On NEWCITY MAGAZINE’s LIT50 list for “Who really books in Chicago, 2025”
Our next reading happens on July 26, 2026 at Roscoe Books, see details below.
Sunday Salon Chicago
Celebrating 22 years, Sunday Salon Chicago is the city’s premier curated literary reading event series. Our monthly readings are always FREE, and we’re glad to be hosting authors from near and far, both in-person at Roscoe Books and on Zoom alternatively. There are no readings in December.
Thank you so much for your support in these trying times!
Yrs,
Ignatius Valentine Aloysius
Host & Curator
*** Testimonials ***
Gratitude!
I just wanted to express my deep gratitude for creating space for all of us to share words with each other and with such an engaged audience. To my fellow readers: it was truly a pleasure to hear all of you read, and I look forward to meeting up in real life in the not too distant future.
— Daniel Tam-Claiborne, author
So lovely!
Hi Ignatius, hope you’re well! I just wanted to say a huge thank you to you for the wonderful Sunday gathering. It was so lovely to be in brief community with you and my fellow readers.
Wishing you the best.
— Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo, author
Inspiring!
What an inspiring and reassuring night. Thank you so much for including me.
Yours,
— Rachel DeWoskin, author
Our next reading happens on July 26, 2026 at 7 pm CT at Roscoe Books in Roscoe Village and features:
Rachel Swearingen
Sahar Mustafah
Sara Lippmann
Daniel Kraus
Richard Vargas
Daniel Kraus
Daniel Kraus is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling writer of novels, TV, and film. His novel Angel Down was the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2025, and a national bestseller. His novel Whalefall received a front-cover review in the New York Times Book Review, won the Alex Award, was an L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, and was a Best Book of 2023 from NPR, the New York Times, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and more.
With Guillermo del Toro, he co-authored The Shape of Water, based on the same idea the two created for the Oscar-winning film. Also with del Toro, Kraus co-authored Trollhunters, which was adapted into the Emmy-winning Netflix series. He cowrote The Living Dead and Pay the Piper with legendary filmmaker George A. Romero. Kraus’s The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch was named one of Entertainment Weekly‘s Top 10 Books of the Year. Kraus has won the Bram Stoker Award, Scribe Award, two Odyssey Awards (for both Rotters and Scowler), and has appeared multiple times as Library Guild selections, and more.
Kraus’s work has been translated into over 25 languages. He lives with his partner in Chicago. Visit him at danielkraus.com.
Daniel Kraus Instagram
Daniel Kraus BlueSky
Rachel Swearingen
Rachel Swearingen is the author of 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, as well as a New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Selection.” Her writings have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Berlin Writing Prize, the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. Originally from rural Wisconsin, she lives in Chicago and teaches in the MFA Prose and Poetry program at Northwestern University School of Professional Studies.
www.rachelswearingen.com
Instagram: @rmswearingen
Sahar Mustafah
Sahar Mustafah is an award-winning Palestinian American author of The Slightest Green, The Beauty of Your Face, and Code of the West. Her recent fiction is featured in Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction; The View from Gaza published in The Massachusetts Review; and Redline: Chicago Horror Stories. Mustafah writes and teaches outside of Chicago.
www.saharmustafah.com
IG: @saharmustafahwriter
Sara Lippmann
Sara Lippmann is the author of the novels Lech and Hidden River and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible from SUNY Press. She is a co-founder of Writing Co-lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor-in-chief of Epiphany magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.
saralippmann.com
Twitter/X: @saralippmann
IG @sara.lipp
FB: sara lippmann
bluesky saralippmann
Richard Vargas
Richard Vargas earned his B.A. at Cal State University, Long Beach, where he studied under Gerald Locklin. He edited/published five issues of The Tequila Review, 1978-1980, and twelve issues of The Mas Tequila Review from 2010-2015. Vargas received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico, 2010, where he workshopped his poems with Joy Harjo. A sixth book, The Screw City Poems, was released in July 2025, Roadside Press. He currently resides in the hometown of Cheap Trick and porn star legend Ginger Lynn, but is planning to relocate to Albuquerque, NM.
www.richardvargaspoet.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/richardvargas_poet/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/richard.vargas.414936/
Contact us
Welcome to Sunday Salon Chicago! If you’d like to send us a brief query, add your full name, email, and message in the form below and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. And be sure to subscribe to our Mailchimp list above to receive our regular event notifications, thanks! ~Ignatius
Our June 28, 2026 reading was a Zoom event at 6 pm CT and featured:
Desiree Cooper
Leah Umansky
Kashiana Singh
Michael Copperman
Janice Zerfas
Desiree Cooper
Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, former attorney, and editor of the groundbreaking 2026 anthology, Black Summers: Growing up in the Urban Outdoors. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, MSNBC Daily, Flash Fiction America 2023, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, River Teeth, and noted in The Best American Essays 2019. Cooper is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection, Know the Mother. Her children’s picture book, Nothing Special, is a 2023 Paterson Prizewinner and one of the New York Public Library’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2022.”
www.descooper.com/
IG: @descooper @blacksummersbook
FB: @descooper @descooperauthor
Leah Umansky
Leah Umansky is a writer, educator, artist and the author of the forthcoming memoir, Delicate Machine(Dzanc Books, 2027), and five books of poetry, most recently Of Tyrant (Word Works Books, 2024.) She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. She is the creator of the STAY BRAVE Substack which encourages women-identifying creatives to inspire other women-identifying creatives to stay brave in their creative pursuits. Her creative work has been featured on PBS and The Slowdown Podcast, and in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, Cincinnati Review, POETRY, Rhino, and American Poetry Review. She is an educator and writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as The Guggenheim, The New York Public Library, Poets House, Memorial Sloan Kettering and elsewhere.
www.leahumansky.com
Instagram: @Leah.Umansky
FB: Leah Umansky
Twitter; @Lady_bronte
Bluesky @leah.umansky
Photo: Scott Walsh
Kashiana Singh
Kashiana Singh is the author of Dualities of Albireo (The Poetry Box, 2025); Witching Hour (Glass Lyre Press, 2024); Woman by the Door (Apprentice House Press, 2022); and Crushed Anthills (Yavanika Press, 2020). She is an alumna of Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA) Foundation and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Managing editor for Poets Reading the News, and President of the North Carolina Poetry Society, Singh lives in Apex, North Carolina.
www.kashianasingh.com/
TEDx Talk – https://youtu.be/jzFflaqPrhM
Instagram – @kashianasingh
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/authorkashianasingh
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kashiana-singh-42b3952
Twitter – @Kashianasingh
Michael Copperman
Michael Copperman is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Cultures at Michigan State University. His work has appeared in The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review and Copper Nickel, among others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission.His memoir Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in CNF. He is the Creative Nonfiction editor for the Northwest Review.
Copperman was once one of the best wrestler’s in the Western United States, and attended Stanford on a wrestling scholarship. His new book Seeking Kenny is about the extremes of the American subculture of wrestling as seen through the story of five-time national champion Kenny Cox’s pilgrimage deep into the wilderness of Kauai’s Na Pali Coast (University of Iowa Press 2026).
www.mikecopperman.com
FB: Mike Copperman
Instagram: Mikecopperman
Threads: mikecopperman
Photo: Mashal Copperman
Janice Zerfas
Janice Zerfas PhD. is a poet with an MFA and PhD from Western Michigan University. She won the 2026 Celery Chapbook Competition for Grief Mapping sponsored by Friends of Poetry. Her first published chapbook, Headshots, won the 2019 competition. Janice won first place (poetry) in the 14th Annual Westminster Art Festival Contest focusing on environmental injustice, as well as the 12th. Her poems are in The South Dakota Review, Rattle’s Ekphrastic series, Passager: Special Issue on Ancestral Trauma, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Thought, Bear River Review, Dunes Review, the McGuffin, and more. She has also given workshops on writing Ekphrastic poetry, including the Krasl, an art gallery in St. Joseph; her poems were also included in the St. Joseph Library Walk. Janice has been named by her Bear River Conference Peers as a “Regional Organic Badass” Poet. She also writes creative non-fiction, one of the participants in a Master Creative Writing Workshop with author Stephanie Land at the Tucson Literary Festival. She is a reader for the Ludington-based magazine, Making Waves, focusing this fall on celebrating LGBTQ writing. She is currently Poet-in-Residence at the Jane Adams Research Center in St. Joseph, Michigan.
www.poetrycorner.art
Email: zerfas@poetrycorner.art
Our May 24, 2026 reading happened at Roscoe Books at 7 pm CT and featured:
Cynthia Gallaher
Melanie Faranello
Mary Kay Zuravleff
Rachel León
J.R. Blanes
Cynthia Gallaher
Cynthia is a Chicago-based author of four poetry collections, including Epicurean Ecstasy: More Poems About Food, Drink, Herbs & Spices, and three chapbooks, including Drenched. Her award-winning creativity guide is Frugal Poets’ Guide to Life: How to Live a Poetic Life, Even If You Aren’t a Poet. One of her poems will be sent on NASA’s manned flight to the south pole of the moon later this decade. Gallaher’s hybrid memoir Just Before Montana: My Face-to-Face Debates with Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber) will be published by Southern Illinois University Press, Spring 2027.
Follow her on X/Twitter at @swimmerpoet;
Instagram and Threads at @frugalpoet
Facebook @swimmerpoet;
http://bit.ly/cynthiagallaher
https://linktr.ee/cynthiagallaher
Melanie Faranello
Melanie is the author of the award-winning story collection, Everybody Needs Something, which received the 2025 Donald L Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence and was just released in March. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, Hippocampus, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere, and have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. Her novel-in-progress won an Emerging Writer Award from Key West Literary Seminars. She holds her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Originally from Chicago, she lives in W. Hartford, CT and is the founder of the community engagement project, Poetry on the Streets, and a new reading series in Hartford called Sonder. She originally started Sunday Salon Chicago at the Charleston Bar in Bucktown in 2004 and is thrilled to be back to read at it now!
Website: www.melaniefaranello.com
IG @melaniefaranello
FB melanie.pappadisfaranello
Mary Kay Zuravleff
Mary Kay is the award-winning author of American Ending, chosen for Oprah’s Spring Reading List. Earlier novels include Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book, The Bowl Is Already Broken, and The Frequency of Souls, winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award and the James Jones First Novel Award. She lives in Washington, DC.
www.marykayzuravleff.com
www.americanending.net
www.facebook.com/marykay.zuravleff
@mkzur on Instagram
Rachel León
Rachel (she/they) is a writer, editor, and social worker, who has worked in child welfare for nearly two decades. She serves as Managing Director for Chicago Review of Books and Fiction Director for Arcturus. Their work has appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and has been supported by StoryStudio Chicago, Tin House, Poets & Writers, and the Illinois Arts Council. León is the editor of The Rockford Anthology, and the author of the novel, How We See the Gray.
Website: https://rachelleon.me
https://www.instagram.com/rachellayown
https://bsky.app/profile/rachellayown.bsky.social
https://www.threads.com/@rachellayown
J.R. Blanes
J.R. is the author of the Southern Gothic Horror Tale, Portraits of Decay, released in 2025 from Ruadán Books, and the upcoming New England Witch Novel, Acascreamia, forthcoming from Crystal Lake Publishing in 2027. His short fiction has appeared in Allegory, Tales to Terrify, The No Sleep Podcast, the Spring in the City Anthology, among others. He lives in Chicago with his wife and their neurotic dog. When he’s not writing, he’s working on new music for various side projects.
https://jrblanes.com/
https://www.facebook.com/jrblanes76/
https://bsky.app/profile/jrblanes.bsky.social
Our April 26, 2026 reading took place on ZOOM at 6 pm CT and featured
Adela Najarro
Dorsía Smith Silva
Alex Wells Shapiro
Jacinda Townsend
Brian L. Jacobs
Adela Najarro
Adela Najarro is a poet with a social consciousness who is working on a novel. She serves on the board of directors for Círculo de poetas and Writers and works with the Latine/x community nationwide, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice. Her extended family left Nicaragua and arrived in San Francisco during the 1940s; after the fall of the Somoza regime, the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. The Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Collaborative selected Variations in Blue for publication in 2025. She is the author of four additional poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over, My Childrens, and Volcanic Interruptions, a chapbook that includes Janet Trenchard’s artwork. The 2024 Int’l Latino Book Awards designated Volcanic Interruptions as an Honorable Mention in the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award category. The California Arts Council has recognized her as an established artist for the Central California Region and appointed her as an Individual Artist Fellow. www.adelanajarro.com | www.circulowriters.com
Facebook: Adela Najarro
Instagram: adelanajarro_
Dorsía Smith Silva
Dorsía Smith Silva is the author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award, Eric Hoffer Award, Whirling Prize, and Da Vinci Eye Award, reviewed by Publishers Weekly, and recommended by Ms. Magazine. She is a multi-nominated Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net finalist, Best New Poets nominee, Cave Canem Poetry Prize Semifinalist, Obsidian Fellow, Poetry Editor at The Hopper, and Full Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Literary Hub, Poets.org, Poets & Writers, Split This Rock, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Los Angeles Review have published her work, and poems are forthcoming in The Cimarron Review and AMPLIFY: An Anthology of Black Poets, Indigenous Poets, and Other Poets of Color. She is the recipient of the Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship from Bread Loaf, Voices of Color Fellowship (2nd Place) from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and SWWIM residency. Dorsía has a Ph.D. in Caribbean Literature and Language.
She is on social media @DSmithSilva
Alex Wells Shapiro
Alex Wells Shapiro is a poet and organizer. He co-founded the performance series and artist’s collective Exhibit B. He is the author of a full length collection of poems, Insect Architecture (Unbound Edition 2022), and a chapbook, Gridiron Fables (Bottlecap Features 2022). His work has recently been featured in the Cincinnati Review miCRo Series, The Under Review, like a field, The Spectacle, Vlad Mag, and Tyger Review, among other spaces. He grew up in the Hudson Valley, and has found Chicago as his home for over a decade.
www.alexwellsshapiro.com
Insta: @alexwellsshapiro1
Jacinda Townsend
Jacinda Townsend is the author of Trigger Warning and Mother Country, winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Townsend’s first novel, Saint Monkey, winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, was an Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. A former lawyer and elected official, Townsend teaches in the MFA program at Brown University.
www.jacindatownsend.com
Insta: jacindatownsendthewriter
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jackie.huddle.90
Brian L. Jacobs
Brian L. Jacobs PhD. is a poet and editor of Tofu Ink Arts Press. His latest books are HOMOCAUST & Rhizomatic Poetics: Toolkit for Heretics. He grew up in Southern California and has been teaching GATE English and Humanities for thirty-five years in both K-12 and college settings. Brian was the assistant to the poets Allen Ginsberg and Julie Patton during his time at Naropa in the mid 90’s. During that time he walked half way around the world while on a peace pilgrimage with Buddhist monks commemorating WWII visiting Europe, the Middle East and India. Brian is also a three time Fulbright Scholar, which has allowed him to study in Brazil, China, and Japan. His poetry has been published in several publications including Dark Moon Lilith Press, Black Tape Press, Genre, Inky Blue/Celery, Red Dancefloor Press, Entelechy, 1844 Pine Street, Pasta Poetics, Trouble, In Parenthesis, Unbound Anthology, DZANC House Blue, Landlocked and Praxis.
tofuinkarts@gmail.com
Insta @tofuinkarts
tofuink.com
“Whether this earth comes to an end or not, we’ll slog over this endless road.”
— Mahmoud Darwish
Sunday Salon Chicago 