by John Lillig Chicago author Nelson Algren (1909-1981) is usually associated with the north side neighborhoods of Bucktown and Wicker Park, where he lived during the mid-20th Century (first at 1523 W. Wabansia and later at 1958 W. Evergreen) and where much of his fiction is set.  However,…

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by Sharon Woodhouse The data is damning, the history is inspiring, and the conversation is overdue. The time to build an economically vibrant literary eco-system is now. Carl Sandburg called Chicago “Hog Butcher to the World” and we swaggered to match, didn’t blush. He carved out…

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By Barry Pearce Stanley Elkin was a stylist of the highest rank, dazzling readers with highwire prose that kept them on the edge of their seats, white-knuckling books whose turns of phrase inspired thrills, chills, and deep unease. “Darkly comic” might be the most common label applied to…

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by Robert Loerzel “I can’t breathe” became a slogan for the Black Lives Matter movement, as protesters repeated the final words of Eric Garner, an African American killed in 2014 after being put in a chokehold by a New York City police officer. Half a century earlier, Chicago…

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by Sandra Jackson-Opoku Crime writers who know their history invariably invoke the legacy of Eleanor Taylor Bland. I count myself incredibly lucky to have known her personally, and been a part of her community. Her footprints were so indelible that we never realized how deep they were until she no…

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by John Lillig Chicago author Hugo Martinez-Serros passed away on February 26, 2026. While Martinez-Serros may not have been as well-known as some of his near contemporaries, such as Harry Mark Petrakis, Leon Forrest, or Stuart Dybek, his fiction provides rich, important, and valuable images and…

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by Kayleigh McNamara It was an early, very warm morning in July, and it had rained during the night. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colors everywhere had deepened. ― Tove Jansson, The Summer Book July brings us into the thick gooey…

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by Andrew Peart Chicago was destined to be Ed Roberson’s “second chance.” That’s what a parking attendant told him at the Congress Plaza Hotel in 2004. Roberson had received an invitation from poet David Trinidad to serve that spring as a visiting artist at Columbia College…

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By Barbara Egel There has been so much written about this poet: the forms, the subjects, the place in cultural history and the response to the culture that came before him, the politics, the song, the sweet, and the sly—and with good reason, because there is no reaching the edge of his world,…

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