Center Stage Sunday, Sept. 8th at 2pm Audrey Petty is the editor of High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (Voice of Witness/Haymarket Press) and co-editor of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom (Haymarket Press). Her work has appeared in Saveur, Oxford American, Poetry, Callaloo, Salon, The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook (Belt) ... Read more
Grace Place Stage (1st floor) Saturday, Sept. 7th at 1pm Carolyn Pfeiffer is a pioneering producer of American independent film. Having run two successful film companies and worked with directors like Alan Rudolph, Sam Shepard, Mary Lambert, and Wes Craven, Carolyn was dubbed a “mini-mogul” by The Wall Street Journal. Carolyn was the founding president ... Read more
Grace Place Stage (2nd floor) Saturday, Sept. 7th at 10am Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. Of the more than 40 books Alta has translated from Italian and German, novelist Juli Zeh’s New Year was a finalist for both the 2022 PEN ... Read more
North Stage Sunday, Sept. 8th at 11am Ruben Quesada’s forthcoming collection, Brutal Companion, won the Barrow Street Editors Prize and will be released on October 15, 2024. He edited Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, a Gold Medal winner from the Independent Publisher Awards. Quesada’s previous works include two chapbooks—Jane/La Sequa and Revelations ... Read more
Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Saturday, Sept. 7th at 3:30pm Daniel Rachel is the best-selling author of several books including The Lost Album of the Beatles: What If the Beatles Hadn’t Split Up?, Don't Look Back In Anger, and Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone, and ... Read more
North Stage Saturday, Sept. 7th at 10am Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar Award-nominated and Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of The Death of Us, Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, and others. Lori lives in Chicago, where she co-chairs the crime fiction readers’ event Midwest Mystery Conference and ... Read more
Center Stage Saturday, Sept. 7th at 12pm Jessica Nirvana Ram is an Indo-Guyanese poet. She is the author of the debut poetry collection, Earthly Gods (Variant Literature, 2024) and the chapbook in the aftermath (Prismatica Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, amongst others. Jessica works at ... Read more
Jazz Showcase Stage Saturday, Sept. 7th at 4:30pm Pablo Ramirez, the author of Pocho Love: Pilsen Heart Beats To Chicago Streets, is a visual artist and poet as well as an activist and curator for cultural events in the Pilsen community. His art is influenced by the likes of Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl as well as ... Read more
Grace Place Stage (2nd floor) Saturday, Sept. 7th at 2pm Mitzi Rapkin is the founder, host and producer of the literary podcast, First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing, which features a new author interview each week. She has interviewed more than 470 contemporary writers over the past 11 years, exploring the decisions and psychology that ... Read more
Center Stage Saturday, Sept. 7th at 4pm trina reynolds-tyler is a data journalist for human rights, abolitionist, and South Side of Chicago native. She is a graduate of Colorado College and UChicago's Harris School of Public Policy. She is Invisible Institute's Data Director and leads the Beneath the Surface project, which utilizes machine learning and ... Read more
Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Sunday, Sept. 8th at 10am 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, The Academy of American Poets, Jubilat, Vinyl, Bat City Review, The Volta, PANK, and MAKE Magazine among others. ... Read more
Plymouth Court Stage Sunday, Sept. 8th at 1pm Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. She is the author of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, and her latest poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner ... Read more
Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Sunday, Sept. 8th at 12pm Veronica Roth is The New York Times best-selling author of Poster Girl, Chosen Ones, Arch-Conspirator, When Among Crows, the Divergent series, and the Carve the Mark duology. She is also the guest editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021. She lives ... Read more
North Stage Sunday, Sept. 8th at 1pm Francesca T. Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago, and received her PhD in English from University of California, Berkeley. She’s written scholarly work on Shakespeare, Black Lesbian Country music fans, Prince, and Fela Kuti on Broadway among other topics. Her books include Black Country ... Read more
Jazz Showcase Stage Saturday, Sept. 7th at 4:30pm Jacob Saenz is the author of Throwing the Crown, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. His poetry has appeared in The Boiler, Memorious, Poetry, RHINO, and other journals. A CantoMundo fellow, he's been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and ... Read more
Plymouth Court Stage Saturday, Sept. 7th at 12pm Bill Savage is Professor of Instruction in the English Department at Northwestern University. He has taught adult education seminars at the Newberry Library of Chicago since 1992. He has taught Mike Royko's columns and his biography of Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago since the turn of ... Read more
Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Saturday, Sept. 7th at 2:30pm Suzanne Scanlon is the author of the memoir Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen and of the novels Promising Young Women, and Her 37th Year, An Index. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Granta, BOMB Magazine, Fence, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She teaches ... Read more
Grace Place Stage (1st floor) Saturday, Sept. 7th at 1pm Barbara Scharres is a film curator, film journalist, and lecturer. She is currently the artistic director for the Donald M. Ephraim Sun & Stars International Film Festival, having formerly served as the longtime Director of Programming for the Gene Siskel Film Center at the School ... Read more
Grace Place Stage (2nd floor) Saturday, Sept. 7th at 10am Lynn Schmeidler is an award-winning writer of fiction and poetry. Half-Lives, her new collection of short stories, won the 2023 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction. Her story, InventEd was chosen by Jonathan Lethem as the winner of BOMB Magazine’s 2023 Fiction Contest. Schmeidler’s ... Read more
Plymouth Court Stage Saturday, Sept. 7th at 4pm Mary Schmich is a Chicago journalist who wrote for the Chicago Tribune for 36 years. She won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. One of her columns, loosely called Wear Sunscreen, was turned into a popular song by Baz Luhrmann. Her columns have been collected in a ... Read more
Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Sunday, Sept. 8th at 2pm Skyler Schrempp writes historical fiction for young people. Her first novel Three Strike Summer received four starred reviews and was listed on several “best of” lists including Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books of the Year, Chicago Public Library’s Best of the ... Read more
Plymouth Court Stage Saturday, Sept. 7th at 5pm Daniel Schulman is the New York Times bestselling author of Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty, and The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America. His work has appeared ... Read more
Grace Place Stage (2nd floor) Saturday, Sept. 7th at 11am Harrison Sherrod is the Executive Director of Pentimenti Productions, an arts non-profit and film production company based in Chicago. He is a producer and co-writer of the recently released 3-D documentary about the artist and Marine H.C. Westermann, which features narration by Ed Harris, and ... Read more
Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Sunday, Sept. 8th at 11am Dick Simpson is UIC Professor Emeritus and former Chicago Alderman. He has combined a distinguished public service and academic career. He is the author of Chicago's Modern Mayors and 25 other books.
North Stage Sunday, Sept. 8th at 11am Callie Siskel is the author of Two Minds (W. W. Norton) and Arctic Revival, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have been featured in NPR’s Weekend Edition and Poetry Daily and published in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and the New York Review ... Read more