The Spiritual Essence of Storytelling
Featured writers: Catherine-Esther Cowie, Tom Montgomery Fate, Runako Jahi, and Aviya Kushner
What is the difference between spiritual and religious? And how does that manifest itself in certain works of literature? In either case, a higher power, or a higher something, is implied, as too is the idea that becoming a better self is a perpetual aspiration. Spiritual threads run through the work of Aviya Kushner, Runako Jahi, Tom Montgomery Fate, and Catherine-Esther Cowie. These four writers will explore their sense of spirituality’s meaning and their thoughts on its importance in literature, specifically their own. This program is presented in partnership with the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
This program is also presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s special exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture, a powerful exhibit that takes you on the ultimate exploration through spirituality and storytelling. American Prophets is now on display at the AWM. American Prophets is supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. through its Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative.
Book signing times (all signings take place in the First Floor Lobby of the library)
🖊️Catherine-Esther Cowie: 12:30 – 12:50
🖊️Tom Montgomery Fate: 12:30 – 12:50
🖊️Runako Jahi: 12:30 – 12:50
🖊️Aviya Kushner: 12:30 – 12:50
About the writers:
CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE was born in St. Lucia to a Trinidadian father and a St. Lucian mother. She migrated with her family to Canada and then to the USA. Her debut poetry collection is Heirloom (Carcanet Press, 2025) which was shortlisted for a Forward Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Her poems have been published in PN Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch Journal, The Common, SWWIM, Rhino Poetry and others. She lives in Illinois, USA.
TOM MONTGOMERY FATE is a professor emeritus at College DuPage in Glen Ellyn IL, where he taught creative writing and literature courses for more than 30 years. He is the author of six books of creative nonfiction, including The Long Way Home: Detours and Discoveries, a travel memoir (Ice Cube Press, 2022), Cabin Fever, a nature memoir (Beacon Press), and Steady and Trembling, a spiritual memoir (Chalice Press). A regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune, his essays have appeared in the Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Orion, The Iowa Review, Christian Century, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and many others. Dozens of his essays have also aired on NPR and Chicago Public Radio.
RUNAKO JAHI is a playwright, poet, actor, theater director, former Artistic Director of ETA Creative Arts Foundation, and is currently Jennifer Hudson’s acting coach. To date, they have worked on twelve film projects together, including Dreamgirls. Spirituality is an important element that determines the essence of human character in ways that can be viewed as both positive and negative. There are people who use their “spirituality” as a mask, or coverup to APPEAR to be RIGHTEOUS, good-natured, or forgiving. When in truth, their mindset is racist, hateful, hellbent on chaos within American culture, displaying not an OUNCE of love and compassion for the very people who elected them. My approach to the Arts is to explore CHARACTER in the most human way possible, by revealing the SOUL beneath the LIES.
AVIYA KUSHNER grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau / Penguin Random House), which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, a Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Finalist, and one of Publishers Weekly‘s Top 10 Religion Stories of the year, as well as the poetry chapbook Eve and All the Wrong Men (Dancing Girl Press, 2019). Kushner is The Forward‘s language columnist, and previously wrote a travel column for The International Jerusalem Post. She is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, a founding faculty member at the Randolph College MFA program, and a member of The Third Coast Translators Collective. Her work has been supported by the Howard Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
THE CHICAGO LITERARY HALL OF FAME‘s missing is to honor and preserve Chicago’s great literary heritage. They do this through educational programming, awards, exhibits and other special events, particularly their annual induction ceremony. They are also in the process of creating a repository of detailed information about Chicago’s past, present and future literary life through such projects as the Chicago Literary Map and Chicago Literary Tours.
The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible
by Aviya Kushner
In this eye-opening chronicle, Kushner tells the story of her vibrant relationship to the Bible, and along the way illustrates how the differences in translation affect our understanding of our culture’s most important written work. A fascinating look at language and the beliefs we hold most dear, The Grammar of God is also a moving tale about leaving home and returning to it, both literally and through reading.
Heirloom
by Catherine-Esther Cowie
Moving from colonial to post-colonial St. Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women’s lives, and what they hand down to one another. Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut’s remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie’s powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegise and celebrate her subjects.
The Long Way Home: Detours and Discoveries
by Tom Montgomery Fate
In a travel memoir that ventures from his smalltown upbringing to vastly different cultures around the globe, Tom Montgomery Fate comes to define “home” not as a physical location, but as a way of belonging. Whether he is bobbing in a canoe in the freezing rain with his son on a Canadian lake, praying with Lakota elders in a sweat lodge in South Dakota, or teaching English in a remote Filipino village, these are not stories of arrival. They are detours of discovery, a spiritual wayfinding through the wilderness of time and memory.
Wolf Lamb Bomb
by Aviya Kushner