Sunday, September 7th 2pm CT - North Stage Amy Yee is the author of nonfiction book Far from the Rooftop of the World: Travels among Tibetan Refugees on Four Continents with a Foreword by the Dalai Lama. It won Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year award for traditional nonfiction. She is an award-winning journalist ... Read more
Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, author of Intaglio (Kent State University Press), and The Rub (Elixir Press) and several chapbooks, lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (Lumbee) is dean of Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Education and Social Policy. A member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, Brayboy’s research focuses on intersecting knowledge systems that illuminate the ways that ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 2pm CT - Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award-winning and International Latino Book Award-winning author and poet. Pelayo writes fairy tales that blend genre and explore concepts of grief, mourning, and cycles of violence. She is the author of Loteria, Poems of My Night, Into ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 2pm CT - Center Stage Danielle Jackson is a contemporary romance author, avid reader, lackluster-yet-mighty crafter, and accomplished TV binge-watcher. Danielle has had the unique experience of working on almost every side of the book business—as a publicist at a publisher, a managing editor of a book review website, pop culture podcast ... Read more
Kathleen DuVal is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Nations: A Millennium in North America and Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. A professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she teaches early American and Native American history. Her awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, the Bancroft Prize, and ... Read more
Susan Baller-Shepard writes along a wilderness track, amidst cornfields and big skies. A Presbyterian minister, Susan's writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post's On Faith section, Spirituality & Health, Writer’s Digest, Intima, Typishly, Patheos, Day One, The Tattooed Buddha, and other publications. Her poetry collection, Doe was published in 2019, two of ... Read more
Natalie Caña loves to incorporate her you’ll-never-believe-what-just-happened-to-me personal experiences, enthusiasm for telenovela tomfoolery, and love for her Latine culture into creating saucy stories with shenanigans and sabor.
Sunday, September 7th 3pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage A.D. Nauman is an author and educator in Chicago. Her second novel, Down the Steep (Regal House), was chosen as a 2024 Great Group Reads book by the Women’s National Book Association. The novel also won the 2024 FAW Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 3pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 3pm CT - North Stage Bernard Turner is the executive director of the Bronzeville-Black Metropolis National Heritage Area focused on preserving the history and culture of Bronzeville. Author of several books about Chicago and African American History, including A New View of Bronzeville and Tate and His Historic Dream, Turner conducts neighborhood ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 3pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage Daria Lavelle is a speculative fiction writer. Her short stories have appeared in The Deadlands, Dread Machine, Dark Matters, and elsewhere, and her debut novel, Aftertaste, was published by Simon & Schuster (US) and Bloomsbury (UK) in May 2025, and is currently being translated into thirteen ... Read more
Rowan Beaird is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and The Common, among others. She is the recipient of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award, and she has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and StoryStudio. Her first novel, The Divorcées, was named a best book ... Read more
Nora Brooks Blakely founded Brooks Permissions, in 2001, to license and promote the work of her mother, Gwendolyn Brooks by producing programming and publications which demonstrate her continuing relevance. The company recently published the 75th anniversary edition of Annie Allen, the book that made Gwendolyn Brooks the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize. ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 4pm CT - North Stage Alison Cuddy (she/her) is a Chicago based writer, editor and audio producer whose work appears on such platforms as Newcity Magazine, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, WBEZ Chicago, NPR, the BBC and Monocle Radio. She has hosted and created several podcast series, most recently 2023’s Library ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 4pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage Ashlee Piper is a sustainability expert, commentator, and speaker whose work has been featured on more 300+ TV segments, and in Vogue, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more. Piper has spoken at the United Nations and SXSW and has a popular TED talk. ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 4pm CT - Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Keir Graff’s first work of nonfiction is Chicago’s Fine Arts Building: Music, Magic, and Murder! More typically, he writes tales of marriages in trouble under the pen name Linda Keir with his coauthor, Linda Joffe Hull, and mysteries for middle-grade readers with James ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 4pm CT - Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Lindsay Fullerton is a media studies scholar and historian originally from the Chicago area and now based in Cleveland, Ohio. Lindsay is the author of Ephemeral City: A People’s History of Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair (University of Illinois Press, 2025), which ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 5pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage Earley is a the author of the popular Substack series, Queering Reality, with 100,000 subscribers and of two novels: A Map of Everything, a debut finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize; and Like Wings, Your Hands (Red Hen Press), winner of the Women’s Prose Prize (judged ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 5pm CT - North Stage Erica Stern is the author of Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story. Her work has been published in The Sun, The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has received support ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 5pm CT - Center Stage Gina Frangello is the author of four books of fiction and two books of nonfiction, most recently Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, and Elena Ferrante: The Neapolitan Novels. She is on faculty at UNR-Tahoe’s low residency MFA program and also teaches ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 5pm CT - North Stage Janice Deal is the author of The Blue Door, a novel plus three previous books of fiction: Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories; The Sound of Rabbits, a novel; and The Decline of Pigeons: Stories. She’s the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award and has ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 5pm CT - Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Kevin Davis is an award-winning journalist, author and magazine editor based in Chicago. He is the author of three non-fiction books: The Wrong Man, Defending the Damned and The Brain Defense. Davis has also authored eight nonfiction children’s books. His writing has appeared ... Read more
Sunday, September 7th 5pm CT - North Stage Lynn Sloan is the author of two novels, Midstream (Fomite 2022) and Principles of Navigation (Fomite 2015), and the story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough (Fomite 2018). Fortune Cookies, a fine art book of her flash fiction was produced by Lark Sparrow Press in 2022. Her ... Read more
Martha Bayne has worked in Chicago journalism and publishing for 30 years. Currently a senior acquisitions editor at the University of Illinois Press, she has written a narrative cookbook, has edited three acclaimed anthologies of nonfiction writing about Chicago and the Midwest, and her reported work and essays have been published in many local and ... Read more