Past Events

Part of the larger Chicago Black Renaissance, the literary movement started in the 1930s and continued to foster important African-America authors through the 1950s. On this bus tour, we’ll visit some of the foundational cultural institutions of the movement (George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library, South Side Community Art Center, The Chicago Defender) as well as the homes of iconic authors (Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry). Along the way, we’ll explore how these and other authors used their personal experiences and observations of the city to create literature that explored the devastating effects of prejudice during the Jim Crow era and up to the Civil Rights movement. Registration is $40 and limited to 50 people. You can reserve seats for the tour through Eventbrite.

The Caxton Club's newly-released Chicago By the Book maps out a history of our city through some of its most important literature. For this panel discussion, which includes moderator Donald G. Evans, author Sandi Wisenberg, Newberry Library's Director of Chicago Studies Liesl Olson, University of Chicago scholar Kenneth Warren, and Nelson Algren biographer Mary Wisniewski, we're going to focus on entry #61: Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide. The Illinois unit of the Federal Writers Project's employed some of Chicago's finest literary minds, most before they were known to the general public. Richard Wright, Algren, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, Sam Ross, Arna Bontemps, and others turned out narratives for this government agency that included the guide book we'll use as the center piece of our discussion.  We'll explore this government initiative to support artists, as well as other such endeavors, and discuss the impact it had on future careers. Within Chicago By The Book are many examples of FWP's impact: #62 (Wright's Native Son), #71 (Algren's Chicago: City on the Make), #76 (Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March). #84 (Terkel's Division Street). Also, Bellow interviewed James T. Farrell (#51: Studs Lonigan trilogy) for the FWP. Join us at City Lit Books, one of Chicago's finest indepenent bookstores, for a modest reception and then discussion. Free and open to the public, including a modest reception. This event made possible through partnerships with The Caxton Club and City Lit Books.

The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame invites middle school students to attend a poetry workshop led by Jerikah Greene at Little Black Pearl's Carver 47 Cafe. Inspired by the life and work of Gwendolyn Brooks, this workshop provides a unique opportunity for students to express themselves through poetry. It is the first in a series of three youth writing workshops this spring, but the only available to middle schoolers. Registration is required, and will be limited to 15 students. Register early to secure a place in the workshop.

Students will:

• Compose their own poems.

• Read their poems to an audience in Gwendolyn Brooks Park.

• See their work published by the CLHOF.

CLHOF plans to create a limited-run print anthology that will be available through Little Black Pearl; the electronic copy will be made available on our website.

Jerakah Greene studies creative writing, literature, and sexuality studies at Columbia College Chicago. They were the Fall 2018 reviews editor for Hair Trigger 2.0,  where they have a review and interview published. They have also been published in The Lab Review. This workshop is made possible through a The Chicago Community Trust grant and the participation of Little Black Pearl.

Our Great Chicago Books Club on Sunday, March 10, will feature Rosellen Brown’s The Lake on Fire, the author’s first fictional foray into the Chicago landscape after nearly a quarter century living in the city. We'll have the event at Ronne Hartfield’s beautiful Hyde Park condominium, not far from the setting of Rosellen’s story, which takes place around the Columbian Exposition.

The evening begins with a cocktails at five p.m., followed by a sit-down dinner from 5:30-6:30 p.m. Dessert will be served during the book discussion, which begins at 6:30 p.m.  

Registration is limited to ten for the whole program, and an additional five for discussion/dessert only. The cost for the full program is $150. Cost for the discussion/dessert only is $50. 

All money raised at this and other Great Chicago Books Club events helps fund our (mostly free) programming throughout the year, including our annual induction ceremony and lifetime achievement ceremonies for Sara Paretsky and Sterling Plumpp.

Please contact Don Evans to make reservations, get the proper event address, and to arrange pickup/delivery of your book. We want to make sure you get it in time to read.

The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, The Phantom Collective, Snickersnee Press, and the Newberry Library’s program in Chicago Studies, in collaboration with the Shakespeare Project of Chicago, present a morning devoted to playwright Kenneth Goodman (1883-1918) and his legacy.

Florice Whyte Kovan will introduce Goodman and his importance to the Chicago literary scene of the early twentieth century. The Shakespeare Project of Chicago, directed by Peter Garino, and featuring actors Deborah Clifton, John Kishline, Daniel Millhouse, Grace Smith, and Randy Steinmeyer, will stage a theatrical reading of his play Back of the Yards. Finally, there will be a talkback discussion with the audience about the play and Goodman’s contributions to Chicago literature with dramaturg June Skinner Sawyers and the director and cast.

The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Goodman, the son of wealthy lumber barons, was, in those early years of the 20th century, one of the leaders of the Chicago Renaissance. His plays, which he wrote alone and with collaborators such as Ben Hecht, ranged from realism to farce, and frequently opened in Chicago’s “little theaters.”

Goodman’s passion for the theater led him to establish the Chicago Theatre Society in 1911 and an “art university” combing a theatre and training program for drama students at the Art Institute in the summer of 1915. Goodman also headed the Prints Department at the Art Institute of Chicago, and his idea was to build upon (with greater resources) the “little theater” scene’s aesthetics, including a determination to include new and often controversial voices.

But Goodman died young, just 35 years old when he passed at his family home on North Astor Street during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Four years later, Goodman’s parents proposed to the Art Institute’s Board of Trustees the creation of a memorial theatre in their son’s memory. The Goodman Memorial Theatre, designed by architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, opened on Oct. 20, 1925. That night, the theatre’s professional company, the Reparatory Company, presented three Goodman plays at the dedication performance: Back of the Yards, The Green Scarf, and The Game of Chess.

Back of the Yards was published in 1914, and opens at a kitchen table in the title neighborhood: a mother, a priest, and a cop. The conversation skirts around a recent shooting and avoids the real subject, the suspicion that the mother’s adolescent son was involved. Goodman uses a dialogue-heavy scene to capture the essence of the characters; in the process, he provides insight into the neighborhood at large. Each character has his or her own responsibilities, each his or her own fears, each his or her own sense of loyalty. Together, though, the characters in Back of the Yards comprise a portrait of a neighborhood, and how it acts and reacts in support of a higher purpose.

Please reserve your seat for the event. Doors open at 9:30 a.m.; donuts and coffee will be available.

The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame will induct Henry Blake Fuller, Marita Bonner, and Robert Sengstacke Abbott as its newest class on Nov. 16. In large part because of Fuller's importance to the club, which got its name from his novel The Cliff-Dwellers, this event will be held at Cliff Dwellers. Though this is a private club, the event is open to the public. Reservations are required. Cost of dinner is $30; to reseve a seat for the program only costs $10. There is a cash bar beginning at 4:30 p.m.; dinner is served at 6:15 p.m.; the ceremony starts promptly at 7:15 p.m. Reservations can also be made by phone at 312-922-8080.

Speakers for the evening include Ethan Michaeli, author of the critically acclaimed book The Defender; Myiti Sengstacke-Rice, great grand-niece of Abbott; Richard Guzman, author of Black Writing from Chicago; and Bill Getzoff, prominent Cliff Dwellers member.

After seven classes of six writers, CLHOF has reduced its class size to three, partly in order to ensure the highest standards for selection and in part to allow more detailed commentary on each writer at the ceremony. All 45 CLHOF inductees, including this new class, were selected after a rigorous process that relied on the expertise and passion of the finest minds in our literary community. Nominators and selectors include a range of scholars, authors, artists, and others known for their close and relentless interest in Chicago literature.

Almost right from that moment--the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month--when the shooting stopped, American writers set out to capture the essence of their experiences with that war and that peace. War and peace, along with love and death, constitute the most enduring and important topics of literary exploration, here and across the globe. How American writers have grappled with such profound and disturbing themes speaks much to our national consciousness, and also the diversity of our experiences. War and peace manifest themselves differently to different people. On the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, an extraordinary blend of literary artists will share their stories (as well as the stories of others throughout literary history). Readers include Haki Madhubuti, Nina Corwin, Reginald Gibbons, Chris Green, and contributors to his anthology I Remember: Chicago Veterans of War, and Gerald Brennan, among others. This event is free and open to the public, and is co-sponsored by American Writers Museum and Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. Admission to the museum entitles guests to attend the reading.

Stuart Dybek, considered among the best short story writers of his generation and also acclaimed for his poetry, will be honored with a Fuller Award for lifetime achievement at the Poetry Foundation on Tuesday, Oct. 30, from 7--9:30 p.m. Dybek grew up in Chicago’s Little Village and has written extensively about Chicago, particularly in his brilliant short story collections A Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, Paper Lantern: Love Stories, and Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories. His novel-in-stories, I Sailed with Magellan, as well as his two poetry collections, Brass Knuckles and Streets in their Own Ink, also explore the city. Dybek’s many literary awards include MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, a Pen/Malamud Award, and a Lannan Prize. He has been Northwestern University’s Distinguished Writer in Residence for the past decade. Speakers from throughout the literary community will pay tribute to Dybek, including Bill Savage, Henry Bienen, Donna Seaman, Mark Turcotte, Alex Kotlowitz, Malcolm O’Hagan, Rachel Jamison Webster, Reginald Gibbons, Mary Dempsey, Dennis Zacek, and Scott Turow. A reception will follow the program. Free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 and it’s advisable to arrive early.

It's the twentieth anniversary of Don De Grazia's American Skin, and the novel is at least as relevant today as when it first came out. The story of teenager Alex Verdi's move from a downstate farmhouse to the big city harkens back to great Chicago realists like Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Floyd Dell. The gritty 80s landscape has, to some extent, left Nelson Algren's Neon Wilderness behind, but in other ways it's updated the clouds in this seemingly glorious skyline. Alex's struggle to find himself, notably in a community of skinheads, leads to a brilliant, inspiring exploration of race, wealth, family, work, and success. We're honored to have Don be our special guest at this month's installment of the Great Chicago Books Club, which raises funds for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame's (mostly free) programming throughout the year. The first half of the evening is a cocktail party; the second half is a discussion with Don about his novel and career. The event will be held at a private home in Lincoln Park--we'll give you the address when you register for the event. Cost is $40, and includes appetizers and drinks. Registration is limited to 15 people, and can be done simply by emailing or calling Don Evans (773.414.2603).

On Sept. 15, 2018, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame will host a fundraiser in the fabulous penthouse party room of the 1700 Building. All proceeds from the evening will go to fund programming throughout the year, including our end-of-the-year induction ceremony and our next Fuller Award for lifetime achievement. 

The main activities for the evening are Trivia and our Silent Auction, but it is also an evening of food, drink, music, conversation, and a spectacular lake view

Teams of five to seven players will compete for prizes and boasting rights. The cost is $30 per person and includes drink and food. Gather your friends to form your own team, or sign up as an individual and we’ll place you with other singles. 

Due to space limitations, reservations are limited to 10 teams or 70 total players. Please reserve your tickets for a fun evening that will help the CLHOF continue doing its best to serve our literary community. 

There will be a good dose of Chicago and literary themed trivia questions, along with more general knowledge questions in a variety of categories.

Silent auction items will include original artwork, collectible books, theme baskets (such as At the Movies, Play Ball, and Sweet Tooth), tickets for cultural events around town, special experiential packages, and much more. Time will be built into the Trivia contest—before, after, and between rounds—in order for people to bid on items. There will be a half hour at the completion of trivia for guests to make final bids. We accept cash, credit cards and checks. 

Thanks for your participation and see you on Sept. 15! Please email Don Evans if you'd like to make a donation to the silent auction.