This week, two of Chicago’s leading poets—Mayda del Valle and Eve L. Ewing—discuss how to use poetic forms to tell stories, reveal characters, and express memory. Mayda del Valle is the Poet Laureate of the City of Chicago, and Eve L. Ewing is an award-winning poet and scholar.
This program was part of the 2026 American Writers Festival. Co-hosted by the American Writers Museum and Chicago Public Library, the American Writers Festival is a free literary event featuring in-depth conversations with diverse writers from across genres and backgrounds. This conversation took place June 7, 2026 and was recorded live at the Harold Washington Library Center.
In this episode, both Mayda and Eve read their poems aloud, some of which are published and some that have not been published yet. For the published work, they read from these collections:
A South Side Girl’s Guide to Love & Sex: Poems by Mayda del Valle
As a child of Puerto Rican migrants on Chicago’s Southside, Mayda del Valle’s poetry utilizes part Spanish and English, part hip-hop and salsa, part Nas and Sonia Sanchez, part Shakespeare and John Leguizamo. It is inherited history as well as traditions remixed and invented.
Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing
Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the fantastical, Ewing takes us from the streets of Chicago to an alien arrival in an unspecified future, deftly navigating boundaries of space, time, and reality with delight and flexibility.
1919: Poems by Eve L. Ewing
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation’s Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in 38 deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.
More about the poets:
MAYDA DEL VALLE is a Chicago-born poet, and interdisciplinary artist. A former Grand Slam Champion at the Nuyorican Poets Café, she became the youngest poet and first Latinx winner of the National Poetry Slam. She has appeared on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and was an original cast member of the Tony Award-winning Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. She is a 2024 Letras Boricuas Fellow and in January of 2026, began her tenure as the second Poet Laureate of the City of Chicago. She is currently developing Herencia, a multimedia performance exploring Puerto Rican migration to Chicago’s South Side.
DR. EVE L. EWING is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author, most recently, of Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, an instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller. She has also published the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, and a novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She has written several projects for Marvel Comics, most notably, Ironheart, Black Panther, and Exceptional X-Men, and is currently writing X-Men United. Ewing is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is also proud to be a co-owner of Build Coffee & Books. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues.