by Marc Zimmerman

1.

When I was a young guy living near New York, I played me a waiting game. Waiting for Love, waiting for myself, and Waiting for … Godot.

When I moved to San Diego, Mexico, Minnesota and Chicago, I found myself waiting, sometimes without knowing it. Waiting for Alurista, Carlos Monsivaís, Tomás Rivera, Carlos Fuentes and Sandra Cisneros.

And yes, in San Diego,…

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by Gerald R. Butters

In 2010, I had one of the luckiest breaks of my professional career. I was fortunate enough to win a Timuel D. Black Jr. Fellowship, which allowed me to complete a book at the Carter G. Woodson Library on the South Side of Chicago. I knew little about the man in whose name I received the fellowship, other than that…

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by Michael Burke

Reginald Gibbons received the Fuller Award for lifetime achievement on September 30, 2021. The fun, moving ceremony was hosted online by the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, the Newberry Library, and more than a dozen other partners. Named after the notable Chicago writer and Hall of Famer Henry Blake Fuller, the coveted award recognizes people who master…

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by Barbara Egel

“Poems are one of the ways we speak ourselves to life—our own poems and those of others”

—R.G., “Homage to Longshot O’Leary”

The words in the title of this essay are borrowed wares taken from the love poetry of one of Reginald Gibbons’ poetic forefathers, Osip Mandelstam. Not only are they from another poet, they’re in a language native to neither Mandelstam…

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The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame chats with PEN/Emerging Voices designee Jerakah Greene, who will instruct a free creative writing “Chicago Voices” workshop with local youth, offered by the Hall of Fame as of June 2021. (For more information and registration, click link TBD)

Q) In light of your own experiences studying creative writing as a young undergraduate in this setting, can you talk about Chicago…

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By Donald G. Evans

Arthur Meeker, in his 1949 historical novel, Prairie Avenue, takes us back to a time when the residential district, just south of what is now Printers Row, was the street on which Chicago’s movers and shakers built their homes, raised their families, and feted the city’s most important people. Marshall Field lived there. So did Phillip Armour. George Pullman. Olivia…

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by Jarrett Neal

Coming out of the destabilization and devastation of the pandemic, worldwide protests over systemic racism, and an increasingly histrionic political climate, place has never meant so much to our daily lives. Our connections to our communities as well as the histories and inhabitants that shape those communities has been amplified by the propulsion of current events. When the world races past and…

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Inside for Indies: Live on Independent Bookstore Day
11 a.m. Until Noon
via Zoom
Free and Open to the Public
Registration Required

by Donald G. Evans

This pandemic. We're more than a year into it and I think we all feel like we deserve some kind of return to normal. We miss all those things, sometimes tiny,…

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By Donald G. Evans

I have not read nearly all of the Chicago books on baseball. In fact, I own several dozen more than I’ve read, always looking for an opening to move one or more of those onto my nightstand. The insincerity of any “best” list is the insinuation that the author’s opinion is definitive, when in fact it is most often a consensus based…

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