Past Events

GCBC Hosts Scott Turow for Fundraising Dinner and Discussion

Great Chicago Books Club will feature Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent on Sunday, Aug. 26 in Evanston. This event will help raise funds for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s continued programming throughout the course of this year, including our upcoming Fuller Award for lifetime achievement and our annual induction ceremony.

The author will join guests for a cocktail hour, dinner, and then discussion, in a lovely Queen Anne Victorian home built in 1890 by the well-known Chicago architectural firm Holabird and Roche. The current owners gut renovated the house…

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CLHOF Reading at NU Summer Writers’ Conference

The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame will help to orchestrate a reading to conclude the 14th annual Northwestern University Summer Writers’ Conference, held at Wiebolt Hall (339 E. Chicago Ave., Chicago). CLHOF Founding Executive Director Donald G. Evans will host a lineup of Rebecca Makkai, Bayo Ojikutu, Kelly O'Connor McNees, Ben Tanzer, and Valya Dudycz Lupescu. These writers represent an extraordinary sampling of our world class collection of authors, and their wide ranging and varied voices showcase Chicago as perhaps the world’s finest literary city.

This is…

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Stuart Dybek, Ana Castillo, and Sandra Cisneros are among the legendary living Chicago writers with strong associations to the Pilsen neighborhood. On this tour we'll place their lives and literature, along with other notable figures, in the context of this vibrant neighborhood. Stops will include the model for the fictional home on Mango Street, a mosaic that includes depictions of Castillo and Cisneros, the church featured in a classic Dybeck short story, and much more.

Tour registration: dgevans@chicagoliteraryhof.org, 773.414.2603.

Groups (8 or more walking tour: 40 or more bus tour) can arrange a date and time for any…

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The modernist movement, outside academia, is often considered elitist; artists like Gertrude Stein downright baffling; and Chicago’s place in it mostly architectural. Liesl Olson’s cultural history of that period makes a clear and insightful case that Chicago was essential to the movement, and that the literature arising from it both avant-garde and accessible. Olson, in her book, mirrors this quality that partly defined the Chicago Renaissance, distilling high-minded ideas into an intellectual carnival: the city’s art, its personalities, its industry, its euphoric struggle to make and represent a new age. Like the Chicago literary modernists, Olson (director, Chicago studies,…

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Maud Martha (1958) is Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ only work of adult fiction. The 34 vignettes tell the story of a girl’s maturation from girlhood to adolescence to womanhood in 1930s and 1940s black Chicago. Maud is the novella’s protagonist, and through her eyes we see the extraordinary circumstances and people and events that constitute her ordinary life. The book is rendered with humanity and musicality, as one would expect from one of the 20th century’s greatest poets. Brooks’ daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, will join us as the Great Chicago Books Club discusses Maud Martha at…

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Angela Jackson, the author of highly-praised novels, a biography, poetry, and plays, will be honored with a Fuller Award for lifetime achievement at the landmark Poetry Foundation buildingon May 17, from 7-9 p.m. Jackson, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, has been a consistent contributor to our literary culture since her debut poetry collection, Voodoo Love Magic, in 1974.

Jackson, an early member of the Organization of Black American Culture, has published six volumes of poetry, two novels, five plays, and a biography. Last year, Jackson wrote a biography of Gwendolyn Brooks called A Surprised Queenhood in…

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The Great Chicago Books Club is ecstatic to announce that Sara Paretsky will be our special guest as we host an evening of food, drink, and literary discussion centered around her classic Chicago novel Hardball, in which Chicago private investigator V.I. Warshawski takes on a cold case that might possibly prove her cherished father to have been a dirty cop.

We’re equally ecstatic to announce that the host for this special program, in which funds raised will help CLHOF’s myriad programming throughout the year, will be the fabulous Oak Park bed and breakfast, Bishops Hall.

Built…

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Newspaper comics started as a hook to attract readers—a quick laugh on the way to becoming fish or gift wrap, something to catch the coffee grinds. But over the past century, the throw-away funnies have evolved into a major art form. Chicago has been at the center of the movement. When Claire Briggs created A. Piker Clerk for the Chicago American in 1903, Chicago planted its flag as a pioneer in comic arts. Since then, comic artists have created an uninterrupted chain of memorable and important characters, and in so doing transformed comics into a form that deftly explores subjects…

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Edna Ferber’s 1912 collection of a dozen short stories amounted to a coming out party for an author who would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize and generally be considered among the greatest and most prolific American authors of the 1920s and 30s. The New York Times, reviewing the collection on June 9, 1912, wrote, “Edna Ferber is the Chicago O. Henry. Her short stories have the crispness of the genius named, the vividness, the nervousness.” The stories feature street-wise working women grinding it out as stenographers, shopkeepers, actresses, and other marginally-rewarded occupations. The stories are brisk, irreverent, fun, and mostly…

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Adam Morgan (publisher, Chicago Review of Books) leads a conversation about the Chicago comic book scene, including its evolution from the early strips to contemporary trends. He'll be joined by cultural anthropologist Stanford W. Carpenter (Rice University, Institute for Comic Studies, Cosmic Underground) and top comic book creators Michael Moreci (Roche Limit, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash) and Ashley A. Woods (Niobe, Lady Castle)  In partnership with Chicago Literarcy Alliance and Chicago Review of Books. Free and open to the public.

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