Saturday, September 6th 12pm CT - North Stage Carlos Cumpián is a poet, editor and teacher. His latest book Human Cicada (Prickly Pear Publishing) marks his fifth poetry collection. He has been recognized for his contributions to literacy and literature most recently in April 2025, by the Spanish-language literary consortium Poesia en Abril, the Illinois ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 12pm CT - North Stage Daniel Lassell is the author of two poetry books: Frame Inside a Frame (Texas Review Press, 2025) and Spit (Wheelbarrow Books, 2021), winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. He grew up in Kentucky and lives in Indiana. Visit his website: www.daniel-lassell.com.
Saturday, September 6th 12pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage Elizabeth Todd-Breland is co-author of I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education, author of A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago Since the 1960s, and Associate Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty in Black Studies at the University of Illinois ... Read more
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is an Emmy award-winning writer, social justice attorney, and playwright. She is a tenured full professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College (CUNY) where she created the course Literature, Race, and Law. She was a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School as well as a ... Read more
Helene Achanzar is a poet and editor whose writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Sixth Finch, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2022 New England Review Award for Emerging Writers, her work has been supported by Bread Loaf, the T.S. Eliot Foundation, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. She is a senior editor ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 12pm CT - Center Stage James Stewart III is a Black writer from Chicago and the author of Defiant Acts (Acre Books, 2025), a debut novel praised as “a new classic in the storied tradition of Chicago novels” (Lindsay Hunter) and “an unflinching look into multi-racial America” (David Wright Faladé). Told in ... Read more
Author of Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around (Glass Lyre Press 2025) and From the Belly (Sibling Rivalry Press 2012), Virginia Bell won NELLE magazine’s Nonfiction Prize in 2020 for the personal essay, “Chicken,” and her poetry won Honorable Mention in the 2019 riverSedge Poetry Prize, judged by José Antonio Rodríguez. Her work has ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 12pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage Cedric de Leon is Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has published six books. His newest, Freedom Train, with University of California Press is about the role of Black labor activists in desegregating the U.S. labor movement. From 2018 ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 12:30pm CT - Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Edward Hirsch, a Chicago native and MacArthur Fellow, has published ten books of poems, including The Living Fire and Gabriel: A Poem, as well as eight prose books about poetry, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 1pm CT - Grace Place Stage Adrianne Kalfopoulou is the author of three poetry collections, and three collections of prose including, On the Gaze, Dubai and its New Cosmopolitanisms (2023), and The Re in Refuge (2025). She is Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at RIT-Dubai.
Saturday, September 6th 1pm CT - Grace Place Stage Anca L. Szilágyi is the author of Daughters of the Air, which Shelf Awareness called “a striking debut from a writer to watch” and Dreams Under Glass, which BuzzFeed Books called “a novel for our modern times.” Her short fiction has appeared in Lilith Magazine, Fairy ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 1pm CT - Grace Place Stage Brooke Randel is a writer, editor and associate creative director in Chicago. She is the author of Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. Her writing has been published in Hippocampus, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. The granddaughter of ... Read more
David Ambroz is a nationally recognized poverty and child welfare advocate, bestselling author of A Place Called Home: A Memoir, Emmy-nominated producer, and currently, an executive at Amazon. Named a “Champion of Change” by President Obama, he draws from his lived experience growing up homeless and in foster care to champion youth and families. A ... Read more
David Axelrod is a preeminent American political strategist and commentator and the former chief strategist and senior advisor to President Barack Obama. Axelrod was the founding director of the University of Chicago's non-partisan Institute of Politics. He currently serves as a Distinguished Fellow at the University of Chicago, Chief Political Analyst for CNN, and Professor ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 1pm CT - Center Stage Sports historian Don Zminda served as Director of Research at STATS LLC from 1992-2016. He is the author of The Legendary Harry Caray: Baseball’s Greatest Salesman (2019), a CASEY Award nominee; Double Plays and Double Crosses: The Black Sox and Baseball in 1920 (2021); and Justice Batted ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 1pm CT - Center Stage Evan F. Moore is a writer whose work over time consists of the topics of sports, race, entertainment, and culture. Evan, an adjunct journalism professor at DePaul University, is the co-author of the book Game Misconduct: Hockey’s Toxic Culture and How to Fix It. His writing is ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 1pm CT - Grace Place Stage Gazmend Kapllani is an Albanian-born polyglot author of two collections of poetry in Albanian and four published novels, written in Greek and Albanian, and translated into several languages. His literary work centers on borders, totalitarianism, migration, and how European history has shaped private and public memories. ... Read more
Helen Benedict, a British-American professor at Columbia University, is the author of eight novels, six nonfiction books, and a play. Her latest novel, The Good Deed, came out in April 2024 from Red Hen Press. Benedict received PEN’s Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and ... Read more
Izidora Angel is a Bulgarian-born memoirist and literary translator based in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in A Public Space, Astra Magazine, Best Literary Translations 2024, Chicago Reader, and elsewhere. She’s been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, ART OMI, the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and Bread Loaf, among others. Izidora’s translation of She ... Read more
Lisa Barr is The New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of The Goddess of Warsaw and Woman on Fire. Lisa served as an editor for The Jerusalem Post, managing editor of Today's Chicago Woman, managing editor of Moment magazine, and as an editor/reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Among the highlights of her career, ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 1:30pm CT - Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage billy lombardo is the author of The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, The Man with Two Arms, Morning Will Come, and Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns. A Nelson Algren award winner, billy is the founder of Polyphony Lit, a student-run literary magazine for high ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 1:30pm CT - Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage Emily is a storyteller who creatively curates spaces for stories to be experienced in community. For over thirty years, she has performed and led projects in diverse venues locally and nationally including the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, National ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 2pm CT - Center Stage Curtis Duffy is a Michelin-starred chef and co-owner of Ever and After in Chicago. He built his career at top restaurants like Charlie Trotter’s, Alinea, and Avenues before opening Grace in 2012, which consistently earned three Michelin stars before closing in 2017. His story was featured in ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 2pm CT - Plymouth Court Stage Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is author of COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History and 2025 Lincoln Prize. COMBEE details Harriet Tubman’s daring Civil War service as a spy for the ... Read more
Saturday, September 6th 2pm CT - Grace Place Stage Eileen Favorite’s first novel, The Heroines (Scribner), has been translated into five languages. Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus, Triquarterly, The Toast, The Chicago Reader, Diagram, and others. She’s received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council for poetry, fiction, ... Read more