Saturday, September 6th 2pm CT - Grace Place Stage Jarrett Neal is the Writing Center Coordinator at Governors State University. His first book, What Color Is Your Hoodie?: Essays on Black Gay Identity, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. He holds a BA in English from Northwestern University, and MFA in Writing from ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 2pm CT - North Stage For nearly 30 years, Jeff Copeland worked as a show biz hobo, hopping from one gravy train to the next, working with legendary entertainers such as Madonna, Pee-wee Herman, Garry Shandling, and Carol Burnett. He was nominated for an Emmy (yay!) and lost (boo!), and has enjoyed ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 2pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage Jonathan Eig is the author of six books. His most recent book, King: A Life, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
Saturday, September 6th 2pm CT - Center Stage Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor. She spent nearly a decade assisting Anthony Bourdain, with whom she coauthored the cookbook Appetites and World Travel. She’s written about food and travel for The New York Times, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, ... Read more
A native of Woodstock, Illinois, Richard Babcock has enjoyed a long career as a novelist and magazine editor, including 20 years as the editor of Chicago Magazine. His 2012 novel, Are You Happy Now? was a finalist in fiction with the Society of Midland Authors. His latest novel, published in July, is A Small Disturbance ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 3pm CT - Grace Place Stage Amina Gautier is the author of four 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 American Short Fiction, Boston Review, ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 3pm CT - Grace Place Stage Andy Jiaming Tang is the author of Cinema Love, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize for First Fiction; the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 3pm CT - North Stage Emmy-award winner Ben Tanzer's work includes the story collection Upstate, the novel Orphans and the essay collections Lost in Space and Be Cool. His recent novel The Missing was released in March 2024 by 7.13 Books and was a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year finalist ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 3pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage An award-winning podcast producer, Healy co-created You Didn’t See Nothin, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting and a Peabody Award. Healy has worked on stories for NPR, the BBC and This American Life, and spent years editing StoryCorps for Chicago’s public radio station, ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 3pm CT - Center Stage Bill Kurtis is currently the president of Kurtis Productions and the official judge and scorekeeper of NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! He lives in Chicago with his wife, Donna.
Saturday, September 6th 3pm CT - Grace Place Stage Carlo Rotella's new book is What Can I Get Out of This? Teaching and Learning In a Classroom Full of Skeptics. A professor of English at Boston College and a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, he has previously written books about neighborhood, music, ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 3pm CT - Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Sunita is a bestselling author, an award-winning Cornell professor, and an expert in organizational psychology. She leads groundbreaking research on influence, authority, compliance, and defiance. A trained physician, she practiced medicine in the UK and worked as a management consultant for the pharmaceutical ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 3pm CT - North Stage Lucie is a no-longer-practicing lawyer and the author of How the Hell Did I Not Know That? My Midlife Year from Couch to Curiosity (Trinity University Press, August 2025). She has written humor and satire for NextTribe, Slackjaw, The Belladonna, Points in Case, Emrys Journal, and others. ... Read more
Tracy Brown is Chief Partnership Officer at Chicago Public Media, where she has strategic oversight in building key partnerships with local and national newsrooms, corporate and community organizations, as well as cultivating new relationships with supporters of independent journalism. Tracy joined WBEZ in 2019 as managing editor to lead enterprise, investigations, daily news and special ... Read more
SaShay Butler, M.Ed (she/they) is an interdisciplinary youth-development professional. They hold a Master’s in Youth Development from UIC. SaShay’s lived experiences as a First-Generation and/or Lower-Income (FGLI) undergraduate student from rural South Carolina sparked her commitment to servant leadership and helping folks reach their ideal version of success. As an Assistant Director of Student Enrichment ... Read more
Scott Carlson is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he has written about the culture and business of college, the relationship between campuses and communities, and the journeys of students through the system since 1999. He is also the writer of The Edge, The Chronicle’s column about innovation and ideas in ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 4pm CT - Center Stage Alex Wells Shapiro (he/him) is a poet and organizer from the Hudson Valley, living in Chicago. 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 ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 4pm CT - Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Anne K. Ream is a Chicago-based writer and the founder of Center for Story & Witness (formerly The Voices & Faces Project), a global testimonial writing program which seeks to share stories that bear witness to social injustices. The author of Lived Through ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 4pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage Barbara McQuade is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and a co-host of the podcast #SistersInLaw. From 2010 to 2017, McQuade served as U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. Ms. McQuade was appointed ... Read more
Bill Adair is an award-winning journalist, the author of two books and a global leader in political fact-checking. He is the creator of PolitiFact and the co-founder of the International Fact-Checking Network. He serves as the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 4pm CT - Center Stage CD Eskilson is a trans nonbinary poet and translator. Their work appears in the Kenyon Review, The Offing, Cincinnati Review, Passages North, among others, and they are the poetry co-editor at Split Lip Magazine. They are a recipient of the C.D. Wright / Academy of American Poets ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 4pm CT - Center Stage Grayson is a Black, Jamaican-American, queer transgender cowboy poet and therapist. He won Foglifter Press' 2024 Start A Riot! Chapbook Prize for Sand Bodied Florida Boy and Write Bloody Publishing’s 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize for his debut full-length collection, A Congregation of Alligators. His work appears ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 4pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage Jake Sheridan is a City Hall reporter for the Chicago Tribune. His work focuses on local policy, the City Council and Mayor Brandon Johnson. He is a graduate of Duke University and his previous work includes fighting social media misinformation on the Poynter Institute's MediaWise team ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 4pm CT - Center Stage Kimberly Ann Priest is the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells, as well as the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor ... Read more
Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts and 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, he is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). The managing poetry ... Read more