review’s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her stories have appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Threepenny Review, AGNI, Story, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, and have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and PEN America Best Debut Short Stories. She is an assistant professor at Utah State University and an assistant fiction editor at AGNI.
Amber Caron
David Cazden is the author of three books, including the just released New Stars And Constellations (Bainbridge Island Press). His work has appeared in Passages North, The New Republic, The Connecticut Review, Rattle, The McNeese Review, Fugue Journal, Nimrod, Verse Daily and elsewhere. David was the poetry editor for Miller's Pond magazine for 5 years. He received an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council for Poetry in 2008.
twitter @dcazdn
insta / fb @davidcazden
website https://www.davidcazden.net/
twitter @dcazdn
insta / fb @davidcazden
website https://www.davidcazden.net/
David Cazden
Shown below:
Our September 29, 2024, 7 pm CT reading took place at Roscoe Books, featuring Rachel Jamison Webster, Tina Jenkins Bell, Ananda Lima, S.L. Wisenberg, & Calvin Forbes. See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Rachel Jamison Webster is the author of four books of poetry in addition to her debut book of nonfiction, Benjamin Banneker and Us, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker and Editor's Pick by The New York Times. Publisher’s Weekly hailed the book as “a stunning meditation on race, identity, and achievement” and Booklist called it an “engrossing, multifaceted, profoundly thoughtful, and beautifully rendered inquiry that forms a clarifying lens on America’s ongoing struggles against racism and endemic injustice.” Rachel has taught at Northwestern for the last 17 years. She has been a Kaplan Fellow in the Humanities, an Op Ed Public Voices Fellow, and a winner of the Culture-Light Award by the Sri Chinmoy Foundation. She is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Rachel’s essays, poems, and stories are published in outlets including Poetry, Tin House, and the Yale Review. She lives in Evanston with her daughter, Adele, and her husband and fellow-poet, John McCarthy.
Rachel Jamison Webster on IG and Facebook
Rachel Jamison
Webster
Webster
Tina Jenkins Bell is a published fiction writer, playwright, freelance journalist, and
literary activist living on Chicago’s south side with her husband Earl and two dogs Jackson and Bella. She is the mother of four, and though all are grown, she will always be Evan, Elijah, Eric and Lakeshia’s mom. She writes about being Black in America and the various ways race and kinship bend common aspects of life. Her work has appeared in Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, They Said, and Us Against Alzheimer’s as well as Hypertext, Hairtrigger 32, Expressions from Englewood journals and other publications. Most recently, her social justice flash prose, “Swimming,” originally published by Jet Fuel Review, will appear in Sonder Press’ Best Small Fiction” anthology in November 2022. She is currently working on her second novel, Down and Dirty in Kosciusko, Mississippi.
FaceBook - tjbell2
Instagram - tejay2016
Twitter - @tinajbell
Tina Jenkins Bell
Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press), as well as publications such as The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She was a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and is currently a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers University, Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and The New York Times Review of Books describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.
Socials: @anandalima
https://www.instagram.com/anandalima/
https://www.facebook.com/anandalima
https://twitter.com/anandalima
https://bsky.app/profile/anandalima.bsky.social
https://www.threads.net/@anandalima
Ananda Lima
Photo: Beowulf Sheehan
S.L. Wisenberg writes about bodies, history, and herself. According to Hypertext Magazine, she is “a Chicago literary icon.” Her nonfiction chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch, has just been revised and updated in a paperback edition. She is also the author of The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home, winner of the Juniper Prize in nonfiction, published by the University of Massachusetts Press last year. Earlier books are the short-story collection The Sweetheart Is In, and an essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, & Other Obsessions. She’s the executive editor Another Chicago Magazine. She’s received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sandi lives nearby in Lakeview, where she nurtures black swallowtail caterpillars and hypnotizes wild rabbits.
X: SLWisenberg
Instagram: @SLwisenberg
Facebook: @Sandi.Wisenberg
Threads:@sanwisenberg
S.L. Wisenberg
Calvin Forbes is a Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught jazz history, creative writing, and African American literature. Calvin is currently writing a series of new poems for a book of Selected and New Poems to be published in the near future. He’s also working on the story of jazz musician expats in Europe prior to World War 2. Calvin Forbes has taught at several colleges and universities, and read his work and lectured at colleges from Boston to London to Copenhagen to Paris to Honolulu and Amsterdam.
Calvin Forbes
Shown below:
Our August 25, 2024 Pop-Up reading with RHINO Poetry authors, took place at 7 pm CT at Roscoe Books. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
April Gibson is the author of The Span of a Small Forever (Amistad, 2024). Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, RHINO Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is a winner of The Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award from the Illinois Emerging Writers Competition, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Award in poetry. She has been a writer-in-residence for Write On, Door County, and a Vermont Studio Center resident. She is a fellow of the Poetry Incubator (Poetry Foundation), the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and The Watering Hole Poetry Retreat. She is also a Tin House and VONA Writing Workshop alum and her research has received support from the National Endowment of the Humanities. She teaches in the Department of English, Literature, and Speech at Malcolm X College in Chicago.
April Gibson
Anna Hernandez-Jung is a poet with an MFA from New York University and an Associate Editor with RHINO. She is also the Creative Director of Silent Rebel, a marketing consultant business based in Chicago. Anna lives in Chicago with her family.
Anna Hernandez-
Jung
Jung
Colin Pope is the author of Prayer Book for the New Heretic (NYQ Books, 2023), a finalist for the Louise Bogan Award and the St. Lawrence Award, and Why I Didn’t Go to Your Funeral (Tolsun Books, 2019), a finalist for the Press 53 Award. He earned his MFA from Texas University and a PhD from Oklahoma State University. Pope is the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Northwestern University and is a member of the editorial boards of RHINO and TriQuarterly. Originally from the Adirondacks, he currently lives in Chicago.
Colin Pope
Keenan Norris’s latest book is Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings. Keenan’s novel The Confession of Copeland Cane won the 2022 Northern California Book Award and his essays have received the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award and Folio: Eddie Award. He's been a Callaloo fellow, as well as a Public Voices fellow with the Op-Ed Project. His editorials and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Stranger's Guide (Chicago edition), Alta and LitHub. Keenan teaches at San Jose State University.
Keenan Norris
Celebrate the 2024 print release of the award-winning poetry journal RHINO, which includes new work by Laura Bandy, T. De Los Reyes, Denise Duhamel, Ian-Khara Ellasante, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Alison Granucci, Jessica Hincapie, Matthew Kelsey, Maurya Kerr, Alejandro Lucero, Adrian S. Potter, Mike Puican, José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes, Joni Wallace, and Jameka Williams--just to name a few!
Shown below: Our July 28, 2024 reading at 7 pm CT at Roscoe Books featured Bonnie Jo Campbell, Faylita Hicks, Melanie Faranello, Beth Uznis Johnson, and Michael Zapata. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of The Waters (W.W. Norton, 2024) written “with a ‘ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world’ (New York Times Book Review), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.” Her bestselling novel, Once Upon a River (2011) was adapted into a full length feature film and released to international critical acclaim in 2020. She is also author of Q Road, a Barnes & Noble Great New Writers novel. Her critically acclaimed short fiction collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP Prize for Short Fiction; and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. Her story collection American Salvage, a National Book Award Finalist, was heralded by The Guardian as a top 10 rural noir novel of all time.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Faylita Hicks is a queer Afro-Latinx multidisciplinary artist, writer, hoodoo practitioner, and cultural strategist advocating for people directly impacted by the carceral system. An Art for Justice Fund grantee, voting member of the Recording Academy, and winner of the 2020 Sappho Poetry Award from Palette Poetry, they are the author of A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024) and HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Currently based in Chicago, they are working on their forthcoming memoir about their pretrial incarceration, A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2026), their next contemporary jazz-infused spoken word album, and a digitally immersive performance piece tentatively entitled The Echoes.
Website: www.FaylitaHicks.com
Facebook: faylitahicks
Instagram: faylitahicks
Threads: @faylitahicks
Twitter/X: faylitahicks
Tik Tok: @faylitahicks
Faylita Hicks
Melanie Faranello’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including StoryQuarterly, HuffPost Personal, Swamp Pink, Hippocampus, Blackbird, Literary Mama, Catamaran, and others. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her novel-in-progress won an Emerging Writer Award from Key West Literary Seminars. She holds her MFA from The New School. Originally from Chicago, she lives in West Hartford, CT and is working on a novel along with a collection of stories and essays. She is the founder of the community engagement project, Poetry on the Streets. She started the Sunday Salon Chicago series at the Charleston Bar in Bucktown, Chicago, almost twenty years ago and is thrilled to be back to read at it now.
Instagram: @Melanie-Faranello
Facebook: @Melanie Pappadis Faranello
Melanie Faranello
Beth Uznis Johnson has published fiction and creative nonfiction in Massachusetts Review, Broad Street, Cincinnati Review, Story Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, Gargoyle, the Rumpus, Best American Essays 2018, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2017 McGinnis-Ritchie Award from Southwest Review and a finalist in the 2019 Mississippi Review fiction contest. She has an MFA in fiction from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Chicago. Her first novel, Coming Clean, was released by Regal House Publishing on January 9, 2024.
Visit: https://bethujohnson.com/
Facebook: buzjohn1
Twitter/X: buzjohn
Instagram: buzjohn
LinkedIn: bethuznisjohnson
Beth Uznis Johnson
Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is a recipient of a Meier Foundation Artist Achievement Award. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.
Michael Zapata
Our June 30, 2024 Zoom reading at 6 pm Central Time (Chicago), featured Luisa A. Igloria, Felice Neals, Patricia Q. Bidar, and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
During her appointed term as 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded Luisa A. Igloria one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021 to support a program of public poetry projects. Luisa is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press, 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize, Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and 11 other books; in 2015, she was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry. She is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University, and also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk.
https://poets.org/poet/luisa-igloria
IG @poetslizard | X/Twitter @ThePoetsLizard
FB https://www.facebook.com/VAPoetLaureate2020/
FB https://www.facebook.com/VAPoetLaureate2020/
Luisa A. Igloria
Felice Neals is an avid traveler, language buff, film enthusiast and photographer.
She received her MA in Media/Film Studies at The New School University in New York City in 2013 and her MFA in Creative Writing at City College, New York, in 2018, where she began the journey with her current novel-in-progress, THE SOMMERVILLE PASSAGE. She is the author of screenplays, short stories, travel narratives and non-fiction essays, and also the founder of (Re) An Ideas Journal. Her work has been featured in various publications including Catapult, Odyssey Magazine, Day One Literary Journal and the New York Times. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the City College of NY, CUNY and works, lives and pursues her dreams in downtown New York City.
Felice Neals
Patricia Quintana Bidar is a western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. Her short fiction has appeared in Wigleaf, Smokelong Quarterly, The Pinch, Atticus Review, and Variant Lit and has been widely anthologized, including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024 (Alternating Current), and Best Microfiction 2023 (Pelekinesis Press). Patricia’s novelette, Wild Plums (ELJ Press) is available from Amazon. Her collection of short works, Pardon Me For Moonwalking, is slated for publication in December 2025 from Unsolicited Press.
Visit patriciaqbidar.com
Twitter: @patriciabidar | Instagram and Facebook: @patriciaqbidar
Patricia Q. Bidar
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is a speculative fiction writer, editor and publisher in Nigeria. His works have won the Nebula, Otherwise, Nommo, Locus, British and World Fantasy awards, and been a finalist in the Hugo, Sturgeon, British Science Fiction, and NAACP Image awards. He was a guest of honour at CanCon and the Afrofuturism themed International Conference For the Fantastic In The Arts, where he coined the genre label, Afropantheology.
Oghenechovwe
Donald Ekpeki
Donald Ekpeki
Our May 26, 2024 reading lineup below featured Anne-Marie Oomen, JP Solheim, Laura Joyce-Hubbard, and J. Howard Rosier. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Anne-Marie Oomen was recently awarded the Michigan Author Award (2023- 24) for Lifetime Achievement. Her memoir AS LONG AS I KNOW YOU: THE MOM BOOK won AWP’s Sue William Silverman Nonfiction Award (University of Georgia Press), a Michigan Notable Book Award, and a Silver IPPY. The Long Field: Essays of Comfort and Home (Cornerstone Press) is her most recent collection of new and selected essays. She edited ELEMENTAL: A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction, and co-authored The Lake Michigan Mermaid, (with Linda Nemec Foster), Pulling Down the Barn, House of Fields (all Michigan Notable Books), American Map: Essays, Uncoded Woman (poetry), and Love, Sex and 4-H (Next Generation Indie Award for Memoir). She teaches poetry and nonfiction at Solstice MFA at Lasell University (MA) and Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She and her husband, David Early, have built a handmade home on wild acreage formerly stewarded by the tribes of Three Fires Confederacy near Empire, Michigan.
Facebook: annemarie.oomen & AnneMarieOomenAuthor
Twitter/X: oomen_anne | Instagram: annemarieoomen
Pinterest: annemarieoomen/_saved/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/45764826-anne-marie-oomen
Anne-Marie Oomen
Tim Moder is a poet from northern Wisconsin. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, River Mouth Review, Cutthroat, One Art, and others. He is the author of the chapbooks All True Heavens (Alien Buddha) and American Parade Routes (Seven Kitchens). His poems have been nominated for Best Of The Net and The Pushcart Prize. He is a member of The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
Find him at timmoder.com
@ModerTim on Twitter/X
@moder_poet_tim (IG)
Tim Moder
Laura Joyce-Hubbard’s work appears in Poetry, The Chicago Tribune, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. Recent awards include first-place in The Iowa Review’s Veteran writing contest, the Porch Poetry Prize, and an AWP Intro Journal Award. Laura’s nonfiction is “Notable” in Best American Essays 2022 and 2023. She served twenty years in the Air Force and was among the first women to pilot the C-130s. She has an MA in Environmental Policy from Colorado State University and worked on Environmental Justice programs while serving at the Pentagon. Laura’s a TriQuarterly fiction editor, Northwestern University MFA candidate, and the inaugural Highland Park Poet Laureate.
Website: https://linktr.ee/laura.joycehubbard
Instagram: laurajh
Facebook: Laura Joyce-Hubbard
Twitter/X: @laurajoyhub
Laura Joyce-Hubbard
JP Solheim is a fiction writer, teacher, and literary critic. The author of the critical work The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture (Liverpool University Press, 2018), their fiction has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Confrontation, MQR: Mixtape, The Pinch, and Zone 3, among others. They are a Ragdale Fellow and erstwhile punk bassist. They serve as the Associate Director of the BookEnds novel revision fellowship directed by Meg Wolitzer and Susan Scarf Merrell at Stony Brook University, where they also teach in the Creative Writing and Literature MFA Program.
Instagram: @je_estuneautre
FB: https://www.facebook.com/jennifer.solheim.9/
JP Solheim
J. Howard Rosier's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, The Nation, Bookforum, 4Columns, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle and a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Twitter/X: @justlikebeirut
Instagram: @savile_ros
J. Howard Rosier
Our Zoom readers for April 28, 2024 featured Fleda Brown (Poetry/Nonfic), Stacy Gnall (Poetry), Susan L. Leary (Poetry), Casey Bell (Fiction), and Sarah A. Rae. See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Fleda Brown’s tenth collection of poems, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press and is an Indie finalist. Earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, chosen by Ted Kooser for his University of Nebraska series, 2017. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her new memoir is Mortality, with Friends (Wayne State University Press, an MIPA Winner and Midwest Book Award winner in memoir). She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07.
Website: fledabrown.com
Twitter: @FledaBrown
Instagram: fledabrown7
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/fleda-brown-9a37898
Fleda Brown
Stacy Gnall is the author of the poetry collections Dogged (winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry from The University of Massachusetts Press, 2022) and Heart First into the Forest (Alice James Books, 2011). A finalist for the Georgia Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in numerous journals, most recently Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, Bennington Review, and New American Writing. Gnall holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California, and is also a graduate of the University of Alabama’s MFA program in Creative Writing and Sarah Lawrence College. She is the founder and director of Wordstruck (Young Writers Collective), which offers creative writing programming for teens and tweens. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she is currently Poet-in-Residence at the University of Detroit Mercy.
Website: stacygnall.com
Instagram: @stacygnall
Stacy Gnall
Susan L. Leary is the author of four poetry collections: Dressing the Bear, selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the Louise Bogan Award and forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2024; A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, Crab Creek Review, The Arkansas International, Superstition Review, South Dakota Review, Tar River Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, and Verse Daily. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and teaches at Indiana University.
Website: www.susanlleary.com
Social Media Links:
Twitter/X: @susanlleary
Instagram: @susanllearypoet
Susan L. Leary
Casey Bell is author of the award-winning short story collection Little Fury (Metatron Press). She’s a graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno MFA program in Creative Writing. Her fiction appears in Sequestrum, Cream City Review, New South, Reed Magazine, Timber and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize, the Calvino Prize and the Iowa Review Fiction Award. Casey is co-director of G.I.R.L.S. Rock Reno, a music camp for self-identified girls, trans and gender-expansive youth. She teaches English at the University of Nevada, Reno and is the drummer and singer of the band Fine Motor.
Photo: Dan Morse
Website: www.caseybellwriter.com
Instagram: @caseylaurenbell
Casey Bell
Sarah A. Rae (she/her) is a poet and occasional essayist living in Chicago. Publications include her chapbook, Someplace Else (dancing girl press, 2020), and poems appearing or forthcoming in Poemeleon, Gyroscope Review, Jet Fuel Review, Revista Blanco Y Negro, Naugatuck River Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and the New Orleans Poetry Buffet Anthology, among others. Her translations of work by the Mexican poet Guadalupe Ángela may be found in Ezra, and in video format in Jill! A Woman+ in Translation Reading Series. A native of Champaign, Illinois, she holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans, and works as an educator for high school students and adults.
Website: (available by May 1, 2024): saraharaepoet.com
Social Media: Facebook (Sarah A. Rae) and WhatsApp
Sarah A. Rae
Our March 24, 2024 reading took place at Roscoe Books at 7 pm Central Time, featuring Tyler Mills (Nonfic), Marcia Bradley (Fiction), Kenyatta Rogers (Poetry), Thea Goodman (Poetry), Ben Tanzer (Fiction), and Rob A. Mackenzie (poetry). See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Tyler Mills is the author of the memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024), which received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. Her poetry guidebook, Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets, is forthcoming this May from the University of Akron Press. She is the author of the poetry books City Scattered (Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions 2021). A poet and essayist, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, the Kenyon Review, The Believer, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Brevity, Copper Nickel, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. She teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center's 24PearlStreet and lives in Brooklyn.
@TylerMPoetry (on Instagram and X)
https://www.facebook.com/tyler.mills.14/
Tyler Mills
Marcia Bradley, seeking her ‘second life,’ moved from Los Angeles to study at Sarah Lawrence College earning her MFA in 2017 after her BA from Antioch University. Marcia received a Bronx Council on the Arts/New York City BRIO Award for Fiction, was a Pushcart nominee in 2022, and her writing has appeared in The Chicago Review of Books, The Capital Gazette, and many other publications. She was awarded scholarships to Ragdale, Community of Writers, and Eckerd College Writers’ residencies. A native of Chicago, Marcia teaches adult fiction and memoir writers at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in the Bronx. Her debut novel, The Home for Wayward Girls, was published by HarperCollins in 2023 and was included on “Goodreads 105 of the buzziest novels of 2023 list.”
https://www.facebook.com/marcia.bradley.98
https://www.instagram.com/marciamariebradley/
@marciamariebradley
Marcia Bradley
Kenyatta Rogers is a Cave Canem Fellow and has been awarded scholarships from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. His work has been previously published in Poetry Magazine, Jubilat, Vinyl, Bat City Review, The Volta, PANK, MAKE Magazine among others. Kenyatta is a Lead Teacher for the Poetry Foundations Teacher Institute and Chautauqua Institution’s Young Writer Institute. He is a co-host of the Sunday Reading Series with Simone Muench and is the Creative Writing Department Head at The Chicago High School for the Arts.
Instagram: supportyourlocalvibedealer
Kenyatta Rogers
Thea Goodman is a novelist, poet and educator in Chicago. She was a Visiting Faculty Member at The University of Chicago from 2016-2019. Her first novel, The Sunshine When She’s Gone (Henry Holt) appeared in 2013 to critical acclaim. Her short fiction, essays and poems have appeared in New England Review, Arrowsmith, Columbia, among many others. Honors are inclusion in The New York Public Library’s Stories on the MTA, 2019, a digital archive, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, The Columbia Fiction Award and a Story Magazine short-short award. The Invented Mother was a finalist in The New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition 2022. She lives in Chicago.
website: theagoodman.com
Instagram: theagoodmann
Facebook: Thea Goodman, Thea Goodman, Author
Thea Goodman
Emmy-award winner Ben Tanzer's acclaimed work includes the short story collection UPSTATE, the science fiction novel Orphans and the essay collections Lost in Space and Be Cool. Ben is a storySouth and Pushcart nominee, a finalist for the Annual National Indie Excellence and Eric Hoffer Book Awards, a winner of the Devil's Kitchen Literary Festival Nonfiction Prose Award and a Midwest Book Award. He also received an Honorable Mention at the Chicago Writers Association Book Awards for Traditional Non-Fiction and a Bronze Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He's written for Hemispheres, Punk Planet, Men’s Health, and The Arrow, AARP’s GenX newsletter. His forthcoming novel The Missing, which Kirkus Reviews says is a “A taut, incisive look at two lives as they slowly implode.,” will be released on March 21, 2024, by 7.13 Books. He lives in Chicago with his family.
Photo: Jacob. S. Knabb
Website—https://www.tanzerben.com/
Twitter—https://twitter.com/BenTanzer
Instagram—https://www.instagram.com/tanzerben/
Facebook—https://www.facebook.com/BenTanzer/
TikTok—https://www.tiktok.com/@bentanzerautho
Ben Tanzer
Rob A. Mackenzie is a poet and publisher. He is from Glasgow and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has published two poetry chapbooks and four full poetry collections, the most recent of which are The Book of Revelation (2020) and Woof! Woof! Woof! (2023), both published by Salt. His poems, articles, reviews and translations have appeared in many UK publications. For ten years, he was reviews editor of Magma Poetry magazine. He has taken part in literary festivals – both readings and panel discussions – such as the StAnza International Poetry Festival (on several occasions), Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Poetry on the Lake (Orta, Italy), Den Poezie (Prague, Czech Republic). His work has been translated into French, Italian and Czech. He runs the literary publishing house, Blue Diode Press.
Photo: Ryan McGoverne
Twitter/X - @RobAMackenzie1
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/rob.a.mackenzie
Instagram - @robamackenzie
Rob A. Mackenzie
Our February 25, 2024 ZOOM Pop-Up reading began @6 pm Central Time and featured Cynthia Atkins (Poetry), Mary Hawley (Fiction), Jared Beloff (Poetry), Josh Barkan (Memoir), and Westley Heine (Prose/Poetry). They read from their recent writings and/or published works. See their bios below.
Cynthia Atkins (She, Her) is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In the Event of Full Disclosure, and Still-Life with God (Saint Julian Press 2020), and a collaborative chapbook from Harbor Editions, 2022. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, Green Mountains Review, Indianapolis Review, Los Angeles Review, Rust + Moth, North American Review, Permafrost, SWWIM, Tinderbox, and Verse Daily. She earned her MFA from Columbia University and has earned fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work. Atkins lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, Virginia, with artist Phillip Welch and their family.
More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com
Photo: Anne Valerie
@catkinspoet (twitter/x)
cynthia.atkins1 (insta)
Cynthia Atkins
Mary Hawley is a fiction writer, poet, and literary translator. Her short stories have appeared in Hypertext, The Saturday Evening Post, Doubleback Review, and other magazines, and she received a 2019 Illinois Literary Award for fiction. She is the author of a poetry collection, Double Tongues (Tía Chucha Press), and her poems have been published in journals such as La Tolteca 2.0, Mudlark, Tipton Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Notre Dame Review, as well as in anthologies including Brute Neighbors (DePaul University), Dream of a Word (Tía Chucha Press), and Naming the Daytime Moon (Another Chicago Press). Her translations (Spanish to English) of poetry and prose have appeared in The Common, TriQuarterly, After Hours, and Deinós, and she is currently translating a trilogy of novels by the Uruguayan writer Sergio Altesor Licandro. She lives in Evanston.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maryhawleywriter/
Mary Hawley
Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023). He is the editor of the Marvel inspired poetry anthology, Marvelous Verses (Daily Drunk, 2021) and the forthcoming Poets of Queens Anthology, Vol. 2 (2024). His work is forthcoming this Spring at AGNI, Image Journal and Grist Journal. He can be found in Baltimore Review, River Mouth Review and elsewhere. He is a Poetry Editor at The Weight Journal. When he isn’t writing poetry Jared is a high school English teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters.
IG: @Jared_W_Beloff
Twitter: @Read_Instead
Bluesky: @readinstead.bsky.social
Jared Beloff
Josh Barkan won the Lightship International Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Paterson Fiction Prize, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his writing has appeared in Esquire. He has taught creative writing at Harvard, NYU, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Hollins University and MIT. His books include the novel Blind Speed and short story collections Before Hiroshima and Mexico (Hogarth/Penguin Random House)—named one of the five best story collections of 2017 by Library Journal. His memoir Wonder Travels was published in the fall of 2023. He lives in Boston.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/josh.barkan
Instagram: @josh.barkan.writer
Josh Barkan
Westley Heine is the author of Busking Blues: Recollections of a Chicago Street Musician and Squatter (2022) through Roadside Press, a short story collection 12 Chicago Cabbies (2021) through Newington Blue Press, and a volume of poetry The Trail of Quetzalcoatl (2016) from Scars Publications. He is a regular contributor to Beatdom. His poems and short stories can be found throughout the independent press. He has twice featured at the Green Mill Poetry Slam in Uptown Chicago, and is the host of the poetry open mic at The Gallery Cabaret in Chicago every 4th Saturday. Most recently Roadside Press has released his poetry collection entitled Street Corner Spirits, audio excerpts of which are now available on streaming services under the same title.
Instagram: @westleyheine
Westley Heine
Our January 28, 2024 reading at Roscoe Books featured Amina Gautier, Kathleen Rooney, Emily Wolf, Rabha Ashry, and Jeremy T. Wilson. See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Amina Gautier is the author of four award-winning short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, The Loss of All Lost Things, and The Best That You Can Do. More than one hundred of her stories have been published, appearing in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, Callaloo, Cincinnati Review, Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, Hypertext Magazine, Kenyon Review, Latino Book Review, Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly among other places. She is the recipient of the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the International Latino Book Award, the Mellon-Flamboyan Foundation Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
Amina Gautier
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. The author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, her most recent novel is From Dust to Stardust. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay, and teaches at DePaul.
@kathleenMRooney on X
@poemswhileyouwait on Insta
https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.rooney.18/ on FB
Kathleen Rooney
Emily Wolf is an ardent feminist, U2 fan, and native Chicagoan. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Emily now lives in Houston with her husband, children, and dogs. My Thirty-First Year (And Other Calamities) is her first novel. She works by day as a writer for a children’s hospital, chairs her synagogue’s Social Justice team, and is an advisory board member for Inprint, a non-profit organization that serves Houston’s writers and readers. Emily has published several essays in the Houston Chronicle, is at work on her second book—a spiritual memoir—and regularly shares new writing at emilyvwolf.medium.com
Website: www.emilywolfbooks.com
Emily Wolf
Rabha Ashry is Egyptian, by way of Abu Dhabi, and based in Chicago. She has a Bachelor of Arts from New York University Abu Dhabi, and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The recipient of the Brunel International Poetry Prize 2020, she is the author of the chapbooks Loving the Alien and Grief and Ecstasy, published in 2021 and 2023. She currently teaches poetry and essay writing at DePaul University while writing about home, exile, the diaspora, and living between languages.
https://www.instagram.com/rabhaishere/
Rabha Ashry
Jeremy T. Wilson is the author of the novel The Quail Who Wears the Shirt and the short story collection Adult Teeth. He is a former winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and the Hessman Trophy, presented by legendary Principal Durward U. Hessman to the fifth grade student who could eat the most corn. His work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Masters Review, Sonora Review, Third Coast, The Best Small Fictions 2020, and other publications. He prefers pie over cake, waffles over pancakes, and R.E.M. over U2. He teaches creative writing at The Chicago High School for the Arts and lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Social: @shiremy (X)
Jeremy T. Wilson
Our November 19, 2023 reading at Roscoe Books featured Lynn Sloan, Elizabeth Strauss Friedman, Janice Deal & Ruben Quesada. See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Lynn Sloan is a writer and a photographer. Her novel Midstream (Fomite 2022) was called “luminous” (Foreword Reviews), “a cinematic tour de force” (Third Coast Review), with “a high-stakes plot” (New City). Principles of Navigation, her first novel, was chosen for Chicago Book Review’s Best Books of 2015. She is the author of the story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough (2018). Fortune Cookies, her flash fiction using fortune cookie fortunes, was produced as an art book by Lark Sparrow Press in 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshare and included in NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally.
https://www.facebook.com/lynn.sloan2/
https://www.instagram.com/lynn.sloan.writer/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynn-sloan-40591b28
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynn-sloan
Lynn Sloan
Elizabeth Strauss Friedman is the author of the poetry books The Lost Positive (BlazeVOX [books], 2023), The Eggshell Skull Rule (Kelsay Books, 2018), and the prose/poetry chapbook Gathered Bones are Known to Wander (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her work has appeared in Pleiades, Rust + Moth, The Rumpus, et al.
Elizabeth’s work can be found at elizabethstraussfriedman.com
Elizabeth’s work can be found at elizabethstraussfriedman.com
Twitter/X: @aelizabethpoet
IG: @elizabethsfriedmanpoet
FB: https://www.facebook.com/elizabethstraussfriedman
Elizabeth Strauss
Friedman
Janice Deal is the author of a novel, The Sound of Rabbits (Regal House, 2023), and the story collection The Decline of Pigeons (Queen’s Ferry, 2013), which was a Flannery O’Connor Award finalist. The Sound of Rabbits was a finalist for both the Many Voices Project annual competition and the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize. Stories from her new collection, Strange Attractors (New Door Books, 2023), won The Moth Short Story Prize and the Cagibi Macaron Prize. Janice has also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose. She lives with her husband in the Chicago area.
Photo: David Deal
Visit www.janicedeal.com
Twitter/X: @janicemdeal
IG: @janicemdeal
https://www.facebook.com/janicemdeal
Janice Deal
Ruben Quesada is the award-winning editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (2022), a collection of original essays from poets of Latin American descent. His writing appears in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, Taos Journal, Pilgrimage, Honey Literary, Adroit Journal, Superstition Review, Rattle, Third Coast, PoetryNow, Cordite (AU), Stand (UK), Tupelo Quarterly, SRPR, Ploughshares, Guernica, TriQuarterly, and Pleiades. Quesada is the founder of the Latinx Writers Caucus, which meets annually at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference and serves to connect and advocate Latinx and Latin American poets and writers from around the world.
Photo: Harvard Review
Twitter/X: @RubenQuesada
IG: @rubesphd
FB: https://www.facebook.com/rubesphd
Ruben Quesada
Our October 29th, 2023 online Zoom reading took place at 6 pm CT, featuring Christine Sneed, Jimin Han, Dr. Taylor Byas, A.S. Coomer & Alex Wells Shapiro . See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Christine Sneed is the author most recently of the story collection Direct Sunlight (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2023), Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, The Virginity of Famous Men: Stories, and the novel Paris, He Said. She is the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of #TimesUp, and her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New England Review, and numerous other publications. She's received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, among other honors. She teaches for Northwestern University’s and Regis University’s graduate creative writing programs.
@ChristineSneed (Twitter)
@christinemsneed (IG)
Christine Sneed
Jimin Han was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island; Dayton, Ohio; and Jamestown, New York. Her work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts. She is the author of A Small Revolution and has written for American Public Media's Weekend America, Poets & Writers, and Catapult, and other media outlets. She teaches at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, Pace University, and community writing centers. She lives outside New York City with her husband and children.
Photo: Christine Petrella
Jimin Han
Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. (she/her) is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus, a Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Literature, and an editorial board member for Beloit Poetry Journal. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize, and a 2023-24 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow. She is the author of the chapbooks Bloodwarm and Shutter, and the debut full-length I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, which recently won the Maya Angelou Book Award. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, forthcoming from Texas Review Press, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology forthcoming from HarperCollins. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency.
@TaylorByas3 (Twitter/X)
@taylorbyaspoet (IG)
Dr. Taylor Byas
A.S. Coomer is a writer & musician. Books include Songs for Leaving, Memorabilia, Birth of a Monster, The Fetishists, & several others. He runs Lost, Long Gone, Forgotten Records, a “record label” for poetry.
@ascoomer (Twitter/X)
https://www.instagram.com/ascoomer/ https://www.facebook.com/ascoomer/www.lostlonggoneforgottenrecords.wordpress.com
A.S. Coomer
Alex Wells Shapiro (he/him) is a poet and organizer from the Hudson Valley, living in Chicago. Northeastern University and SAIC have given him degrees. He serves as Poetry Editor for Another Chicago Magazine, and co-curates Exhibit B: A Literary Variety Show. He is the author of a full-length collection of poems, Insect Architecture (Unbound Edition 2022), and a chapbook, Gridiron Fables (Bottlecap Features 2022). He’s been published by Fourteen Hills, The Under Review, Tyger Review, Jelly Bucket, and other reputable and disreputable journals. His poems are forthcoming in The Spectacle and The Laurel Review.
Insta - @alexwellsshapiro1
Alex Wells Shapiro
Our Sept 25th, 2023 in-person reading took place at Roscoe Books at 7 pm CT and featured Toya Wolfe, Meg Tuite, Ann Keniston, Robert Vaughan & David Allen Sullivan. See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Toya Wolfe earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Her debut novel, Last Summer on State Street is the recipient of The Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award, was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, winner of the Friends of American Writers Adult Literature Award for Fiction, winner of the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award in Traditional Fiction and selected by four-time NBA Champion Stephen Curry for his August 2022 “Underrated” Book Club. Toya teaches fiction for the Bennington Writing Seminars and resides near Chicago.
Photo: Leicester Mitchell
Toya Wolfe
Meg Tuite is author of a collection of three of her books (Domestic Apparitions, Bound By Blue, and Her Skin is a Costume) Three By Tuite (Cowboy Jamboree) 2023, White Van (Unlikely Books) 2022, Meet My Haze (Big Table Publishing) 2018, Bound By Blue, (Sententia Books) 2013, won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from (Artistically Declined Press) for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging 2013, Grace Notes (Unknown Press) 2014, a novel-in-stories, Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press) 2011, as well as five chapbooks of short fiction, flash, poetic prose, and multi-genre. She teaches workshops and online classes through Bending Genres and is an associate editor at Narrative Magazine. Her work has been published in over 600 literary magazines and over fifteen anthologies including: Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good. She has been nominated over 20 times for the Pushcart Prize, won first and second place in Prick of the Spindle contest, five-time finalist at Glimmer Train, finalist of the Gertrude Stein award and 3rd prize in the Bristol Short Story Contest. She is also the editor of eight anthologies. She is included in the Best Small Fictions of 2021, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 stories of 2022, 2023. Her blog: http://megtuite.com
Twitter: @megtuite
FB: Meg Tuite
Instagram: @crazyrabbitposse
Meg Tuite
Ann Keniston is a poet, essayist, and critic interested in the relation of the creative to the scholarly. She is the author of several poetry collections, including, most recently, Somatic (Terrapin 2020), as well as several scholarly studies of contemporary American poetry. Her poems have appeared widely, and her essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, and Five Points. A professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she teaches poetry workshops and literature classes, she lives in Reno.
Ann Keniston
Robert Vaughan is an award-winning author, playwright, and teacher. His books include Microtones (Cervena Barva, 2012), Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits (Deadly Chaps, 2013), Addicts & Basements (CCM, 2014), RIFT (Unknown Press, 2015), Funhouse (Unknown Press, 2016), and Askew (Cowboy Jamboree, 2022). He was twice the runner-up for the Gertrude Stein Award for Fiction. His work has been widely anthologized, including the New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2018) and Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2019 (Sonder Press), His plays have been produced in S.F., N.Y.C., and Milwaukee. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Bending Genres.
Robert Vaughan
David Allen Sullivan is the former poet laureate of Santa Cruz county. His books include: Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, and Black Ice. Most recently, he won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing, and Tim Seibles selected Black Butterflies Over Baghdad for the Hilary Tham capital collection, Word Works Books. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, lives in Santa Cruz with his family, and his website is:
David Allen Sullivan
SUNDAY SALON CHICAGO
A POPULAR READING SERIES NOW IN ITS 17TH YEAR.
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Our August 27, 2023 in-person reading was a joint in-person POP-UP event with Hypertext Magazine & Studio (w/founder & ed. Christine Maul Rice), taking place at Roscoe Books on August 27th at 7 pm CT and featuring: Kathleen Rooney (co-founder, Rose Metal Press), Virginia Bell (co-ed. Rhino Poetry), Kiel M. Gregory, Erin Miller, Natasha Mijares, Laura Hawbaker, and Jessica L. Walsh. See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Virginia Bell is Co-Editor of RHINO Poetry and the author of From the Belly (Sibling Rivalry Press). Her work is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Five Points, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly and has appeared in Hypertext Magazine, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Cider Press Review, Gargoyle, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Rogue Agent, Cloudbank, Spoon River Poetry Review, Calyx, Poet Lore, Pebble Lake Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from NELLE, Honorable Mention in the RiverSedge Poetry Prize, Pushcart Prize nominations, and a Ragdale Foundation residency. She is also an adjunct professor of English at Loyola University Chicago and Northwestern University.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary works in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection, Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, has just been released by Texas Review Press and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in fall of 2023.
Natasha Mijares is an artist, writer, curator, and educator. Her debut collection of poetry, violent wave, is forthcoming. She received her MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at various international and national galleries. Her work has appeared in Gravity of the Thing, Hypertext Review, Calamity, Vinyl Poetry, and more.
Erin Miller is a 25-year-old writer, born and raised in Reno, NV, most recently residing in Chicago, now living here and there. When not writing, you can find them playing guitar in a hardcore band, enjoying a cold one on the stoop with their best friends, or lighting off fireworks in the White Sox parking lot.
Jessica L. Walsh is the author of Book of Gods and Grudges (Glass Lyre Press, 2022) as well as two previous collections. Her work has appeared in many journals like RHINO, Whale Road Review, Ninth Letter, and more. She is the blog mistress at Agape Editions. Originally from small-town Michigan, she now lives outside of Chicago with her family and teaches at a community college.
Find more at jessicalwalsh.com
Kiel M. Gregory teaches undergraduate coursework at Binghamton University where he is a PhD student in Comparative Literature. His work has been nominated for inclusion in the Pushcart Prize anthology in nonfiction and Best American Essays. His words and visual art appear in Lips, Stone Canoe, Atticus Review, and other fine journals.
Laura Hawbaker is a Chicago-based writer by way of New Orleans and Hawai’i. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago and served as the Franz Kafka Fellow at the Prague School of Communication. Hawbaker is the editor in chief of MASKS Literary Magazine. www.lahawbaker.com
Our July 30, 2023 in-person reading event at Roscoe Books took place at 7 pm CDT on with Rita Woods, Christine Maul Rice, Mary Barbara Moore, Rebecca Entel, and Faisal Mohyuddin. They read from their recent writings and/or published works. See their bios below.
Rita Woods was born and raised in Detroit. She received a BS in Microbiology before graduating from Howard University College of Medicine. She currently is acting Medical Director for a local prison in Illinois. Rita lives in suburban Chicago with her family and where she serves as an elected Trustee on her local library board. She is the author of Remembrance (2020) which was a recipient of a Hurston-Wright award for debut fiction and The Last Dreamwalker (2022), which was recently awarded the Midlands Authors Award for fiction. Rita loves magic, books, history, coffee and travel, not necessarily in that order.
Rita Woods
Christine Maul Rice’s award-winning novel, Swarm Theory, was called "a gripping work of Midwest Gothic" by Michigan Public Radio and was awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award (finalist), and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup: The Best Books of 2016 So Far. In 2019, Christine was included in New City's Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago 2019 and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago's Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk*, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder of the literary nonprofit Hypertext Magazine & Studio and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University.
Photo: Joe Mazza at Brave Lux
Insta Rice_Christine & Hypertext_Magazine
Twitter @ChrisMaulRice & @HypertextMag
Substack Hyper Until It Crashes
Christine Maul
Rice
Mary B. Moore’s five poetry books include Dear If, Orison Books 2022; Flicker, Dogfish Head Prize 2016; The Book Of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center 1998; the prize-winning chapbooks are Amanda and the Man Soul 2017, and Eating the Light 2016. Poems appear lately in Birmingham Poetry Review (BPR), Poetry, Prairie Schooner, NELLE, Nimrod, Gettysburg Review, Terrain, and more. She has won Birmingham Review’s Collins Prize and NELLE’s Three Sisters Award, and she won second place in Nimrod’s 2017 Pablo Neruda Award, and third in Terrain’s awards.
Facebook:
Mary Barbara Moore
Web-site:
Mary B. Moore
Rebecca Entel is the author of a novel, Fingerprints of Previous Owners; stories and essays in journals such as Guernica, Joyland, and Literary Hub; and flash in Cleaver, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing, U.S. and Caribbean literature, and the literature of social justice at Cornell College, where she also directs the Center for the Literary Arts. She is a mentor in the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program, a past Newberry Library fellow (as a teacher and as a researcher), and a former member of the late Writers Workspace in Edgewater. She currently lives in Iowa City and is at work on a second novel and a first book of creative nonfiction. You can follow her dog on Instagram @geriatricdachshund.
Photo: Elizabeth McQuern
rebeccaentel.com
@rebeccaentel (Instagram)
https://www.facebook.com/rebeccaentel
Rebecca Entel
Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of the chapbooks An End to Captivity (Next Page, 2024) and The Riddle of Longing (Backbone, 2017) and the full-length collection The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear, 2018). His recent poems have appeared in The Banyan Review, Poetry, RHINO, Poet Lore, Kweli, and What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (University Press of Kentucky, 2023). He teaches English at Highland Park High School in suburban Chicago and creative writing at the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University, and he serves as a Master Practitioner with the global not-for-profit Narrative 4.
Faisal Mohyuddin
Our June 25, 2023 online reading event took place at 6 pm CDT on Zoom with Ramona Reeves, Mandira Pattnaik, Chelsea Stickle, and Giano Cromley. They read from their recent writings and/or published works. See their bios below.
Ramona Reeves’ interconnected short story collection, It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories, won the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and is set in Mobile, Alabama, where she grew up. It was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press last fall and also won the 2023 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. In addition to her book, she has been awarded an AROHO fellowship, a residency at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, a scholarship from the Community of Writers, and recently taught for the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing. She also has served as an associate fiction editor for Kallisto Gaia Press. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Southampton Review, Bayou Magazine, Pembroke, New South, Superstition Review, Texas Highways and others. She currently lives with her wife and their two fur babies in Texas.
Website
Social links
· Instagram (@ramoreeves) - https://www.instagram.com/ramoreeves/
· Facebook (@ramonareev) - https://www.facebook.com/ramonareev/
· Twitter (@ramona_reeeves) - Please note three e’s in last name of user name; https://twitter.com/ramona_reeeves
Ramona Reeves
Mandira Pattnaik is an Indian fiction writer, essayist, poet and columnist with writings in print and online, in over 250 publications, including in university journals like The McNeese Review, Quarterly West, Passages North, Existere Journal, Quarter After Eight, Contrary, Penn Review, Miracle Monocle, Timber, and Watershed Review. Her work has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfictions, Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Mandira Pattnaik is the author of three collections: Anatomy of a Storm-Weathered Quaint Townspeople (2022, Fahmidan, Poetry), Girls Who Don't Cry (2023, ABP, Flash) and Where We Set Our Easel (May, 2023, Stanchion Publishing, Novella-in-Flash). She serves on the masthead of Reckon Review, Trampset and Vestal Review, where she strives to champion underrepresented voices and overlooked themes. Mandira is also a writing workshops instructor, NFFD NZ panelist, and interviewer. She balances life with holidays in nature with her family.
More at her website mandirapattnaik.com
Twitter (@MandiraPattnaik)
Insta (@pattnaik_mandira)
Mandira Pattnaik
Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbooks Everything’s Changing (Thirty West Publishing, 2023) and Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her stories appear in CHEAP POP, CRAFT, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants.
Chelsea Stickle
Giano Cromley has published two YA novels and a short story collection. His most recent novel is titled The Prince of Infinite Space. He’s been a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, and is a recipient of an Artists Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. He’s an English professor at Kennedy-King College, where he serves as chair of the Communications Department. And he’s an assistant fiction editor with Identity Theory. His next novel, entitled American Mythology, will be forthcoming in summer 2025 with Anchor Books.
He can be found on Instagram at: @gianocromley
And on Twitter at: @gianoc
Giano Cromley
Our May 28, 2023 in-person reading event happened at 7pm CDT at Roscoe Books with Cris Mazza (Nonfic), Rachel Swearingen (Fiction), Dina Elenbogen (Poetry), Amy E. Casey (Fiction), and Lois Baer Barr (Poetry). See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Cris Mazza’s new book is It’s No Puzzle, a Memoir in Artifact. Her last novel, Yet to Come, was from BlazeVox Books. Mazza has eighteen other titles of fiction and literary nonfiction, including Something Wrong With Her, a real-time hybrid memoir; her first novel How to Leave a Country, which won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction; and the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She is a native of Southern California and is a professor in and director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Cris Mazza
Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year. Her stories, essays, interviews and reviews have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Her writing has won the Berlin Writing Prize, the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. She lives in Chicago.
Instagram: @rmswearingen
Twitter: @rachelswearinge
Rachel
Swearingen
Dina Elenbogen is author of the poetry collections, Apples of the Earth (Spuyten Duyvil) and Shore (Glass Lyre Press), as well as the memoir, Drawn from Water (BkMkPress, University of Missouri). She has received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the Ragdale Foundation. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including: Fury: Women’s Lived Experience During the Trump Era (Pact Press), City of the Big shoulders (University of Iowa Press) Lit Hub, Bellevue Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, december, Woven Tale Press, The Examined Life Journal, Patterson Literary Review and many other venues. She teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago Writer’s Studio.
poetdina@instagram
https://www.facebook.com/dina.elenbogen
Dina Elenbogen
Amy E. Casey is the author of the dark, fabulist novel The Sturgeon’s Heart, an honorable mention for the 2022 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year. Amy is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, with short fiction and poetry featured or forthcoming in Split Rock Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Fauxmoir, Club Plum, Marrow Magazine, Lit Angels Journal, Dream Pop Journal, and elsewhere. Amy lives and writes on the freshwater shores of Lake Michigan, with her husband and two tabby cats. She is currently working on her second novel, usually writing on a Smith Corona Classic 12 typewriter from 1964.
IG: @amy_e_casey
Amy E. Casey
An emerita professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College, Lois Baer Barr has published books, articles, and reviews about literature in Spanish. Her stories and translations have been published here and abroad. Her chapbook of stories, Lope de Vega’s Daughter,is available from Red Bird Chapbooks. Her chapbook of poems Biopoesis won first prize at Poetica, and Tracks: Poems on the “L” was a finalist in the New Voices Contest at Finishing Line Press in 2022. Her first novel, The Tailor’s Daughter, is forthcoming from Water’s Edge Press this fall. A literacy tutor at Forging Opportunities for Refugees in America, Lois lives in Riverwoods, IL with her husband Lew and golden doodle Aggie.
https://www.facebook.com/peachy.queen.7
Lois Baer Barr
www.sundaysalon-chicago.com
~a curated literary reading series, now in its 17th year
Our April 30, 2023 - 6pm CDT Zoom reading event took place with Alina Stefanescu (Poetry), Alex Poppe (Fiction), Genevieve Kaplan (Poetry), Alice Kaltman (Fiction), and Jenn Stroud Rossmann (Fiction). See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature.
@aliner (twitter)
@alinajenesaisquoi (instagram)
https://www.facebook.com/alina.stefasomething/
Alina Stefanescu
Alex Poppe is the author of four works of fiction: Duende by Regal House Publishing (2022), Jinwar and Other Stories by Cune Press (2022), Moxie by Tortoise Books (2019), and Girl, World by Laughing Fire Press (2017). Duende has just been named a 2023 Readers’ Choice Book Awards finalist. Jinwar and Other Stories was a 2022 International Book Awards finalist. In 2018, Girl, World was named a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, Eric Hoffer Grand Prize finalist, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards. In 2021, Alex was an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where she began Breakfast Wine, a memoir-in-essay about her time living in Iraq, which charmed with a heart and a fist. When she is not dining with pistol-packing Kurdish hitmen or being thrown off the back of food aid trucks, she writes.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sapoppe
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alex.poppe.girl.world/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alex.poppe.16
Alex Poppe
Genevieve Kaplan is the author of (aviary) (Veliz Books, 2020); In the ice house (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation‘s poetry publication prize; and five chapbooks, most recently Felines, which sounds like feelings (above/ground press, 2022). Her poems can be found in Third Coast, Puerto del Sol, Denver Quarterly, South Dakota Review, Poetry, and other journals. A poet, scholar, and book-maker, Genevieve earned her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She co-edited Et Al.: New Voices in Arts Management (IOPN, 2022), an open-access collection of ideas, action, and inspiration from contemporary arts managers. Since 2003, she’s been editing the Toad Press International chapbook series, which became an imprint of Veliz Books in 2021, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose. Genevieve lives in southern California.
Twitter: @genevievekaplan
Insta: @vievekaplan
FB: @genevievekaplanpoet (public page)
Genevieve Kaplan
Alice Kaltman is the author of two story collections and three novels. Her latest linked collection, ALMOST DEADLY, ALMOST GOOD is based on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Heavenly Virtues. Alice’s stories appear in journals like Lost Balloon, The Pinch, Joyland, Five South, Fractured Lit and BULL, and in numerous anthologies. Alice splits her time between Brooklyn and Montauk, NY where she lives, surfs, and swims with her husband the sculptor Daniel Wiener and Ollie the Wonder Dog.
Instagram @alicekaltman
Twitter @AliceKaltman
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/alice.kaltman/
Alice Kaltman
Jenn Stroud Rossmann is the author of the novel The Place You're Supposed to Laugh, and her short stories have appeared in such journals as Pithead Chapel, Hobart, and Cheap Pop. She’s a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She is also a professor of mechanical engineering at Lafayette College, and writes the essay series “An engineer reads a novel” for Public Books. Her nonfiction writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Bloom, and Inside Higher Ed. She throws right, bats left.
@jenn_rossmann on twitter
https://twitter.com/jenn_rossmann
@jenn_rossmann IG
https://www.instagram.com/jenn_rossmann/?hl=en
FB: https://www.facebook.com/jenn.rossmann
Jenn Stroud
Rossmann
www.sundaysalon-chicago.com
Our March 26, 2023 - 7pm reading event took place at Roscoe Books, featuring Sandra Jackson-Opoku (Fiction), Maud Lavin (Nonfiction), Michael McColly (Nonfiction), and Gary Houston (Fiction). See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku is author of the American Library Association Black Caucus award-winning novel, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him, an Essence Magazine Hardcover Fiction Bestseller.
Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic works are widely published and produced. They appear in Both Sides: Stories from the Border, story South, Another Chicago Magazine, New Daughters of Africa, Novus Literary Journal, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, Taint Taint Taint Literary Journal, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and other outlets. She also coedited Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, a finalist in the Chicago Review of Books Nonfiction Award.
Jackson-Opoku’s work has earned a US National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, Newcity Lit50: Who Really Books in Chicago, an Esteemed Literary Artist Award from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the Lifeline Theatre BIPOC Adaptation Showcase, a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Globe Soup Story Award, and many other awards and honors.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku has taught creative writing at Columbia College Chicago, the University of Chicago, the University of Miami, and Chicago State University. She presents workshops, readings, and literary presentations in schools, libraries, and arts organizations worldwide.
twitter.com/jacksonopoku
https://www.instagram.com/sjacksonopoku/
https://www.facebook.com/sandra.jacksonopoku/
Sandra Jackson-
Opoku
A Pushcart Prize nominee, Maud Lavin has published recently in BULL, Heimat Review, JAKE, Red Ogre Review, and Roi Faineant, and earlier in the Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, and other venues. One of her books, CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE, was named a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Chicago where she edits, writes, and runs the READINGS series in the South Loop. She is a Guggenheim Fellow.
Twitter @maud_lavin
Instagram @lavinmaud
Photo: Bruce Black
Maud Lavin
Michael McColly’s essays and journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Sun Magazine, the online blog Humans & Nature, and other journals. He is the author of the 2006 Lambda Literary Award-winning memoir, The After-Death Room: Journey into Spiritual Activism (Soft Skull Press), which chronicles his journey reporting on AIDS activism in Africa, Asia and America. Recently, his essays on urban walking have been anthologized in Belt’s series on Midwest cities: Gary and Indianapolis.
He has also published The World Is Round, which is a collection of college student essays that give accounts of their immigrating to America. Along with a former student and photographer, Tuong Nguyen, McColly has written and produced a documentary on efforts by social workers in Vietnam who’ve worked with street youth struggling with heroin addiction, poverty, and HIV. He has won a Lisagor Journalism Award for a series on WBEZ on Chicago neighborhoods and been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Blue Mountain Center, and Ragdale.
He has been a lecturer in Creative Nonfiction at Northwestern’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Columbia College. He was teaching creative writing to inmates in Indiana’s State Prisons before the Covid pandemic.
Twitter @michaelmccolly
Michael McColly
Gary Houston is managing editor of Chicago Quarterly Review, formerly writer and an editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and even longer ago an editor for the University of Chicago-based Chicago Literary Review. His work has been published in those publications as well as Harper's, Chicago Tribune, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catamaran, Chicagoland, Aware, Kinesis, Libido and others. An actor, he may, if you look carefully, be spotted in the movies Fargo, Watchmen, Hoffa, Proof and the soon-to-be released adaptation of Judy Blume's novel Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.
Gary Houston
Our February 26, 2023 ZOOM reading event happened at 6 pm CDT featuring these excellent talents: Sara Lippmann (Fiction), Nikia Chaney (Poetry/Memoir), Suzanne Frischkorn (Poetry), Dawn Raffel (Fiction), and Michele McDannold (Poetry). See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Sara Lippmann is the author of the novel Lech (Tortoise Books) and the story collections Doll Palace (re-released by 7.13 Books) and Jerks (Mason Jar Press.) Her fiction has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Catapult, The Lit Hub and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she is co-editing the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible for SUNY Press. She teaches with the Writing Co-Lab and lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Twitter @saralippmann
IG @sara.lipp
Sara Lippmann
Nikia Chaney is the author of us mouth (University of Hell Press, 2018) and two chapbooks, Sis Fuss (2012, Orange Monkey Publishing) and ladies, please (2012, Dancing Girl Press). She has served as Inlandia Literary Laureate (2016-2018). Her poetry has been published in Sugarhouse Review, 491, Iowa Review, Vinyl, and Pearl, Welter, and Saranac.
Her memoir, ladybug, is upcoming from Inlandia in 2022.
Her memoir, ladybug, is upcoming from Inlandia in 2022.
Nikia Chaney
Dawn Raffel is the author of Boundless As the Sky, a novel in stories (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2022), plus five previous books, most recently The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies. Other books include two critically-acclaimed short story collections, a novel, and a memoir. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including NOON, BOMB, Conjunctions, Exquisite Pandemic, New American Writing, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, and more.
Dawn Raffel
Michele McDannold has organized poetry events and/or performed poetry with a bunch of unabashed free-thinkers across this great United States, most happily by roadtrip but sometimes by plane, train or coincidence. She spends most of her time producing and publishing books, when she’s not out killing miles with her magical jeep. Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of Days (Punk Hostage Press) and By Plane, Train or Coincidence (Roadside Press) are her full-length poetry collections.
Michele
McDannold
Suzanne Frischkorn is a Cuban-American poet. She is the author of Fixed Star (JackLeg Press, 2022), Girl on a Bridge, Lit Windowpane, (both from Main Street Rag Press) and five chapbooks. She is the recipient of The Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Center for her book Lit Windowpane, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, and a 2023 SWWIM Residency Award at The Betsy. She is an editor for
$ -Poetry is Currency and serves on the Terrain.org editorial board.
$ -Poetry is Currency and serves on the Terrain.org editorial board.
Twitter: @ litwindowpane
Instagram @ SuzFrischkorn
Facebook: Suzanne Frischkorn
Website:
Suzanne
Frischkorn
www.sundaysalon-chicago.com
We were excited to kick off 2023 with our January 29th in-person reading at ROSCOE BOOKS (not the Reveler) at 7 pm CDT. These awesome talents took the floor: Jameka Williams (Poetry), Dipika Mukherjee (Poetry), Tommy Dean (Fiction), and Scott Laudati (Fiction). Eileen Favorite (Fiction) couldn't attend for personal reasons. See all bios below. Authors read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Eileen Favorite's novel, The Heroines (Scribner), has been translated into five languages. Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in many publications, including, Chicago Magazine, The Toast, Triquarterly, The Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus, Diagram, and others. Her essay, "On Aerial Views," was a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2020 and received first place in the 2020 Midwest Review Essay Contest. She was named a 2021 Illinois Arts Council Awardee for nonfiction. She teaches writing and literature classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Graham School of the University of Chicago. Her TEDx Talk, "Love the Art, Hate the Artist" is available at her website www.eileenfavorite.com.
@EileenFavorite (Twitter)
Eileen Favorite (FB)
Eileen Favorite (Instagram)
@EileenFavorite (Twitter)
Eileen Favorite (FB)
Eileen Favorite (Instagram)
Eileen Favorite
Hailing from Chester, PA, Jameka Williams holds a MFA in poetry from Northwestern University. Her poetry has been published in Prelude Magazine, Gulf Coast, Gigantic Sequins, Muzzle Magazine, Yemassee Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a Best New Poets 2020 finalist, published annually by the University of Virginia. American Sex Tape™, her first collection, is the winner of the University of Wisconsin Press selection the 2022 Brittingham Prize. She resides in Chicago, IL.
Follow Jameka on Twitter and Instagram: @meka_will_write.
Jameka Williams
Dipika Mukherjee’s newest poetry collection, Dialect of Distant Harbors, was published by CavanKerry Press in October 2022. She is also the author of The Palimpsest of Exile (2009), and The Third Glass of Wine (2015). Her poetry appears in publications around the world, including RHINO, PostColonial Text, World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review and Chicago Quarterly Review and she won the Liakoura Prize for Poetry in 2016. She is the recipient of a 2022 Esteemed Artist Award (DCASE) from the City of Chicago and she teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and the Graham School at University of Chicago.
Dipika Mukherjee
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021), and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and numerous litmags.
Tommy Dean
Scott Laudati lives in Brooklyn with his terrier-mutt, Josie. He is the author of Play The Devil and Camp Winapooka. His poems and short stories have been published by Columbia University, X-RAY, Hobart, and many others. Visit him anywhere on online by searching @ScottLaudati.
Instagram: @ScottLaudati
Twittter: @ScottLaudati
Twittter: @ScottLaudati
Scott Laudati
We were thrilled to bring you these amazing writers on November 20, 2022: Jessamine Chan (Fiction), Juan Martinez (Fiction), Anca Szilágyi (Fiction), Steve Henn (Poetry), and Nestor "The Boss" Gomez (Nonfiction). See their bios below. They will be reading from their recent writings and/or published works.
Jessamine Chan’s short stories have appeared in Tin House and Epoch. A former reviews editor at Publishers Weekly, she holds an MFA from Columbia University. Her first novel, The School for Good Mothers, is a New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club pick, and has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter.
Photo: Beowulf Sheehan
Jessamine Chan
Juan Martinez is a writer and associate professor of English at Northwestern University and the author of Best Worst American, a story collection published by Small Beer Press. He is also the author of a horror novel Extended Stay, forthcoming from University of Arizona Press’s Camino del Sol series in 2023. His wife is the writer Sarah Kokernot. They live near Chicago.
Juan Martinez
Anca L. Szilágyi (SEE-lah-ghee) is the author of Daughters of the Air, which Shelf Awareness called “a striking debut from a writer to watch.” Dreams Under Glass, her second novel, released in September. Her essays and stories appear in Newsweek, Orion, Lilith, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, 4Culture, Hugo House, and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. Originally from Brooklyn, she has lived in Montreal, Seattle, and now Chicago, where she teaches creative writing.
Find her at ancawrites.com
Find her at ancawrites.com
Twitter: @ancawrites | Instagram: @anca_szilagyi
FB: ancalszilagyi
Anca Szilágyi
Steve Henn teaches high school English in northern Indiana. His previous books include Guilty Prayer (Main Street Rag, 2021) and Indiana Noble Sad Man of the Year (Wolfson, 2017). He's proud of the children of himself and late American artist Lydia Henn. He roots for the Fighting Irish, played high school soccer, and gives poetry readings in all kinds of places, from Pittsburgh to Milwaukee to Long Beach, travel conditions and money conditions and time permitting. His most recent collection is the chapbook American Male from Main Street Rag (2022). His favorite food is crab cakes, which are also a unit of value measurement for anything in the world (today’s reading set = 4 crab cakes).
Twitter: @MrSteveEngHenn | Instagram: @indiana_sad_man
Website: therealstevehenn.com
Steve Henn
Nestor “The Boss” Gomez was born in Guatemala and moved to Chicago in the mid 80's. He told his first story at a Chicago Moth Slam, as a way to get over stuttering. Surprisingly, he won the slam that night and has not stopped sharing his stories since. He has won thirty one Chicago Moth Slams, thirteen Milwaukee Moth Slams, seven Madison Moth Slams, and one Louisville Kentucky Moth Slam. He has also won virtual slams in the Twin Cities (twice), Atlanta, Washington D.C (twice), Vermont, Seattle, Texas (twice), England (twice), Detroit, Miami, Denver, Portland and Alabama, one Eastern, one Central zone Virtual story slam, plus three Chicago Moth Grand Slams; for a grand total of 73 Moth Slam wins. He is also the winner of the 2022 National Storytelling Network Grand Slam. Nestor is the creator, producer, curator and host of 80 Minutes Around the World, an Immigration Storytelling show which features the stories of immigrants, refugees, their descendants and allies.
nestorgomezstoryteller.com | Twitter: @soloyochapin
Nestor "The Boss" Gomez
SUNDAY SALON CHICAGO
A POPULAR READING SERIES NOW IN ITS 16TH YEAR. BE A PART OF IT.
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Our ZOOM POP-UP reading event took place on October 30th, 2022 at 6pm CDT. We brought you these fine talents: Christine Sneed (Fiction), Monica Prince (Poetry), Amy Cipolla Barnes (Fiction), Raegen Pietrucha (Poetry), and José Angel Araguz (Poetry). See their bios below. They read from their recent writings and/or published works.
Christine Sneed is the author most recently of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, The Virginity of Famous Men: Stories, and the novel Paris, He Said. She is the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of #TimesUp, and her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New England Review, and numerous other publications. She's received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, among other honors. She teaches for Northwestern University’s and Regis University’s graduate creative writing programs.
Christine Sneed
Monica Prince teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University. Her books include How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem, Instructions for Temporary Survival, and Letters from the Other Woman. Born to Guyanese parents and obsessed with maxi skirts with pockets, she writes, teaches, directs, and performs choreopoems all over the country, but is mostly found on Twitter @poetic_moni or on her website, www.monicaprince.com.
IG & Twitter: @poetic_moni
Facebook: @MonicaPrinceChoreopoet
Monica Prince
Amy Barnes is the author of three short fiction collections: AMBROTYPES published by word west, “Mother Figures” published by ELJ, Editions and CHILD CRAFT, forthcoming from Belle Point Press. A collaborative NIF will be published by Ad Hoc in 2023. Her words have appeared in a wide range of publications including The Citron Review, The Citron Review, JMWW Journal, Janus Lit, Flash Frog, No Contact Mag, Leon Review, Complete Sentence, Gone Lawn, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, SmokeLong Quarterly, Apartment Therapy, Southern Living, Allrecipes and many others. She’s been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, long-listed for Wigleaf50 in 2021 and 2022, and included in Best Small Fictions 2022. Her fiction has been published in anthologies including Bath Flash Fiction, and NFFD. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor and reads/judges for NFFD, CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, The MacGuffin, and Narratively.
You can find her on Twitter at @amygcb.
Amy Cipolla Barnes
Raegen Pietrucha writes, edits, and consults creatively and professionally. Head of a Gorgon is her debut full-length poetry collection. Her debut poetry chapbook, An Animal I Can't Name, won the 2015 Two of Cups Press competition, and she has a memoir in progress. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she was an assistant editor for Mid-American Review. Her work has been published in Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, and other journals.
and on Twitter @freeradicalRP
Raegen Pietrucha
José Angel Araguz, Ph.D. is the author of Rotura (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). His poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, The Acentos Review, and Oxidant | Engine among other places. He is an Assistant Professor at Suffolk University where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander and is also a faculty member of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. He blogs and reviews books at The Friday Influence.
Twitter: @JoseAraguz https://twitter.com/josearaguz
Instagram: @poetryamano https://www.instagram.com/poetryamano/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jose.araguz
Rotura link: https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/rotura/
José Angel Araguz
Our first in-person appearance since Covid took place on September 25, 2022 at 7pm CT at The Reveler, 3403 N. Damen Ave, Chicago, IL 60618. So thrilled to bring you an excellent and talented lineup of authors: Meg Tuite (Poetry), Tina Jenkins Bell (Fiction), Kathleen Rooney (Poetry), Lynn Sloan (Fiction), and Larry O. Dean (Poetry). See their bios below. They read from their recent writings. We had book giveaways, music, & pizza. A celebration, in fact, and a full house, wow!
Meg Tuite is author of a novel-in-stories, Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press), a short story collection, Bound By Blue, (Sententia Books) Meet My Haze (Big Table Publishing), White Van (Unlikely Books), won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from (Artistically Declined Press) for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging, Grace Notes (Unknown Press), as well as five chapbooks of short fiction, flash, poetic prose, and multi-genre. She teaches workshops and online classes through Bending Genres and is an associate editor at Narrative Magazine. Her work has been published in over 600 literary magazines and over fifteen anthologies including: Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good. She has been nominated over 15 times for the Pushcart Prize, won first and second place in Prick of the Spindle contest, five-time finalist at Glimmer Train, finalist of the Gertrude Stein award and 3rd prize in the Bristol Short Story Contest. She is also the editor of eight anthologies. She is included in the Best Small Fictions of 2021, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 stories of 2022.
https://megtuite.com | Twitter: @megtuite | IG: crazyrabbitposse | FB: meg.tuite
https://megtuite.com | Twitter: @megtuite | IG: crazyrabbitposse | FB: meg.tuite
Meg Tuite
Tina Jenkins
Bell
Tina Jenkins Bell is a published fiction writer, playwright, freelance journalist, and
literary activist living on Chicago’s south side with her husband Earl and two dogs Jackson and Bella. She is the mother of four, and though all are grown, she will always be Evan, Elijah, Eric and Lakeshia’s mom. She writes about being Black in America and the various ways race and kinship bend common aspects of life. Her work has appeared in Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, They Said, and Us Against Alzheimer’s as well as Hypertext, Hairtrigger 32, Expressions from Englewood journals and other publications. Most recently, her social justice flash prose, “Swimming,” originally published by Jet Fuel Review, will appear in Sonder Press’ Best Small Fiction” anthology in November 2022. She is currently working on her second novel, Down and Dirty in Kosciusko, Mississippi.
Kathleen Rooney
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, has just been released by Texas Review Press and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in Fall of 2023.
Lynn Sloan
Lynn Sloan is a writer and photographer. Her second novel, Midstream, called “luminous” by Foreword Reviews, appeared in 2022, and her first novel, Principles of Navigation, was chosen for Chicago Book Review’s Best Books of 2015. She is the author of the story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough. An art book featuring her flash fiction, titled Fortune Cookies, was produced by Lark Sparrow Press in 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, American Literary Fiction, and included in NPR’s Selected Shorts. She graduated from Northwestern University, earned a master’s degree in photography at The Institute of Design, formerly the New Bauhaus, and exhibited her work nationally and internationally. For many years she taught photography in the MFA program of Columbia College Chicago, where she founded Occasional Readings in Photography and contributed to Afterimage, Art Week, and Exposure before turning to fiction writing.
Larry O. Dean
Larry O. Dean was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. His numerous books include Frequently Asked Questions (forthcoming), Muse, Um (2022), Activities of Daily Living (2017), Brief Nudity (2013), Basic Cable Couplets (2012), Abbrev (2011), About the Author (2011), and I Am Spam (2004). He is also an acclaimed singer-songwriter whose latest solo album is Good Grief (2015); Product Placement, the sophomore album from his band, The Injured Parties, was released August 2019.
Our amazing readers for July 31, 2022 at 6pm CT on Zoom:
Toya Wolfe (Fiction), Dan O'Brien (Poetry), Joann Smith (Fiction), and Robert Vaughan (Poetry). They read from their recent writings and engage in a post-reading Q&A with you, their audience. They read from their recent writings and/or published works, and engaged in an inspiring post-reading Q&A. Please see their bios below.
Toya Wolfe (Fiction), Dan O'Brien (Poetry), Joann Smith (Fiction), and Robert Vaughan (Poetry). They read from their recent writings and engage in a post-reading Q&A with you, their audience. They read from their recent writings and/or published works, and engaged in an inspiring post-reading Q&A. Please see their bios below.
Toya Wolfe grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago's South Side. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Her writing has appeared in African Voices, Chicago Journal, Chicago Reader, Hair Trigger 27, and WarpLand. She is the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston-Bessie Head Fiction Award, the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation Short Story Competition, and the Betty Shifflett/John Schultz Short Story Award. She currently resides in Chicago. Last Summer on State Street is her debut novel.
Her website is:
www.toyawolfe.com
www.toyawolfe.com
and her social media is @toyawolves (Twitter)
Photo: Leicester Mitchell
Robert Vaughan is an award-winning author, playwright, and teacher. His books include Microtones (Cervena Barva, 2012), Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits (Deadly Chaps, 2013), Addicts & Basements (CCM, 2014), RIFT (Unknown Press, 2015), Funhouse (Unknown Press, 2016), and Askew (Cowboy Jamboree, 2022). He was twice the runner-up for the Gertrude Stein Award for Fiction. His work has been widely anthologized, including the New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2018) and Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2019 (Sonder Press), His plays have been produced in S.F., N.Y.C., and Milwaukee. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Bending Genres.
Visit:
@rgvaughan (Twitter)
@rguyvaughan (IG)
In 2021
Dan O’Brien published Our Cancers: A Chronicle in Poems (Acre Books / University of Cincinnati Press), as well as a collection of essays entitled A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas (Dalkey Archive Press, US / CB Editions, UK). O’Brien’s debut poetry collection, War Reporter, was published in the US and the UK, received the UK’s Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. His other poetry collections, also published in the US and the UK, are Scarsdale and New Life. He has published poems, plays, essays and criticism in literary journals, magazines, and newspapers including The Guardian, Hopkins Review, Literary Hub, Missouri Review, New England Review, The New York Times, North American Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, The Sunday Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, Yale Review, and ZYZZYVA. O’Brien’s play The Body of an American was co-produced by Primary Stages and Hartford Stage and ran off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre (New York Times Critic’s Pick), at the Gate Theatre in London, and at theaters around the US. The Body of an American received the Horton Foote Prize, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, the PEN Center USA Award, and was shortlisted for an Evening Standard Theatre Award in London. His most recent play, The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage, premiered at Boston Court Pasadena and received a PEN America Award for Drama. O’Brien is the recipient of fellowships and residencies including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center residency in Italy. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter Isobel.
Dan O’Brien published Our Cancers: A Chronicle in Poems (Acre Books / University of Cincinnati Press), as well as a collection of essays entitled A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas (Dalkey Archive Press, US / CB Editions, UK). O’Brien’s debut poetry collection, War Reporter, was published in the US and the UK, received the UK’s Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. His other poetry collections, also published in the US and the UK, are Scarsdale and New Life. He has published poems, plays, essays and criticism in literary journals, magazines, and newspapers including The Guardian, Hopkins Review, Literary Hub, Missouri Review, New England Review, The New York Times, North American Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, The Sunday Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, Yale Review, and ZYZZYVA. O’Brien’s play The Body of an American was co-produced by Primary Stages and Hartford Stage and ran off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre (New York Times Critic’s Pick), at the Gate Theatre in London, and at theaters around the US. The Body of an American received the Horton Foote Prize, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, the PEN Center USA Award, and was shortlisted for an Evening Standard Theatre Award in London. His most recent play, The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage, premiered at Boston Court Pasadena and received a PEN America Award for Drama. O’Brien is the recipient of fellowships and residencies including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center residency in Italy. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter Isobel.
@danobrienwriter (Twitter)
@bydanobrien (IG)
Photo: Cambridge Jones
Dan O'Brien
Toya Wolfe
Joann Smith’s collection of short stories A Heaven of Their Choosing was published by 7.13 Books in September 2021.
Her stories have been anthologized and published in many literary journals. Best American Short Stories 2000 named one of her stories as one of the 100 Notable Stories of the year.
Her novel of historical fiction, When I Was Boudicca, is available for purchase. She recently completed a novel titled “Birthday Girls” and is currently shopping it around. Joann is now at work on a collection of linked stories.
Though she’s a Capricorn – an earth sign – and lives in the Bronx, NYC, her favorite place is the water. She swims, kayaks, and walks out on sandbars whenever the tide allows.
Visit www.joannsmith.org
@joannsmith6 (Twitter)
@joannsmith.writegoals (IG)
Joann Smith
Robert Vaughan
Our highly engaging readers for May 22nd, 2022 were Yasmina Din Madden, Emily Maloney, Alex Wells Shapiro, Ananda Lima, and David Allen Sullivan, Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz, CA. They read from their recent writings and/or published works, and engaged in an inspiring post-reading Q&A. Please see their bios below.
Emily Maloney is the author of COST OF LIVING, an essay collection now out from Henry Holt, about her transformation from patient into EMT and in the pharmaceutical world, set against the backdrop of the failure of the American healthcare system. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Glamour, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, the North American Review, and the American Journal of Nursing. She has also worked as a dog groomer, pastry chef, general contractor, tile setter, catalog model, and has sold her ceramics at art fairs. She has nonverbal learning disability, a neurologically-based developmental disability similar to autism. Her essay, “Cost of Living,” which originally appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, was selected for Best American Essays 2017, edited by Leslie Jamison. Emily is also a MacDowell Fellow (17, 18), a 2019 Illinois Arts Council Fellow, and a 2015 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh MFA program. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, with Ori Fienberg, and their dog, Millie.
Alex Wells Shapiro (he/him) is a poet and artist from the Hudson Valley, living in Chicago. He reads submissions for Frontier Poetry, serves as Business and Grants Manager for Another Chicago Magazine, and co-curates Exhibit B: A Reading Series presented by The Guild Literary Complex. You can read his poems in Fourteen Hills, Word For/Word, Fatal Flaw, and Jelly Bucket, among other journals and zines. His debut poetry collection, Insect Architecture, is available for preorder now from Unbound Edition Press.
Yasmina Din Madden is a Vietnamese American writer who lives in Iowa. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, The Idaho Review, PANK, Carve, The Masters Review, The Fairy Tale Review, Necessary Fiction, and other journals. Her flash story “The De Facto Mother” won the 2022 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and her short fiction has been a finalist for The Iowa Review Award in Fiction, The Masters Review Anthology. She is working on a collection of short fiction and is an associate professor of English at Drake University. Here website is here.
Twitter: @YasminaMadden | Insta: @minskmadden | facebook: yasminamadden
Twitter: @YasminaMadden | Insta: @minskmadden | facebook: yasminamadden
Yasmina Din
Madden
Alex Wells Shapiro
Emily Maloney
Ananda Lima
Ananda Lima is the author of Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize, and four chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural Work-In-Progress Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers, for her fiction manuscript. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Newark.
Ananda's website is here.
@anandalima (Twitter)
Ananda's website is here.
@anandalima (Twitter)
David Allen Sullivan
Santa Cruz, CA poet laureate David Allen Sullivan’s books include: Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, and Black Ice. Most recently, he won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing, and published Black Butterflies Over Baghdad with Word Works Books. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, lives in Santa Cruz with his family, and his website is: https://dasulliv1.wixsite.com/website-1. He contributed both to the Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, book art project, and to Shadows and Light.
Our five inspiring readers for March 27th, 2022 were Irene Zabytko, Natania Rosenfeld, Archy Jamjun, Leslie Kirk Campbell, and Gerald Brennan. They read from their recent writings and/or published works, and engaged in an inspiring post-reading Q&A. Please see their bios below.
Leslie Kirk Campbell
Irene Zabytko
Irene Zabytko is a Ukrainian-American writer, born and raised in the Ukrainian Village section of Chicago. She is the author of THE SKY UNWASHED, a novel about Chornobyl (Ukrainian transliteration) and the evacuees who returned to their irradiated villages. It was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Book, A Book Sense '76 Pick Selection, and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery title. The e-book version was rated Number One on Amazon.com and appeared on “The New York Times Bestseller E-Books List.” She is also the author of the short story collection WHEN LUBA LEAVES HOME which is based on the Ukrainian community in Chicago. One of the stories, “Obligation,” won the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and was read on National Public Radio’s “The Sound of Writing.” It was selected as The New York City Public Library’s Best Books. She was awarded a Fulbright U.S Scholar Award to Ukraine where she was researching the Ukrainian-based haunts of the Ukrainian 19th century writer Nikolai Gogol for an upcoming novel. Her newest book is another collection of Ukrainian-themed short stories, THE DAYS OF MIRACLE AND WONDER.
Natania Rosenfeld
Archy Jamjun
Natania Rosenfeld is a writer, independent scholar and Professor Emerita of English at Knox College. She has published two books of poetry, The Blue Bed (Spuyten Duyvil Press 2021) and Wild Domestic (Sheep Meadow Press 2015), as well as a scholarly book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton 2000). An e-chapbook, She and I, appeared in 2018 from Essay Press. Her essays, poems and fiction have appeared in journals including AGNI, The Yale Review, APR, Raritan, Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Southwest Review, and four essays have been listed as "Notable" in Best American Essays collections. “Beret,” a poem published in Yale Review, received Special Mention in the 2020 Pushcart Prize anthology. In 2018, she was named one of 30 “Writers to Watch” by the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago.
You can learn more at nataniarosenfeld.com
Archy Jamjun is the co-curator for Outspoken LGBTQ Stories at Sidetrack. He is also a two-time winner of The Moth Grand Slam in Chicago. His writing has been published by Barrel House, The Rhumpus and The Coachella Review. He is also a team member of Story Jam in Chicago and has been a featured teller at The National Storytelling Network. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Roosevelt University.
Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs (Sarabande Books) won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, Southern Indiana Review and The Thomas Wolfe Review. The title story, was published in Ploughshares Solos in 2021. Campbell, the author of Journey into Motherhood (Riverhead), has received writing fellowships at Playa and Ucross. An Illinois resident for half her childhood, she currently splits her time between her ohana in Honolulu and her ohana in San Francisco, where she teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in 1991. Her next collection, Free Radicals, is in the making.
Gerald Brennan
Gerald Brennan earned a B.S. in European History from West Point and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. He's the author of five space books including Infinite Blues and the forthcoming Alone on the Moon, which led one blurbist to dub him "the poet laureate of the desolation of space." His writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Newcity, which named him to its 2019 Lit Fifty list of "People Who Book in Chicago"; he's also the founder of Tortoise Books, which Rick Kogan (of Chicago Tribune and WGN Radio fame) recently called “…one of the best, most provocative, and rewarding publishing houses in the entire country.”
Our January 30, 2022 event was a wonderful experience with authors Donna Vorreyer, Jeremy T. Wilson, Dipika Mukherjee, and Zackary Sholem Berger. They read from their recent writings and published works, and engaged in an inspiring post-reading Q&A. Please see their bios below.
Zackary Sholem
Berger
Donna Vorreyer
Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She lives in the suburbs of Chicago where she serves as an associate editor for Rhino Poetry and hosts the new monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
Jeremy T. Wilson
Dipika Mukherjee
Jeremy T. Wilson is the author of the short story collection Adult Teeth (Tortoise Books). He is a former winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and has been named one of 30 Writers to Watch by the Guild Literary Complex. His work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, Hobart, The Masters Review, Sonora Review, Third Coast, The Best Small Fictions 2020, and other publications. He teaches creative writing at The Chicago High School for the Arts.
Dipika Mukherjee moved to Chicago from Shanghai in 2012 and spends a lot of time at the neighborhood Harold Washington Public Library. She is the author of the novels Shambala Junction and Ode to Broken Things, and the story collection, Rules of Desire. Her writing is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres and Orion. She teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and at the Graham School at University of Chicago.
More at
Zackary Sholem Berger is a poet, translator and short-story writer working in and among Yiddish, English and Hebrew. His work has appeared in POETRY, Words Without Borders, BODY, and elsewhere. His translation of the Yiddish prose poetry of Avrom Sutzkever was published in 2020. By day he is a mild-mannered physician living in Baltimore, and can be found on Twitter at
@DrZackaryBerger.
Website link to his Amazon books are here
Our November 21st event was a success with authors Laurie Lawlor, Ruben Quesada, Cyn Vargas, and Faisal Mohyuddin. They read from their recent writings and published works, and engaged in an inspiring post-reading Q&A. Please see their bios below.
Faisal Mohyuddin
Laurie Lawlor
Laurie Lawlor is the author of 42 works of award-winning fiction and nonfiction for children and young adults. Fearless World Traveler, Adventures of Marianne North, Botanical Artist (Holiday House, 2021) received a starred SLJ review and is named Junior Guild Gold Standard Selection. Super Women: Six Scientists Who Changed the World (Holiday House), middle grade nonfiction, profiles remarkable pioneers in fields ranging from astronomy and mathematics to cartography and biochemistry. Published in 2017, Super Women received a Booklist starred review and was named 2018 Outstanding Science Trade Book by Children’s Book Council (CBC) and NSTA. Lawlor was awarded the 2012 John Burroughs Riverby Award for Excellence in Nature Writing for Rachel Carson and Her Book that Changed the World, featured on the ALA Amelia Bloomer Award List. She has taught creative writing at Northwestern University and writing workshops throughout the Midwest.
Ruben Quesada
Cyn Vargas
Ruben Quesada (PhD) is author of Revelations, Next Extinct Mammal, and translator of Exiled from the Throne of Night: Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda. He is a blogger at The Kenyon Review, host of the monthly literary broadcast Mercy Street Readings, and serves as a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Chicago.
Cyn Vargas' short story collection, On The Way (Curbside Splendor, 2015; 2nd Edition Tortoise Books 2021) received positive reviews from Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Heavy Feather Review, Newcity Lit, Hypertext Magazine, Necessary Fiction and others. Her prose and essays have been published in the Chicago Reader, Word Riot, Split Lip Magazine, Hypertext Magazine, Midnight Breakfast, and elsewhere. Cyn’s received a Top 25 Finalist and Honorable Mention in two of Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers Contests, is the recipient of the Guild Literary Complex Prose Award in Fiction, on the Board of Directors for Hypertext Studio, twice selected as artist-in-residence at the Ragdale Foundation and is Core Faculty at StoryStudio Chicago. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago and is currently working on her first novel.
Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear, 2018) and The Riddle of Longing (Backbone, 2017). He teaches at Highland Park High School in Illinois and at the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University; he also serves as a master practitioner with the global not-for-profit Narrative 4.
Our September 26th event was so enjoyable with E. Hughes, Jeremy Owens, Sarah Terez Rosenblum, and Amin Ahmad. They read from their recent writings and published works, and we had an awesome post-reading Q&A. Please see their bios below.
Amin Ahmad
E. Hughes
E. Hughes is a PhD student in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her MFA+MA from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Her poems have been published in Guernica Magazine, Poet Lore, Wildness Magazine, The Offing, and the Chicago Quarterly Review—among others. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. Hughes has been a participant in Tin House summer and winter workshops, the Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Foundation workshop as well as the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.
Jeremy Owens
Sarah Terez Rosenblum
Jeremy Owens is the creator, producer, and host of You're Being Ridiculous. yourebeingridiculous.com
Sarah Terez Rosenblum’s work has appeared in lit mags such as Diagram, Brevity, Third Coast, and Carve. Sarah has written for sites including Salon, The Chicago Sun Times, The Satirist, and Pop Matters. Most recently, Sarah was runner-up for Prairie Schooner’s annual Creative Nonfiction Contest and was published in their Summer 2020 issue. Pushcart Prize nominated, Sarah holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is a Creative Coach and Developmental Editor, and teaches creative writing at Story Studio and The University of Chicago Writer’s Studio. Sarah’s novel, Herself When She's Missing, was called “poetic and heartrending" by Booklist.
Amin Ahmad was raised in India, and worked as a banker and an architect before turning to fiction. As ‘AX Ahmad’ he is the author of two crime fiction novels, THE CARETAKER and the LAST TAXI RIDE. His essays and stories have been published in literary magazines and listed in Best American Essays. He won the 2020 University of Missouri’s Chandra prize for his short story collection, THIS IS NOT YOUR COUNTRY. A former resident of Chicago, he now teaches creative writing at Duke University in Durham, NC.
Web article resource:
Web article resource:
Our July 25th event was quite memorable with Christine Maul Rice, James Stewart III, Cecilia Pinto, and Steve Trumpeter. They read from their recent writings and published works. Please see their bios below.
Steve Trumpeter
Christine Maul Rice
Christine Maul Rice’s novel-in-stories Swarm Theory (University of Hell Press) was awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award, and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup: The Best Books of 2016 So Far. In 2019, Christine was included in New City's Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago 2019 and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago's Guild Complex. Christine's short stories and essays have been published in MAKE Literary Magazine, BELT’s Rust Belt Anthology, The Literary Review, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Big Smoke, The Millions, Chicago Tribune, Detroit’s Metro Times, among other publications. Christine is the founder and editor of Hypertext Magazine.
Twitter: @ChrisMaulRice
Website: hypertextmag.com
Website: christinemaulrice.com
Twitter: @ChrisMaulRice
Website: hypertextmag.com
Website: christinemaulrice.com
James Stewart III
Cecilia Pinto
James Stewart III is a Black writer from Chicago. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Forge, 580 Split, Hawai Pacific Review, Pangyrus, Cleaver, and Another Chicago Magazine. In addition, he is a co-curator of the text-based performance series “The Guild Complex presents Exhibit B." He earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA from North Central College. Stewart will be reading from his unpublished novel manuscript, Defiant Acts, about a multi-racial working-class family's daily struggles and the costs they pay for loving each other.
Website: www.jamesstewart3.com
Website: www.jamesstewart3.com
Cecilia Pinto is a writer whose fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in a variety of publications and journals including Esquire, Fence and Triquarterly. She has also contributed to a number of anthologies including, American Gun, from Depaul University Press, 2020, and Mentor and Muse, Essays from Poets to Poets, Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. (w/ collaborator Alice George). In addition to publication, she has received various acknowledgements of her efforts including nomination for a Pushcart prize, a grant from the City of Chicago to work on a now completed novel, recognition as one of the Guild Literary Complex’s 25 Writers to Watch and an honorable mention in the Best American Essays series in 2014. She has a poetry chapbook, A Small Woman available from Dancing Girl Press. Her novella, Imagine the Dog which was published this spring by Texas Review Press was the winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. Imagine the Dog can be purchased from Texas A & M University Press or online retailers.
Website: cecilia-pinto.com
She tweets @opnopinto.
Website: cecilia-pinto.com
She tweets @opnopinto.
Steve Trumpeter's fiction has appeared in Southern Review, American Fiction,Chicago Quarterly Review, Salamander, and others, and he was a finalist for the Chicago Tribune’s 2019 Nelson Algren Award and Zoetrope AllStory's 2019 Fiction Prize. He earned a degree in fiction writing from Northwestern University and teaches creative writing at StoryStudio Chicago.
Website: https://stevetrumpeter.com
Website: https://stevetrumpeter.com
Our June 27th event was a success with Shawn Shiflett, Aviya Kushner, Jeanie Chung (former Sunday Salon co-curator), and Nita Noveno (founder of the Sunday Salon series). They read from their recent writings and published works. Please see their
bios below.
bios below.
Aviya Kushner
Nita Noveno
Nita Noveno teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She is a graduate of The New School MFA Creative Writing Program and the founder and host of the Sunday Salon reading series in its nineteenth year in New York City (and online). She is also the founder and editor of the literary journal, SalonZine. Her work has appeared most recently in The Hunger and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Open City. Originally from Southeast Alaska, she lives in Queens, New York and writes about memory, culture, identity, and immigrant lives.
For more about Nita, go here.
For more about Nita, go here.
Jeanie Chung
Shawn Shiflett
Jeanie Chung's fiction, essays, and author interviews have appeared in upstreet, Numero Cinq, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. She works as a development writer at the University of Chicago and was a sportswriter in a previous professional life.
Jeanie's profile is here
Jeanie's profile is here
Shawn Shiflett is an Associate Professor in the English and Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. His debut novel, Hidden Place (Akashic Books, 2004), received rave reviews from newspapers, literary magazines, and Connie Martinson Talks Books (national cable television, UK and Ireland). Library Journal included Hidden Place in “Summer Highs, Fall Firsts,” a 2004 list of most successful debuts. He was awarded an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for his work and was a three-time Finalist for the James novel-in-progress contest, sponsored by the Heekin Group Foundation. New City Newspaper elected Shiflett to their Chicago Lit 50 list, an annual ranking of top figures in the Chicago Literary scene. His essay, “The Importance of Reading to Your Writing” (Creative Writing Studies, UK) was published in 2013. His novel, Hey, Liberal! (Chicago Review Press, 2016), a story about a white boy going to a predominately African American high school in Chicago during the late 1960’s, has received acclaim from Booklist, The Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Review, Newcity Lit, Windy City Review, Mary Mitchell (Chicago Sun-Times), Rick Kogan (WGN Radio), and others. In 2018, he performed his oral story performance “How My Yo-Yo Could Have Gotten Me Killed,” and in 2019 he performed “Oriole Park, from White America to Multicultural America.” He is on the Chicago Writers Association Board of Directors. Currently, he is working on a non-fiction, multicultural project: collecting oral stories concerning race. Several pieces from his work-in-progress, My Secret Lives (a murmur of dreams), were published in Hypertext Magazine, and his dream “Tsunami” will be published in Midwest Review (summer, 2021). Shiflett lives with his wife, a couple of step-cats, and two English setters named Higgins and Brick. shawnshiflett.com
Visit his website
Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau / Penguin Random House, 2015), which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, a Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Finalist, and one of Publishers' Weekly’s Top 10 Religion Stories of the year. She is also the author of WOLF LAMB BOMB (Orison Books, 2021), a poetry collection deeply engaged with the Book of Isaiah, and the poetry chapbook Eve and All the Wrong Men (Dancing Girl Press, 2019). She is The Forward’s language columnist, and previously wrote a travel column for The International Jerusalem Post. Her work has been supported by the Howard Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry. She is a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective and serves on the board of the American Literary Translators Association, as well as the Executive Committee in Nonfiction at the Modern Languages Association.
Visit Aviya on Twitter
Visit Aviya on Twitter
We had a tremendous outpouring of support for our May 23rd Zoom event (shown below). Readers and attendees joined in from Chicagoland and across the country! Thank you, everyone, for making this a delightful event and for the post-reading Q&A with our wonderful and talented authors.
For this month of May, we brought you:
Allison Epstein, Esther Yin-ling Spodek, Sara Connell, and SuSa co-curator Ignatius Valentine Aloysius
They shared from their recently launched books and writings (see bios below).
For this month of May, we brought you:
Allison Epstein, Esther Yin-ling Spodek, Sara Connell, and SuSa co-curator Ignatius Valentine Aloysius
They shared from their recently launched books and writings (see bios below).
Ignatius Valentine Aloysius
Allison Epstein
Allison Epstein is the author of A Tip for the Hangman (Doubleday), a historical thriller that was named one of Chicago Tribune's Top 25 most anticipated books of 2021. She recently completed her MFA in fiction at Northwestern University, where she received the 2020 Distinguished Thesis Award for Creative Writing. A native Michigander and proud Chicago transplant, Allison works as an editor for a philanthropic consulting firm. Learn more at allisonepstein.com, or follow Allison on Twitter @rapscallison for hot takes about ancient popes.
Visit Allison's website
Visit Allison's website
Esther Yin-ling
Spodek
Sara Connell
Esther Yin-ling Spodek was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and raised in Champaign, Illinois. She taught the Survivors’ Writing Workshop at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and edited the book from that workshop, In Our Voices, published by the museum. She has been a Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Esther has worked as an editor at the Indiana Review and Other Voices. Her most recent short story appeared in the Hamilton Stone Review and her novel, We Have Everything Before Us is published by Gibson House Press. She blogs at estherspodek.com, and makes book recommendations on her Facebook site, Esther Yin-ling Spodek.
Visit Esther's website
Visit Esther's website
Sara Connell is a bestselling author and has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, The View, FOX Chicago, NPR, Katie Couric and TEDx. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, Tri-Quarterly, other publications. Her memoir Bringing In Finn was nominated for ELLE magazine Book of the Year. Sara will be reading from her forthcoming book Ghost House.
Visit her website
IG: @saraconnell
Ignatius Valentine Aloysius earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University, where he is a lecturer at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of the novel Fishhead. Republic of Want (Tortoise Books, 2020) and The Imaginal Stage, a doom/sludge metal album by WOOND, his studio project on Mental Illness Recordings, Iowa City. Ignatius was selected as a 2020-21 Creative Writing Fellow by the Ludington Writers Board and the Ludington Area Center for the Arts in Michigan. He is co-curator of Sunday Salon Chicago, a literary reading event series, now in its 15th year. Ignatius serves as a judge for the Evanston Arts Council’s Cultural Fund Grants Application program. He sits on the curatorial board at Ragdale Foundation, and is also a board member for its Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion Taskforce (DEAI). Ignatius lives with his wife in Evanston, IL and is currently at work on his next novel and album.
Visit his website
Visit his website
Our April 25th Zoom event (shown below) brought readers and attendees from Chicagoland and across the country! Thank you, everyone, for making this a stellar event and for the post-reading Q&A with our wonderful and talented authors.
For this month, we brought you:
Simone Muench, Virginia Bell, Gina Frangello, and Tim Hillegonds.
They shared from their recently launched books and writings (see bios below).
For this month, we brought you:
Simone Muench, Virginia Bell, Gina Frangello, and Tim Hillegonds.
They shared from their recently launched books and writings (see bios below).
Gina Frangello
Simone Muench
Simone Muench is the
author of several books including Orange Crush
(Sarabande), Wolf Centos
(Sarabande), and Suture (Black Lawrence), a sonnet collection written with Dean Rader.
She and Dean also co-edited
They Said: A Multi-Genre
Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence). A recipient of an
NEA poetry fellowship and a Meier Foundation for the Arts Award, she is a professor at Lewis University where she acts as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. She also serves as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, poetry editor for Jackleg Press, and is the creator of the HB Sunday Reading Series. Her collaborative chapbook, Hex & Howl, co-written with Jackie K. White,
is forthcoming from Black Lawrence, 2021.
Visit her website
author of several books including Orange Crush
(Sarabande), Wolf Centos
(Sarabande), and Suture (Black Lawrence), a sonnet collection written with Dean Rader.
She and Dean also co-edited
They Said: A Multi-Genre
Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence). A recipient of an
NEA poetry fellowship and a Meier Foundation for the Arts Award, she is a professor at Lewis University where she acts as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. She also serves as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, poetry editor for Jackleg Press, and is the creator of the HB Sunday Reading Series. Her collaborative chapbook, Hex & Howl, co-written with Jackie K. White,
is forthcoming from Black Lawrence, 2021.
Visit her website
Tim Hillegonds
Virginia Bell
Timothy J. Hillegonds is the author of the memoir The Distance Between (Nebraska, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award. His work has appeared in The Guardian, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, The Daily Beast, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, and various other places online and in print. In 2019, Tim was named by the Guild Literary Complex as one of their thirty "Writers to Watch. He currently serves as a contributing editor for Slag Glass City, a digital journal of the urban essay arts.
Visit his website
Visit his website
Virginia Bell is the author of the poetry collection From the Belly (Sibling Rivalry Press). She won NELLE Magazine’s Nonfiction Prize in 2020 for the personal essay, “Chicken”; her personal essay "Battle-Axe Day" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Hypertext in 2020, and her poetry won Honorable Mention in the 2019 RiverSedge Poetry Prize, judged by José Antonio Rodríguez. Her essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in Hypertext, The Night Heron Barks, Kettle Blue Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Rogue Agent, Gargoyle, Cider Press Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Nervous Breakdown, The Keats Letters Project, Blue Fifth Review, Voltage Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. Along with Jacob Saenz and Jan Bottiglieri, Bell is Co-Editor of RHINO Poetry and teaches at Loyola University Chicago.
Visit her website
Gina Frangello is the author of four books of fiction in addition to the memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint 2021). She has nearly 20 years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, and as the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, the LA Times, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and in many other magazines and anthologies. After two decades of teaching at many universities, Gina is excited to be a student again at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Program for Writers, where she has returned to complete the PhD she left unfinished twenty years ago and will graduate in May 2021. Gina lives mainly in Chicago and occasionally in the California desert with her family and three gluttonous cats.
Visit her website
Visit her website
Our March 28th Zoom event (shown below) brought readers and attendees from across the country! Thank you, everyone, for a memorable event and for attending the readings
and sticking around for the Q&A with our featured authors.
For this month, we brought you four exceptional writers:
Patricia Ann McNair, Michael Zapata, Suzanne Clores, and Elizabeth McKenzie.
They shared from their recently launched books and writings (see bios below).
For this month, we brought you four exceptional writers:
Patricia Ann McNair, Michael Zapata, Suzanne Clores, and Elizabeth McKenzie.
They shared from their recently launched books and writings (see bios below).
Elizabeth McKenzie
Patricia Ann McNair
Patricia Ann McNair's recently released short story collection, Responsible Adults, was selected as a Legacy Series book by Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. Her essay collection, And These are The Good Times was named a finalist for the Montaigne Medal for most thought-provoking book of 2017. The Temple of Air, McNair’s debut story collection, received the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Society of Midland Authors (US) Finalist Award. She is an Associate Professor in the English and Creative Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her husband, the visual artist Philip Hartigan.
Visit her website
Visit her website
Michael Zapata
Suzanne Clores
Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction and the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program Award. He is on the core faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.
Visit his website
Visit his website
Suzanne Clores is a memoirist and podcast producer. Her book, Memoirs of a Spiritual Outsider (Conari, 2000) is a personal quest to experience alternative spiritual practices from around the world, and her podcast, The Extraordinary Project, asks questions about our cultural attraction and aversion to extraordinary phenomena and all things mystical. Her work has appeared in Salon, Elle, The Rumpus, and several anthologies, and her essays have aired on Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) and the podcast Strangers. She has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, The Ragdale Foundation, and The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. Her BA is from Columbia University in New York, and her MFA in fiction is from the University of Arizona. She lives in Evanston, Illinois with her family.
Visit her website
Elizabeth McKenzie's novel The Portable Veblen was longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction and received the California Book Award for fiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and others. McKenzie is the managing editor of Catamaran and senior editor of the Chicago Quarterly Review.
Visit her website
Our February 28th Zoom event (shown below) was so much fun with readers and attendees from across the country! Thank you, everyone, for attending the readings
and sticking around for the Q&A with our featured authors.
For this month, we brought you four exceptional writers:
Rachel Swearingen, John McCarthy, Dora Malech, and Gabriella Fee.
They shared from their recently launched books and writings (see bios below).
For this month, we brought you four exceptional writers:
Rachel Swearingen, John McCarthy, Dora Malech, and Gabriella Fee.
They shared from their recently launched books and writings (see bios below).
Dora Malech is the author of the poetry collections Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018), Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Shore Ordered Ocean (The Waywiser Press, 2009). Eris Press (Urtext Ltd) published Soundings (a selected volume of poems and artwork) in the UK in 2019, and Tupelo Press published a chapbook of her poetry titled Time Trying in Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic in 2020. She has been the recipient of honors that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is on the faculty of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
For more, visit her website.
Photo: Joanna Chattman
Dora Malech
John McCarthy
Rachel Swearingen
Rachel Swearingen is the author of How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, winner of the 2018 New American Press Fiction Prize (October 1, 2020). Her stories and essays have appeared in VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, she was named one of 30 Writers to Watch by the Guild Literary Complex. She holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a PhD from Western Michigan University, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.
Visit her website
Visit her website
John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize; and Ghost County (Midwestern Gothic Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2015, Copper Nickel, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Journal, Pleiades, and TriQuarterly. John is the 2016 winner of The Pinch Literary Award in Poetry. He received his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and he is an Associate Editor of RHINO. John currently lives in Evanston, Illinois.
His website is here.
Gabriella Fee
Gabriella Fee is a poetry MFA candidate in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and a graduate of Wellesley College. Her work appears in The Wellesley Review, Levee Magazine, and The American Literary Review, where it won the 2019 annual award for poetry.
Gabriella and Dora will be reading individually, and then together they will read an Italian poetry translation which they collaborated on.
Our January 31st, Zoom event (shown below) was a SOLD OUT! affair with 100+ participants from across the US, yay!
While this is great news, we apologize for those who could not join us. For this month, we brought you three fantastic writers Riva Lehrer, Mike Puican and Emily Gray Tedrowe.
They shared from their recently launched books (see bios below).
While this is great news, we apologize for those who could not join us. For this month, we brought you three fantastic writers Riva Lehrer, Mike Puican and Emily Gray Tedrowe.
They shared from their recently launched books (see bios below).
As well this month, Riva was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for Golem Girl (https://tinyurl.com/y5qx9ewe). Congratulations, Riva!
Emily Gray Tedrowe is the author of The Talented Miss Farwell as well as two other novels. She has received an Illinois Arts Council award, as well as fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, VCCA, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. A frequent book reviewer for USA Today, Tedrowe lives in Chicago.
You can visit her website for more information here.
Photo: Marion Ettlinger
Emily Gray Tedrowe
Mike Puican
Riva Lehrer
Riva Lehrer is an artist, writer and curator who focuses on the socially challenged body. She is best known for representations of people whose physical embodiment, sexuality, or gender identity have long been stigmatized. Ms. Lehrer’s work has been seen in venues including the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, Yale University, the United Nations, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Arnot Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the Frye Museum, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the State of Illinois Museum. Ms. Lehrer is on faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and instructor in the Medical Humanities Departments of Northwestern University. Her memoir, Golem Girl, was published by the One World imprint of Penguin/Random House in October 2020. Ms. Lehrer is represented by Regal Hoffman & Associates literary agency, NYC.
Visit her on Facebook.
Mike Puican's debut book of poetry, Central Air, was released by Northwestern University Press in August, 2020. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, and New England Review. He was a member of the 1996 Chicago Poetry Slam Team, and has been a long-time board member of the Guild Literary Complex. He teaches poetry to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals at the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center and St. Leonard’s House, both in Chicago.
His novel is available at NU Press.
His novel is available at NU Press.
Photo: Iwona Biederman Photography
Welcome to Sunday Salon Chicago! Our reading events for 2020 have been suspended since March due to serious health concerns regarding Covid-19 and the post-pandemic phase. Please check back here for future SuSa makeup dates, and thank you so much for your continued support. We miss you and promise to be back when it is safe to do so as a gathering. Stay in good health with all that you do, continue your art, and please be safe out there. ~SuSa curators (Natalia, Betsy, and Ignatius)
Celebrated. Sought after. Always engaging and fun. So glad you're a part of Sunday Salon Chicago.
(Bottom image of flag: US News & World Report)
Welcome to Sunday Salon Chicago! Our reading events for 2020 have been suspended since March due to serious health concerns regarding Covid-19 and the post-pandemic phase. Please check back here for future SuSa makeup dates, and thank you so much for your continued support. We miss you and promise to be back when it is safe to do so as a gathering. Stay in good health with all that you do, continue your art, and please be safe out there. ~SuSa curators (Natalia, Betsy, and Ignatius)
Celebrated. Sought after. Always engaging and fun. So glad you're a part of Sunday Salon Chicago.
(Bottom image of flag: US News & World Report)
Thank you all for supporting us, and a big thank you to Brian and Jan Hieggelke
of Newcity, and former Lit Editor, Toni Nealie for mentioning us in Newcity.
To read the article, click the shortened Tinyurl link:
We are very pleased to announce our next reading on
Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 7pm @the Reveler
(formerly the Riverview Tavern in Roscoe Village), our original event location and
now a fully rehabbed pub and grub at 3403 N Damen Avenue on the corner of
now a fully rehabbed pub and grub at 3403 N Damen Avenue on the corner of
Damen and Roscoe.
Readers featured in March are Archy Jamjun, Suzanne Clores,
John McCarthy, and Timothy J. Hillegonds, with a presentation of
the non-profit American Writers Museum by Carey Cranston.
Our March 29, 2020 readers are:
(Watch this space for latest updates)
John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which was selected by Victoria Chang as the winner of the Jake Adam York Prize. He is also
the author of one previous poetry collection, Ghost County (Midwestern Gothic Press, 2016), which was named a Best Poetry Book of 2016 by The Chicago Review of Books. Additionally, he was the 2016 winner of The Pinch Literary Award in Poetry, and his work has been featured on Poetry Daily. In 2019, the Chicago Guild Literary Complex, in honor of their 30th anniversary, named John one of “30 Writers to Watch.” John’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Ohio Review, New South, Passages North, Pleiades, Redivider, Sycamore Review, TriQuarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Zone 3, and in anthologies such as New Poetry from the Midwest 2017 and 2019, as well as Best New Poets 2015, which he was selected for by the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith.
Thank you, Roscoe Books!
We are delighted to be partnering with Roscoe Village indie bookseller Roscoe Books to provide authors' titles for sale at our readings. Chicago is home to many excellent independent bookstores. Show your support for Chicago independent booksellers! Contact the bookstore by clicking here or visiting http://www.roscoebooks.com.
Really looking forward to seeing you!
Your hosts of Sunday Salon Chicago,
Natalia Nebel,
Betsy Haberl, and
Ignatius Valentine Aloysius
Copyright ©2020-21 Sunday Salon Chicago. All rights reserved.
Archy Jamjun is a writer and storyteller. He is
a two-time winner of The Moth Grandslam, curator for Outspoken LGBTQ storytelling at Sidetrack which takes the first Tuesday of each month, and co-producer at Story Jam Studio. He has an MFA from Roosevelt University, been featured on the Podcast RISK! and published by the Coachella Review, The Rumpus, and BarrelHouse.
Suzanne Clores is the author of Memoirs of
a Spiritual Outsider (Conari, 2000) a memoir/ethnography of alternate spiritual practices, and founder of The Extraordinary Project, an online collection of exceptional human experiences and meaningful coincidence gathered over years of research and interviews with individuals and experts in the consciousness field. She launched her meaningful coincidence podcast in the
fall of 2017.
Her work has appeared in Salon, Elle, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown, among other publications, and has aired on Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) and the Radiotopia Podcast Strangers. She has been a resident at The Vermont Studio Center, the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, and the Omega Institute. Her BA is from Columbia University in New York, and her MFA in fiction is from the University of Arizona in Tucson. In 2004 she relocated to Evanston IL, where she lives with her family.
Timothy J. Hillegonds is the author of the memoir The Distance Between (Nebraska, 2019). His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Salon, The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and elsewhere online and in print. In 2019, Tim was named by the Guild Literary Complex as one of their thirty "Writers to Watch." He currently serves as a contributing editor for Slag Glass City, a digital journal of the urban essay arts.
In the heart of downtown Chicago on Michigan Avenue,
the American Writers Museum celebrates all genres of writing through interactive exhibits and programming. The mission of the American Writers Museum is to engage the public in celebrating American writers and exploring their influence on our history, our identity, our culture, and our daily lives. The AWM will be presented by Carey Cranston.
