Poetry as Storytelling
Featured writers: Mayda del Valle, Eve L. Ewing, and Maggie Smith
Three of America’s leading poets discuss how to use poetic forms to tell stories, reveal characters, and express memory. Plus, Maggie Smith reads from her new book A Suit or a Suitcase. Eve L. Ewing is an award-winning poet and scholar and Mayda del Valle is the Poet Laureate of the City of Chicago.
Book signing times (all signings take place in the First Floor Lobby of the library)
🖊️Eve L. Ewing: 3:00 – 3:20
🖊️Maggie Smith: 3:00 – 3:20
About the writers:
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.
MAGGIE SMITH is the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of nine books of poetry and prose, including A Suit or a Suitcase, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, Goldenrod, Keep Moving, and My Thoughts Have Wings. She has been widely published, appearing in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, and more. She is the host of The Slowdown. You can find her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
A Suit or a Suitcase: Poems
by Maggie Smith
Instant New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith returns with a new collection of poems on the sometimes-blurry distinction between mind and body, and how the self shifts and moves through time and space.
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.
Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
by Eve L. Ewing
By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.
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, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight 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.