Guests

Cristela Alonzo made history in 2014 when she became the first Latina to create, produce and star in her own network sitcom, “Cristela” for ABC. In 2017 Cristela made history again when she became the first Latina lead in a Disney Pixar film when she voiced the part of “Cruz Ramirez” in Cars 3. Her first stand-up special, Lower Classy, is currently streaming on Netflix and her second special will also premiere on Netflix in 2022. Cristela’s memoir, Music to My Years, was released in October of 2019 by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Alphabet Rockers is a multiracial, intergenerational, two-time Grammy-nominated group that has been speaking truth to power for over a decade through children’s media – music, videos, curriculum, performances…and now books!

You Are Not Alone is an empathetic and inclusive picture book that empowers kids to love themselves and their identities, stand up to hate, and to have each others’ backs no matter what. It can be scary to feel like you’re all on your own, especially in the face of prejudice. But always remember: you are not alone! Based on Alphabet Rockers empowering song “Not Alone,” You Are Not Alone reminds kids that they always belong.

Books will be available for purchase and the authors will be signing.

Marie is a Peruvian-American author of nonfiction and fiction as well as the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. She is the recipient of a 2020 literary award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Among her recent positions are: Director of the National Book Festival, the John W. Kluge Center’s Chair of the Cultures of the Countries of the South, and Writer at Large for the Washington Post. For many years, she was editor-in-chief of the Washington Post’s book review section, Book World.

Marie has also written for the New York Times, the National Geographic, Time Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, Spain’s El País, Colombia’s El Tiempo, and Peru’s El Comercio, among many other publications. Her sweeping history of Latin America, Silver, Sword, and Stone, was named Best Nonfiction Book of 2019 by the American Library Association, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence. Her biography of Simón Bolívar won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Marie’s memoir, American Chica, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. She has also published two prizewinning novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights.

A New York Times bestselling author, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong has written seven pop culture history books, including Seinfeldia; When Women Invented Television; Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted; and Sex and the City and Us. Her work appears in many publications, including BBC Culture, The New York Times Book Review, Vice, New York magazine, and Billboard.

Jabari Asim is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at Emerson College, where he is also the Elma Lewis Distinguished Fellow in Social Justice. His nonfiction books include The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why; What Obama Means: For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future; Not Guilty: Twelve Black Men Speak Out on Law, Justice, and Life; and We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival. His books for children include Whose Toes Are Those? and Preaching to the Chickens: The Story of Young John Lewis. His works of fiction include A Taste of Honey and Only the Strong.

Andrea Beaty is the author of many beloved children’s books, including the bestselling Questioners series, Attack of the Fluffy Bunnies, Happy Birthday, Madame Chapeau, and One Girl. She lives just outside Chicago.

Lauren DeJulio Bell currently teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago Honors College. She has previously worked with the Chicago Teachers Pipeline Program (via Illinois State University) and as a consultant in DePaul’s education courses. Prior to university teaching, Lauren taught high school English and Drama in the Chicago Public Schools. A longtime resident of Chicago, Lauren earned her B.A. and M.Ed. at DePaul University. Her passions include activism, equity, inclusivity, the arts, and connecting to/advocating for humanity. As such, she is heavily immersed in the arts/writing scene and the local community. Lauren is on the Associate Board of StoryStudio Chicago and is involved in multiple Chicago organizations. She also leads a local project (We are All Chicago), where she engages with the people of our schools and neighborhoods to foster civic engagement, community writing, and artistic endeavors. Outside of work, she loves sports, reading, traveling, writing, and hanging out with her family and friends (along with her 2 dogs).

Dr. Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit, Arc & Hue, and the forthcoming Refuse to Disappear. She is the inaugural Poet for the People Practitioner Fellow at University of Chicago and founder of Whirlwind Learning Center. She is currently teaching poetry classes at Northwestern University.

Betsy Bird is the Collection Development Manager of Evanston Public Library and the former Youth Materials Specialist of New York Public Library. She writes for the School Library Journal blog A Fuse #8 Production and reviews for Kirkus. She is the host of the Story Seeds podcast as well as the co-host of the podcast Fuse 8 n’ Kate. Betsy is the author of nonfiction, picture books, anthologies, and the new historical middle grade novel Long Road to the Circus, illustrated by David Small. You can follow Betsy at @FuseEight on Twitter or at betsybirdbooks.com.

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom; American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life, and been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others.

Archie Bongiovanni is a queer comic artist living in Minneapolis. They’re the co-creator of the bestselling comic A Quick And Easy Guide To They/Them Pronouns which has been praised by Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal. Their comic Grease Bats was published on Autostraddle for seven years before being printed as a collection by Boom Studios in 2019. Archie is the author of History Comics: Stonewall, drawn by A. Andrews, published this year by First Second and their original graphic novel Mimosa, published by Surely Press, will be out Spring 2023. Archie has appeared in The New Yorker, Vice, Electric Literature, and The Nib.

Todd Brewster is a veteran journalist and historian who has worked as an editor for Time and Life and as a senior producer for ABC News. He is the coauthor, with Peter Jennings, of the #1 New York Times bestselling book, The Century, which spent nearly a year on the bestseller list, and the author of the acclaimed Lincoln’s Gamble. Brewster was the founding director of Center for Oral History at West Point and the executive producer of Into Harm’s Way, an award-winning documentary about the West Point Class of 1967. He has taught journalism at Temple University and Mount Holyoke College. A native of Indianapolis, Brewster was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 2000. He lives in Connecticut.

J. Nicole Brooks is an actor, author and director. Selected acting credits include Lottery Day (Goodman Theatre, New Stages Festival), Beyond Caring, Death Tax, and RACE(Lookingglass Theatre Company), Immediate Family (Center Theatre Group) and House Home (Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, China). Directing credits include Mr. Rickey Calls A Meeting, Thaddeus & Slocum: A Vaudeville Adventure and Black Diamond the Years the Locusts Have Eaten. Brooks is author of HeLa, Fedra Queen of Haiti, Black Diamond, and 3 Weeks With Her Honor Jane Byrne. Television credits including recurring roles on Showtime’s The Chi and Comedy Central’s South Side. She is a mutli-award winning artist honored by 3Arts, TCG Fox Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Black Ensemble Theatre Playwright of the Year, LA Ovation and Black Theatre Alliance. She is an ensemble member of Lookingglass Theatre Company.

Alicia is a restorative justice practitioner, circle keeper, and abolitionist. She enjoys writing and was recently published in the Envisioning Justice Curricular Concepts Resource Guide, Incarcerated Mothers: Illinois Humanities (2019). Additionally, she performs pieces that she has written.

Alicia is a proud mother of four beautiful children, and she strives to make the world a better place for them.

Liberation Library provides books to youth in prison to encourage literacy, imagination, self-determination, and connection to outside worlds of their choosing. Liberation Library believes access to books is a right, not a privilege, and that books and relationships empower young people to change the criminal legal system.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone is director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and Executive Director of the Freedom to Read Foundation. For nearly two decades she has supported and advised libraries, librarians, and trustees addressing book censorship and privacy issues in their libraries. She is a former appellate litigator.

Karen Chee is an Emmy-nominated comedian and writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers. She has also written for the Golden Globes, Yearly Departed, and The New Yorker. Karen has also acted and done other stuff but it’s kinda weird to just keeping listing things, right? Anyway, if you’d like to say hi, she is active on Twitter and Instagram, @karencheee. (Unfortunately.)

Dhonielle Clayton spent most of her childhood under her grandmother’s table with a stack of books. She hails from the Washington, D.C. suburbs on the Maryland side. She is the author of the Tiny Pretty Things series (recently adapted by Netflix) and The Belles series. She earned an MA in Children’s Literature from Hollins University and an MFA in Writing for Children at the New School. Now, she is a librarian at Harlem Village Academies, is one of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks librarians, and co-founder of CAKE Literary. The Marvellers is her debut middle grade novel.

Jacoby Cochran is a writer, educator, and storyteller from the South Side of Chicago. He is the host of City Cast Chicago, a daily news podcast about all things Chicago! The podcast was named Best of 2021 by the Chicago Reader and Chicago Magazine calls it “the essential Chicago podcast.” Jacoby has voiced national campaigns like AT&T’s, “We Are Believers” and Best Buy/Gizmodo’s “What’s Next In Tech,” and led workshops for Boys & Girls Club, Spotify, and Google. Outside of recording, Jacoby hosts live shows, loves to cook, and can be seen with his camera most of the time.

Deborah Cohen is the author of The War Come Home, Household Gods, and Family Secrets. She is the Richard W. Leopold Professor of History at Northwestern University. She writes regularly for the Atlantic, and reviews for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Review of Books. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

Soyica Diggs Colbert is the Idol Family Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University. Colbert’s most recent book, Radical Vision: a Biography of Lorraine Hansberry, is also described as “A devoted and deeply felt account of the development of an artist’s mind,” according to Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review. 

Colbert’s writing has been featured in the Washington Post, Public Books, Metrograph and American Theatre. She have been interviewed on NPR and commented for the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, and the Washington Post. She is an Associate Director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. 

Carlos Cumpián, a Chicagoan originally from Texas, is the author of five poetry collections: Coyote Sun, Latino Rainbow, Armadillo Charm, 14 Abriles, and his newest Human Cicada (Prickly Pear Publishing, 2022). He has been included in more than thirty poetry anthologies, including the Norton Anthology Telling Stories. His literacy essay, “Learned to Read at My Momma’s Knee,” appears in With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano Readerships Across the Centuries. Cumpián currently is working on his memoir, Accidental Rebel: 1968-1976, and recording his many paranormal accounts.

Jarrett Dapier is the author of the picture books Mr. Watson’s Chickens (Chronicle Books), Jazz For Lunch! (Simon & Schuster), and The Most Haunted House in America (forthcoming from Abrams Kids in August 2022). Also a librarian, he is the recipient of the 2016 John Phillip Immroth Award given by the American Library Association for his research which uncovered previously suppressed information about the 2013 censorship of the graphic novel Persepolis in Chicago Public Schools. His first graphic novel – Wake Now in the Fire – is based on this research and will be released by Chronicle Books in 2023.

Andrew Davis has been executive editor of the Chicago-based LGBTQ+ media outlet Windy City Times since 2018. He joined the outlet as a full-time reporter in 2004 and became managing editor in 2007. He is a graduate of Randolph-Macon College and the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

RC Davis is a high school senior and poet from Oak Park, Illinois. He began writing poetry seriously his freshman year when he joined his high school’s spoken word club and is a two-time competitor in the Chicago spoken word competition Louder Than a Bomb. His poems frequently wrestle with questions of gender and family and the strangeness of being a human with a brain and body. He is a winner of a 2019 Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Award and has been published in Driftwood, Blue Marble Review, and 3Elements Review. RC is an apprentice editor for BreakBread Literary Magazine, which focuses on the publication of writers under 25. He owes his poetic successes to the encouragement he has received from his slam team and his teachers.

Aanika Eragam is a senior at Milton High School in Milton, Georgia who serves as the 2021 National Student Poet for the Southeast. Through her mother’s bedtime tales of South Indian mythology, Aanika was first exposed to the power of storytelling in connecting her to her cultural heritage, unlocking foreign perspectives, and exploring history. Since then, she’s written poetry and creative nonfiction about culture, family, girlhood, and body image. Aanika serves as the 2021 Atlanta Youth Poet Laureate and the Editor-in-Chief of her high school literary magazine The Globe.

Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of education and a writer from Chicago. She is the author of Electric Arches, which received awards from the American Library Association and the Poetry Society of America and was named one of the year’s best books by NPR and the Chicago Tribune. She is also the author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, the writer of Marvel Comics’ Ironheart series, and the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues.

Ashley C. Ford’s New York Times best-selling memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, was published by Flatiron Books in June 2021. Ford is the former host of The Chronicles of Now podcast, co-host of The HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio. She currently lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband, poet and fiction writer Kelly Stacy, and their chocolate lab Astro Renegade Ford-Stacy.

A Second City Detroit alumnus with 18+ years of experience as a performer, producer and facilitator, Dionna Griffin-Irons has taught 200+ workshops at colleges, corporate boardrooms, women’s shelters and worked with the United States Embassy in Norway and Latvia introducing improv as a tool for social change. Griffin-Irons’s outreach work has appeared in Diversity Journal publication, on NPR, ABC, NBC and numerous academic posts including her 2015 TEDx Talk at the University of Chicago. Producer credits include 20+ “Urban Twist” revues, Second City Southside, R.E.A.C.H. (Risky, Eclectic Artists Comedy Hour), Second City Black History Month Show, and Second City & NBC Break Out Comedy Festival. Her 2014 published work can be found in Rowan/Littlefield’s anthology Women, Writing and Prison. She is currently writing a memoir on the intersection of comedy, diversity and women in prison.

Kevin Gu is a Chinese American from Boston and the 2021 National Student Poet of the Northeast. His work has been included in Rattle, The National Poetry Quarterly, Ember Journal, and The Eunoia Review among others. On his off days, he enjoys hunting for underrated boba shops and eating cold watermelon.

Peter Gwinn won two Emmy Awards as one of the original writers for The Colbert Report. He wrote for the Amazon series Alpha House, created by Garry Trudeau. His play Twist Your Dickens has been produced in six cities, and his musical The Story of a Story (The Untold Story) received a Jeff Award nomination for Best New Work. Peter is the founder of Baby Wants Candy, a troupe that improvises hour-long musicals, which was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and sold out multiple runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He currently writes for Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me.

In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position and only the second person to serve three terms in the role. Harjo’s nine books of poetry include An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. She is also the author of two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, which invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. She has edited several anthologies of Native American writing including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words, the companion anthology to her signature poet laureate project. Her many writing awards include the 2019 Jackson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and holds a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally; her most recent album is I Pray For My Enemies. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Zakiya Dalila Harris spent nearly three years working in book publishing before leaving to write her debut novel The Other Black Girl, which was an instant New York Times bestseller. Zakiya received her MFA in creative writing from The New School, and her essays and reviews have appeared in Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Guernica, and The Rumpus. She lives in Brooklyn.

Brooks E. Hefner is Roop Distinguished Professor of English at James Madison University. He has published a host of articles and book chapters on U.S. modernism, popular culture, and film, as well as two books: The Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism (U of Virginia P, 2017) and Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow (U of Minnesota P, 2021). He is also the co-director of Circulating American Magazines, a project funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant.

Marc Lamont Hill is an award-winning journalist and host of BET News, as well as a political contributor to CNN. He is a Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Morehouse College. Prior to that, he held positions at Columbia University and Temple University. He lives in Atlanta and New York City.

Angela Jackson, the fifth Illinois Poet Laureate, is an award-winning poet, novelist, and playwright who has published three chapbooks and four volumes of poetry. Born in Greenville, Mississippi and raised on Chicago’s Southside, she was educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Kosoko Jackson is a digital media specialist, focusing on digital storytelling, email, social and SMS marketing, and a freelance political journalist. Occasionally, his personal essays and short stories have been featured on Medium, Thought Catalog, The Advocate, and some literary magazines. When not writing YA novels that champion holistic representation of black queer youth across genres, he can be found obsessing over movies, drinking his (umpteenth) London Fog, or spending far too much time on Twitter. His YA debut, Yesterday is History, will come out in 2021, published by SourceBooks Fire and his adult #OwnVoices queer Romcom, I’m So (Not) Over You, will come out in 2022, by Berkley Romance.

Mallessa James is an emerging writer and artist whose work explores blackness, science, and theopoetics. Her writing has appeared in The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry; The Black Liberation Blueprint; Gumbo Magazine; Edge Effects; and BLUU Notes: An Anthology of Love, Justice, and Liberation. Originally from the occupied lands of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations (Chicago, Illinois), she identifies as a Black, sci-fi fantasy loving, cis-female person of the global majority; currently resides on the occupied lands of the Powhatan Confederacy (Richmond, Virginia); and enjoys extended walks, expansive conversations, and extra spicy food.

Will Jawando is an attorney, an activist, a community leader, and a councilmember in Montgomery County, Maryland, a diverse community of more than one million residents. Called “the progressive leader we need” by the late congressman John Lewis, Jawando has worked with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Sherrod Brown, and President Barack Obama. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post and The Root and on BET.com, and his work has been featured in The New York Times and New York magazine and on NPR, NBC News, and MTV. He regularly appears on CNN, MSNBC and other media outlets.

Jac Jemc is the author of the novels Total Work of Art; My Only Wife, winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award; The Grip of It; and the short-story collections A Different Bed Every Time and False Bingo, winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction and finalist for the Story Prize. Jemc currently teaches creative writing at UC–San Diego.

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is the author of My Monticello, a fiction debut that was called “a masterly feat” by the New York Times and finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Johnson has been a fellow at TinHouse, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing appears in Guernica, The Guardian and elsewhere. Her short story “Control Negro” was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2018, guest edited by Roxane Gay, who called it, “one hell of a story” and read live by LeVar Burton as part of PRI’s Selected Shorts series. A veteran public school art teacher, Johnson lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Nicole Shawan Junior (they/them) is the Deputy Director of Prison and Justice Writing at PEN America. They founded Roots. Wounds. Words., an organization that provides BIPOC-led and -centered literary arts pedagogy, publication and performance opportunities. Nicole’s writing appears in The Sentences That Create Us, Guernica, The Rumpus, Gay Mag, ZORA, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. They have received residencies and fellowships from Hedgebrook, Tin House, PERIPLUS, NYFA, Lambda Literary, and many more. They served as editor-in-chief of Black Femme Collective and on the editorial teams at Women’s Studies Quarterly of the Feminist Press and SLICE Magazine.

Maxine Hong Kingston was born to Chinese immigrant parents in Stockton, California in 1940 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. A long-time member of the Berkeley faculty, she is currently Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing.

Her nonfiction books include The Woman Warrior, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, China Men, which was awarded the National Book Award in 1981, Hawaii One Summer, Through the Black Curtain, To Be the Poet, and The Fifth Book of Peace. She has written one novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. Kingston is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the title of “Living Treasure of Hawaii.”

Len Lawson is the author of Chime (Get Fresh Books, 2019) and an editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Press, 2021). He has earned fellowships from Tin House, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Callaloo, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts among others. His poetry appears in African American Review, Callaloo, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Born and living in South Carolina, Len earned a PhD in English Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is currently Assistant Professor of English at Newberry College.

Kelly Lytle Hernández holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and directs the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. A 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! and City of Inmates. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad-HarperCollins, forthcoming 2023), editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Publishing, 2021), and author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). Manick is Founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue and her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Callaloo, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently serves on the board of the International Women’s Writing Guild and the editorial board of Alice James Books.

Daiva Markelis is professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, Crab Orchard Review, The American Literary Review, Oyez, The Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Writing on the Edge, Women and Language, The Chicago Reader, Mattoid, and The Fourth River. Her short stories have been published in The Cream City Review and Other Voices. In 2010, the University of Chicago Press published her memoir, White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life.

Juan Martinez is the author of the short-story collection Best Worst American, winner of the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award. His work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, Norton’s Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America, and The Perpetual Engine of Hope: Stories Inspired by Iconic Vegas Photographs.

Kechi Mbah is a senior at Carnegie Vanguard High School and a Houston native. She first found a love for poetry when she stumbled upon a YouTube video of a Brave New Voices slam competition in the fall of 2019 and has been performing and writing poetry ever since. Her poetry explores many avenues from making the known strange to chronicling her experiences as a Nigerian-American and the histories of her people. She currently serves as the 2021 National Student Poet of the Southwest and her work can be found in Blue Marble Review, The Incandescent Review, elementia, and elsewhere.

Caits Meissner is the director of Prison and Justice Writing at PEN America. She has taught, consulted, and co-created extensively for over 15 years across a wide spectrum of communities with a focus on prisons, public schools, and college classrooms at The New School and The City College of New York. In 2017, Meissner re-envisioned the concept of book tour for her illustrated poetry collection Let It Die Hungry, pairing public speaking engagements with opportunities to work with incarcerated writers across the United States.

Joe Meno is the author of seven novels: Marvel and a Wonder, Office Girl, The Great Perhaps, The Boy Detective Fails, Hairstyles of the Damned, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender as Hellfire. His short story collections are Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir and Demons in the Spring. His short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, One Story, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly, Other Voices, and Gulf Coast, and have been broadcast on NPR.

Sarah Fathima Mohammed, daughter of Indian Muslim immigrants, is the 2021-22 National Student Poet representing the West Region, the nation’s highest honor for youth poets. She writes poetry sourced in grief, faith, and longing because, for her people, these emotions are inherited. When she travels back to her hometown in Kumbakonam, India, Sarah sits in circles with girls at the mosque, reading Safia Elhillo and Fatimah Asghar’s anthology of Muslim voices, Halal If You Hear Me. When she is not writing, Sarah loves long morning walks with her family and listening to music by Yuna.

Faisal Mohyuddin is a writer, educator, and visual artist. The author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear Publishing, 2018) and the chapbook The Riddle of Longing (Backbone Press, 2017), his work has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, Prairie Schooner’s Edward Stanley Award, and acclaim from the Poetry Book Society, the Forward Arts Foundation, and the Association of Asian American Studies. He teaches at Highland Park High School in suburban Chicago and at the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University, and he serves as a master practitioner for Narrative 4.

Evan F. Moore is the co-author of the book, Game Misconduct: Hockey’s Toxic Culture and How to Fix It. His work over time, which consists of topics at the intersection of sports, race, and culture, is featured in Rolling Stone, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Magazine, The Athletic, Chicago Reader, and ESPN, among many others. His hockey writing was featured in the 2019 edition of The Best American Sports Writing book series. Evan is an adjunct journalism professor at DePaul University.

Leonard Moore is the George Littlefield Professor of American History at the University of Texas at Austin and a graduate of Jackson State University. He is the author of three books on Black politics, the most recent being The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972.

Natalie Y. Moore is an award-winning journalist based in Chicago, whose reporting tackles race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence.

Natalie’s acclaimed book The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation received the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and was Buzzfeed’s best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.

Elie Mystal is The Nation’s legal analyst and justice correspondent, an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center, and the legal editor of the More Perfect podcast on the Supreme Court for Radiolab. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, the former executive editor of Above the Law, a former associate at Debevoise & Plimpton, and a frequent guest on MSNBC and Sirius XM. The author of Allow Me to Retort (The New Press), he lives in New York.

Arionne Nettles is a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. As a culture reporter in print and audio, her stories often look into Chicago history, culture, gun violence, policing and race & class disparities as a contributor to the New York Times Opinion, Chicago Reader, The Trace, Medium’s ZORA and Momentum, Chicago PBS station WTTW and NPR affiliate WBEZ. She is also host of Is That True? A Kids Podcast About Facts.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed. His other books are a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.

Elizabeth Nunez is the award-winning author of a memoir and ten novels, four of them selected as New York Times Editors’ Choice. Anna In-Between won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and was long-listed for an IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award. Nunez also received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in nonfiction for Not for Everyday Use; an American Book Award; and a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award from the Trinidad and Tobago National Library. Her other novels are: Even in Paradise, Boundaries, Prospero’s Daughter, Bruised Hibiscus, Beyond the Limbo Silence, Grace, Discretion, and When Rocks Dance. She is a cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference and executive producer of the CUNY-TV series Black Writers in America. Nunez is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, where she teaches fiction writing. She divides her time between Amityville and Brooklyn, New York. Now Lila Knows is her latest novel.

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. His novella Riot Baby, a finalist for the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, the Ignyte, and the NAACP Image Awards, won the New England Book Award for Fiction and an ALA Alex Award. He holds a B.A. from Yale, a M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School for the Arts, a Master’s degree in droit économique from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana Magazine, Uncanny, and Lightspeed. His non-fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places.

Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 when she introduced V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. Paretsky challenged a genre where women typically were vamps or victims. Hailed by critics and readers, Indemnity Only was followed by twenty more best-selling Warshawski novels published in 30 countries.

V.I. reflects Paretsky’s passion for social justice, with strong advocacy for literacy and reproductive rights. In 1986 she created Sisters in Crime, earning her Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year award. Other awards include the British Crime Writers Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement; the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master; and several honorary doctorates.

Frances de Pontes Peebles is the author of the novels The Seamstress and The Air You Breathe. She is a Creative Writing Fellow in Literature for 2020 from The National Endowment for the Arts. Her books have been translated into ten languages and won the Elle Grand Prix for fiction, the Friends of American Writers Award, and the James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Fellowship. Her second novel, The Air You Breathe, was a Book of the Month Club pick. Born in Pernambuco, Brazil, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received a Fulbright Grant, Brazil’s Sacatar Foundation Fellowship, and was a Teaching Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her short stories and essays have appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Zoetrope: All-Story, Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Catapult, and Real Simple. Her novel, The Seamstress, was adapted for film and mini-series on Brazil’s Globo Network. She is proud to serve on the Board of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. In Spring 2019, she served as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Kristin Pekoll is the Assistant Director at the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom. She is a former youth librarian from Wisconsin and a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan who happens to live in Chicago Bears country. She is the author of Beyond Banned Books: Defending Intellectual Freedom throughout Your Library published by ALA Editions in 2019.

Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Jazz Studies. She is the author of 6 books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which received the Pen Bograd-Weld Award for Biography, The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for outstanding work in literary scholarship, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction and the Shilts-Grahn Award for nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle. Looking for Lorraine was also named a 2018 notable book by the New York Times, and a honor book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was a finalist for the African American Intellectual History Society Pauli Murray Book Prize. Her book May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, winner of the 2019 American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Book Award for the best book in American Studies, the Hurston Wright Award for Nonfiction, and finalist for an NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction. Her most recent book is: Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Beacon Press, 2019) which was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Alexandra Petri is an American humorist and newspaper columnist at the Washington Post. She lives in Washington, DC.

Poems While You Wait is a nonprofit collective of poets and their vintage typewriters who provide commissioned poetry on demand. We offer our poem-requesters an unexpected and unpretentious encounter with poetry, leaving them with a one-of-a-kind literary memento to keep for themselves or give to a friend.

The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today bestselling author, Kim Michele Richardson has written five works of fiction and a memoir.

Her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek was inspired by the real Blue people of Kentucky, and the fierce, brave Packhorse Librarians who used the power of literacy to overcome bigotry and fear during the Great Depression. The novel is taught widely in high schools and college classrooms.

Her latest novel, The Book Woman’s Daughter is a stand-alone and sequel to The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Kim Michele lives in Kentucky.

Keidrick Roy is a PhD candidate working at the intersection of African-American history, literature, and political thought from the Revolutionary era to the present. His interdisciplinary scholarship is forthcoming in English Literary History, and his public history writing is forthcoming as part of America: The Atlas, published by Smithsonian Books and The Bright Press. Keidrick’s public scholarship has additionally been featured by CBS Sunday Morning, the Harvard Gazette, the Public News Service, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Review of Books, and the National Football League.

Keidrick is also committed to the work of museum curation and documentary film production to encourage public reflection and dialogue. At the American Writers Museum, he is the curator and project lead for Dark Testament, an upcoming exhibition that puts the writings of African Americans from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement in conversation with contemporary Black writers and thinkers.

Peter Sagal is, has been, and perhaps someday will be again, a husband, father, playwright, screenwriter, author, journalist, columnist, marathoner, Jeopardy contestant, dramaturg, podcast host, documentary host, foreign correspondent, wedding officiant, and magician’s assistant.

Sagal is best known as the host of the Peabody Award-winning NPR news quiz Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, one of the most popular shows on public radio. He’s the author of The Book of Vice and The Incomplete Book of Running, a memoir about the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing and other adventures while running long distances, and has run over 20 marathons across the United States.

As a playwright, his work has been produced or commissioned by the Long Wharf Theater, Seattle Rep, Actor’s Theater of Louisville, Florida Stage and many others here and abroad, and he’s won awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and fellowships from the Camargo and Jerome Foundations. His screenwriting career began and pretty much ended with Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights which he wrote without meaning to. He’s contributed essays to Opera News, Saveur, Finesse, The New York Times Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and was the “Road Scholar” columnist for Runner’s World. He’s also won the Kurt Vonnegut Award for Humor from the Kurt Vonnegut Library.

On TV, Peter has made appearances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and other shows, and hosted Constitution USA with Peter Sagal for PBS, and National Geographic Explorer for the NatGeo Channel. He is host to a number of podcasts, including HBO’s The Chernobyl Podcast and The Plot Against America Podcast, and appears as co-host on the narrowly popular Nerdette Recaps Podcast with Peter Sagal, because he is a giant nerd.

Peter lives in the Chicago area with his wife Mara, son Elliott, and two dogs, DeeDee and Dutchie, who like to see their names in print.

John Scalzi is one of the most popular SF authors of his generation. His debut, Old Man’s War, won him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, Redshirts (which won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel), and 2020’s The Last Emperox. Material from his blog, Whatever (whatever.scalzi.com), has earned him two other Hugo Awards. Scalzi also serves as critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

Donna Seaman is Editor, Adult Books for Booklist. A recipient of the Louis Shores Award for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award, Seaman is a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum, a frequent presenter at various literary events and programs, and an adjunct professor for Northwestern University’s MA in Writing and MFA in MFA in Prose and Poetry Programs. Seaman’s author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists.

Aaron Sorkin is one of the most acclaimed, beloved, hated and, if nothing else, identifiable screenwriters of modern times. Probably best known for his primetime drama The West Wing, the sound of a Sorkin screenplay is unmistakable—witty, fast-talking dialogue or monologue, intelligent-but-acerbic male protagonists, and morality tales with politically liberal messages. While known for his smart stories of government and politics, he’s also written quite a bit about the media industry and television in particular.

While his style can be polarizing, Sorkin is an undeniably brilliant writer, responsible for modern classics such as A Few Good Men, and recent hits like The Social Network. He’s won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and several Emmys, and continues to be a powerhouse in both Hollywood and television.

Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast “In Contrast.”

Craig (@mrblackatlantic) is an artist academic that writes and curates around themes of transcultural Blackness, freedom making and radical solidarity. He is co-founder of the Black & African Solidarity Show (B.A.S.S.) and a doctoral student in the Northwestern University Anthropology Department.

Vincent Tirado is a nonbinary Afrotlatine born and raised in the Bronx. A lover of all things horror and sci-fi, they’ve been published in FIYAH Magazine and Desert Rose Lit Mag. They also have been known to write for podcasts with credits in Mnemosyne and Cry Havoc. In their free time, Vincent spends time with their cat and sews their own cosplay for Comic Con.

Michi Trota is a writer, editor, and fire performer who is a five-time Hugo Award winner, British Fantasy Award winner, and Ignyte Award finalist. She is the Features Editor of Prism, a former Editor-in-Chief of Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), and the first Filipina Hugo Award winner. Her publications include the WisCon Chronicles Vol. 12 co-edited with Isabel Schechter (Aqueduct Press) and the Wing Luke Museum 2018-19 exhibit Worlds Beyond Here: Expanding the Universe of APA Science Fiction. Michi performs with Raks Geek/Raks Inferno Fire+Bellydance troupe and lives with her spouse and two cats in Chicago.

Quincy Troupe is an award winning poet, biographer, and editor. He is the author of 20 books including The Pursuit of Happyness; Earl the Pearl, James Baldwin: The Last Interview; Miles: The Autobiography of Miles Davis; and Miles & Me, soon to become a major motion picture for which Troupe wrote the screenplay.

Dawn Turner is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent book, Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood, was named a Notable book of 2021 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others. A former columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Turner spent a decade and a half writing about race, politics and people whose stories are often dismissed and ignored. Turner, who served as a 2017 and 2018 juror for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary, has written commentary for The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, CBS Sunday Morning News show, NPR’s Morning Edition show, the Chicago Tonight show, and elsewhere. She has covered national presidential conventions, as well as Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election and inauguration. Turner has been a regular commentator for several national and international news programs, and has reported from around the world in countries such as Australia, China, France, and Ghana. She spent the 2014–2015 school year as a Nieman Journalism fellow at Harvard University. In 2018, she served as a fellow and journalist-in-residence at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. Turner is the author of two novels, Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven (Crown, Random House) and An Eighth of August (Crown, Random House). In 2018, she established the Dawn M. Turner and Kim D. Turner Endowed Scholarship in Media at her alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of nonfiction The Devil’s Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea is the bestselling author of the novels The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Into the Beautiful North, Queen of America, and most recently, The House of Broken Angels, as well as the story collection The Water Museum, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. He has won the Lannan Literary Award, an Edgar Award, and a 2017 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among many other honors.

Johanny Vázquez Paz is the winner of the 2018 Paz Prize for Poetry given by the National Poetry Series in partnership with the Miami Book Fair. The winning book, I Offer My Heart as a Target / Ofrezco mi corazón como una diana, was chosen by Rigoberto González and published by Akashic Books in 2019. Among her other publications are Sagrada familia (winner of the International Latino Book Award, 2015), Querido voyeur (Ediciones Torremozas, Spain, 2012), and Streetwise Poems / Poemas callejeros (Mayapple Press, Michigan, 2007). She also co-edited the anthology Between the Heart and the Land / Entre el corazón y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, Chicago, 2001).

Poet Michael Warr’s books include Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, The Armageddon of Funk, and We Are All The Black Boy. His literary honors include a 2021 San Francisco Artist Grant, 2020 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, San Francisco Library Laureates, NEA Fellowship, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, Creative Work Fund Award, and others. His poetry is translated into Chinese by poet Chun Yu for their Two Languages / One Community Project. Michael is a former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

Catherine Adel West was born and raised in Chicago, where she currently resides. She graduated with both her Bachelors and Masters of Science in Journalism from the University of Illinois – Urbana. Her work is published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Five2One, Better than Starbucks, Doors Ajar, 805 Lit + Art, The Helix Magazine, Lunch Ticket and Gay Magazine. Author of Saving Ruby King, Catherine was named one of USA TODAY’S Black Authors You Should Know. The Two Lives of Sara is her sophomore novel.

Schele Williams is the author of Your Legacy and a Broadway director committed to cultivating new musicals and devised work. She is directing the upcoming Broadway revivals of Aida and The Wiz as well as the premieres of Mandela the Musical and Indigo. She has a long history of work on Broadway in Rent, Aida, and Motown: The Musical. Passionate about pairing social justice with the arts, Schele is on the steering committee of We Stand United and is a founding member of Black Theatre United, an organization committed to dismantling systemic racism on our streets and stages.

Ivy G. Wilson is associate professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism in the Antebellum U.S.

Jacqueline Woodson is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and she was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award, as well as the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. She also wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Her dozens of books for young readers include Coretta Scott King Award and NAACP Image Award winner Before the Ever After, New York Times bestsellers The Year We Learned to Fly, The Day You Begin, and Harbor Me, Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster, and the picture book Each Kindness, which won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.

Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He’s on the core faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.