20171126

Heid E. Erdrich November 30 at the American Writer’s Museum



American Writer’s Museum, 800 N. Michigan Avenue, Second Floor at 5 pm

Reading and signing with Heid E. Erdrich, the author Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media and five collections of poetry from Michigan State University Press.

Heid E. Erdrich writes from the present into the future where human anxiety lives. Many of her poems engage around the visual work of contemporary artists who, like Erdrich, are Anishinaabe. (the autonym for a group of culturally related indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States that include the Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Oji-Cree, Mississaugas, Chippewa, and Algonquin peoples).

These poems recognize how our love of technology - and how the extraction industries on indigenous lands that technology requires - threaten our future and obscure the realities of indigenous peoples who know what it is to survive apocalypse.   Despite how little communications technology has helped to bring people toward understanding one another, these poems speak to the keen human yearning to connect as they urge engagement of the image, the moment, the sensual, and the real. 

We will be on hand to sell books before and after the event.

20171114

Chicago Books to Women in Prison 15th Anniversary Party, November 15th 6pm-9pm



CBWP 15th Anniversary Social Media Post 3We hope you can join us in the after-words event space helping one of our favorite charities celebrate 15 years of providing a lifeline to women in prison!

Suggested donation $15 (or pay what you can)

The program for the evening includes writer, scholar and artist Eve Ewing.  She will read from her widely acclaimed Electric Arches.  

KoStar, an amazing soul duo, will perform. You may have seen them at the farewell event for Rasmea Odeh, the African Festival of the Arts or many other venues.  Monica Cosby, a writer and activist, will speak on the importance of books for people in prison.  And, members of Praxilla Femina—a women’s music collective of professional opera singers—will sing.

And it’s also a release party! Monica will read selections from Bound Struggles, our re-launched journal of writing and art by women in prison. Everyone at the party will get a copy.

To purchase a ticket in advance, please visit https://chicagobwp.org.   Please help us celebrate an amazing charity with a phenomenal mission!

20171112

Cheryl Reed author of Poison Girls November 14 at Cliff Dwellers




Product DetailsCliff Dwellers 200 S. Michigan 22nd floor penthouse
6pm Social Hour (cash bar, free appetizers)
7pm Reading, signing to follow

Award-winning investigative reporter Cheryl Reed proves equally talented in the world of fiction with this, her first novel.  In Poison Girls, it is 2008.  Chicago’s Hyde Park Senator is running for president, the city is vying to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, and “poison”—a lethal form of heroin, has killed more than 250 people - including dozens of suburban girls from prominent families.

Natalie Delaney, a crime reporter at the Chicago Times, discovers that daughters of Democratic powerhouses are the real targets of a serial killer who uses drugs instead of a gun.  Obsessed with finding who is behind the killings, Delaney becomes entangled in an underworld where drugs, cops, gangs, politics and privilege collide.

No registration required.  Free and open to the public. 

20171108

James McGrath Morris at the American Writer's Museum November 9th



 
At the American Writer’s Museum, 800 N. Michigan Avenue, Second Floor.

James McGrath Morris The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War 5 pm

James McGrath Morris discusses his new novel about the friendship of Ernest Hemingway and John Don Passos, which began during World War I. Eager to find his way in life and words, John Dos Passos first witnessed the horror of trench warfare in France as a volunteer ambulance driver retrieving the dead and seriously wounded from the front line. Later in the war, he briefly met another young writer, Ernest Hemingway, who was just arriving for his service in the ambulance corps. When the war was over, both men knew they had to write about it; they had to give voice to what they felt about war and life.

Their friendship and collaboration developed through the peace of the 1920s and 1930s, as Hemingway's novels soared to success while Dos Passos penned the greatest antiwar novel of his generation, Three Soldiers. In war, Hemingway found adventure, women, and a cause. Dos Passos saw only oppression and futility. Their different visions eventually turned their private friendship into a bitter public fight, fueled by money, jealousy, and lust.

Rich in evocative detail--from Paris cafes to the Austrian Alps, from the streets of Pamplona to the waters of Key West--The Ambulance Drivers is a biography of a turbulent friendship between two of the century's greatest writers, and an illustration of how war both inspires and destroys, unites and divides.

Books will be sold before and after the event.