Participants

A collection of 691 posts

Participants Reading #136

Meet Our Readers: Jessi D

Jessi D hails from the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, which is just as bad as it sounds. She packed her car with her belongings and cat and made the drive to Chicago in the miserably humid summer of 2011 and has been dicking around in the Midwest ever since. She

Participants Reading #136

Meet Our Readers: Kendra Stevens

Kendra Stevens is a Chicago-based live-lit performer, comic and rapper who has performed all over the city. She is the co-producer and host of Serving the Sentence, a live-lit show in which all the stories start with the same first sentence, 2nd Tuesdays at the Teal Room, and a member

Participants Reading #136

Meet Our Readers: Kelly Swails

Kelly Swails is a writer, editor, and all-around geek. Her work has appeared in several anthologies as well as Shondaland.com. Currently, she's the Co-Director of the Writer's Symposium at Gen Con, a con-within-a-con for science fiction and fantasy writers. You can stalk her on twitter

Participants Reading #136

Meet Our Readers: Ananda Lima

Ananda Lima's work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, The Kenyon Review Online, Colorado Review, Rattle, Jubilat, Hobart, The Common, and elsewhere. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. She has served

Participants Reading #135

Meet Our Readers: Darshita Jain

Darshita Jain likes to call herself Quixotic. She is a grad student studying New Arts Journalism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the literary editor of F News Magazine. Most of the time, she oscillates between being the human version of an exclamation point and a

Participants Reading #135

Meet Our Readers: Dmitry Samarov

Dmitry Samarov paints and writes in Chicago. He published two books in 2019: Music to My Eyes (Tortoise Books) and Soviet Stamps (Pictures & Blather). He's also the author of two cabbie books: Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab (2011) and Where to? A Hack Memoir (2014). He

Participants Reading #135

Meet Our Readers: Michael William Palmer

Michael William Palmer is a nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in Bellingham Review, CutBank, Georgetown Review, Alligator Juniper, West Texas Literary Review, and numerous other publications. His first book, Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs, is a collection of essays about growing up in Utah and eventually leaving. He

Participants Reading #135

Meet Our Readers: Cameron McGill

Cameron McGill is a poet and musician living in Moscow, ID. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Meridians, is forthcoming in February 2020 from Willow Springs Books. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of

Participants Reading #135

Meet Our Readers: Maggie Queeney

Maggie Queeney is a writer, visual artist, and educator. Recipient of the 2019 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, The Ruth Stone Scholarship, and a 2019 Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago, she is the author of settler, winner of the 2017 Baltic Writing Residency Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her

Participants Reading #134

Meet Our Readers: Rachel Cromidas

Rachel Cromidas is a writer and editor in Logan Square. She has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune and Buzzfeed Reader. She currently serves as an editor for Built In. She has performed in various live lit and comedy shows around Chicago, including

Participants Reading #134

Meet Our Readers: Norman Doucet

Norman Doucet was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and spent his formative years there, which is reflected in many of the mistakes he has made in his life. For instance, he likes to point out that he was both a right-wing Republican and an evangelical Christian...at the same time.

Participants Reading #134

Meet Our Readers: Katey Schultz

Katey Schultz is the author of Flashes of War, which the Daily Beast praised as an "ambitious and fearless" collection, and Still Come Home, the winner of the first ever Ciofalo Award. Honors for her work include the Linda Flowers Literary Award, IndieFab Book of the Year from

Participants Reading #134

Meet Our Readers: Ruth Kaufman

Ruth Kaufman is the author of four medieval romances, two medieval novellas and two humorous contemporary novels. Her Wars of the Roses Brides trilogy (At His Command, Follow Your Heart, and The Bride Tournament) reached #1 historical romance on Amazon in the US, Canada and Australia. Other accolades include 2016

Participants Reading #134

Meet Our Readers: Anne-Marie Oomen

Anne-Marie Oomen is co-author of Lake Michigan Mermaid with Linda Nemec Foster (Michigan Notable Book for 2019), but she is not a mermaid--she wrote the troubled girl poems in the book--no type-casting there.  She also wrote Love, Sex and 4-H (Next Generation Indie Award for Memoir), which has only about

Participants Reading #133

Meet Our Readers: Karen Clanton

Karen Clanton is an attorney whose law degree did not stifle the English major lurking within. She has forged a career as a writer in the legal profession, where she has led complex editorial projects in securities law, women's history and diversity.  Karen currently works in a large

Participants Reading #133

Meet Our Readers: Kat Jercich

Kat Jercich is a writer and editor living in Chicago. Her writing has appeared on Rewire.News, Tenderly Magazine, Bitch, Bust, RedEye, xoJane, and the Sacramento News and Review. Please join Kat and our other amazing readers on Tuesday, November 5, 2019 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open

Participants Reading #133

Meet Our Readers: Kevin Coval

Kevin Coval is an award-winning poet & author of Everything Must Go: The Life & Death of an American Neighborhood, A People's History of Chicago & over ten other full-length collections, anthologies & chapbooks. He is the founding editor of The BreakBeat Poets imprint on Haymarket Books, &

Participants Reading #133

Meet Our Readers: Leland Cheuk

Leland Cheuk is the author of three books of fiction, including the novels The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong and most recently, No Good Very Bad Asian, forthcoming from C&R Press in November 2019. His work has appeared in Salon, Catapult, Joyland Magazine, and Literary Hub, among other outlets.

Participants Reading #133

Meet Our Readers: Marco Rafalà

Marco Rafalà is a first-generation Sicilian American novelist, musician, and writer for award-winning tabletop role-playing games. He earned his MFA in Fiction from The New School and is a co-curator of the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in New York City. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, he now lives in Brooklyn, New

Participants Reading #132

Meet Our Readers: Gint Aras

Gint Aras has been trapped on planet Earth since 1973. He's the author of the novels The Fugue and Finding the Moon in Sugar, and the forthcoming memoir, Relief by Execution: A Visit to Mauthausen. He lives in Oak Park and teaches at a local community college. Please

Participants Reading #132

Meet Our Readers: Annie Logue

Annie Logue has written Hedge Funds for Dummies, taught finance at UIC and the University of Guadalajara, and now works for a tech start-up. She grew up in Ohio and lives in Chicago. Please join Annie and our other amazing readers on Tuesday, October 1, 2019 in the upstairs bar

Participants Reading #132

Meet Our Readers: Sarah Steimer

Sarah Steimer is a journalist, essayist, podcast producer and yoga teacher, currently serving as editor of Marketing News magazine. Sarah originally hails from Pittsburgh and has lived in Chicago for eight years. Her writing has covered municipal politics, airlines, college mascots, cheese championships, web accessibility and more. Sarah is available

Participants Reading #132

Meet Our Readers: F. Amanda Tugade

F. Amanda Tugade is a writer, community journalist and the daughter of Filipino immigrants. Her work centers on self-love and often weaves past histories into pathways for belonging. Please join F. Amanda and our other amazing readers on Tuesday, October 1, 2019 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open

Participants Reading #132

Meet Our Readers: Scott Smith

Scott Smith is a media strategist and Chicago fundamentalist. A child of the city's southeast suburbs, he's lived in Chicago proper since 1998. He lives on the South Side in Morgan Park with his wife and daughter where he hosts and produces the live lit show

Participants Reading #131

Meet Our Readers: Edward Moses

In 2000, Edward Moses's diverse musical upbringing began to suddenly make a lot of sense, as the whirlwinds of albums his parents had at home merged with his sudden discovery of Hip-Hop and Slam Poetry, all in a single summer. 17 years later, he's shared stages