Far South Side Literary Bus Tour

Saturday, July 11, 2026
10 a.m.-3 p.m.

Chicago goes south all the way to 138th Street, where the Riverdale and Hegewisch neighborhoods bump up against suburban Dolton and Calumet City. Keep going past Hyde Park and you'll find a lot of literary history, and life. In the Pullman neighborood, Philip Randolph wrote influential essays on labor and social justice. The steel mills and dump sites, along with the immigrant experience, are reflected in East Sider Hugo Martinez-Serros's short stories. Tony Fitzpatrick's Bum Town starts on the East Side and covers other far South Side neighborhoods. Frank London Brown's masterpiece Trumbull Park dramatizes the racial redlining in the South Deering neighborhood. John Powers used his upbringing in the Mt. Greenwood neighborhood as the raw material for his Catholic trilogy, which included Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the far South Side, in "Beverly Hills, Chicago" and other poems. Eric Charles May uses his childhood neighborhood of Morgan Park as the basis for the fictional Parkland neighborhood in his acclaimed novel, Bedrock Faith. The poet Nate Marshall's seminar Chicago poetry collection, Wild Hundreds, uses the Roseland neighborhood he knows so well. South Shore authors included Carlo Rotella, Garbriel Bump, and James T. Farrell. Nelson Algren's first Chicago home was in the Park Manor neighborhood. 

We'll begin and end the tour at Third World Press, Chicago's longest-running Black publisher, which resides in the Grand Crossing neighborhood. 

The registration fee of $75 includes beverages and snacks on the bus. We'll stop somewhere for lunch. Bus capacity is 55, and we expect the seats to be sold out quickly. Registration is now open.