Author Reading

Poetry Reading
Charlotte Hart
Organic Spirits
Susanna Lang
Two by Two

Tonight we present a reading from the most recent collections by two Chicago-
area poets. Charlotte Hart, from Evanston, has been published in Apparatus Magazine,
Barnwood International Poetry Magazine, and The Aurorean. Her most recent chapbook,
Organic Spirits, was praised by poet Ralph Hamilton: “I continue to savor this wonderful
manuscript. It is so full of life, smell, and taste. The perfect anecdote for cold winter
days.” A longtime Chicago-area educator, Susanna Lang’s work has appeared in New
Letters, The Baltimore Review, and Kalliope, among others. An Illinois Arts Council
award recipient and Pushcart Prize nominee, she has released two poetry collections. She
will read from her most recent, Two by Two.

Before 2002, Deborah Niemann thought a cheeseburger and fries were a healthy
meal, and taking care of her two cats and dog was the extent of her animal husbandry
experience. Then, in 2002, she relocated her family from the Chicago suburbs to a 32
acre piece of land, where they built their own home and began growing the majority of
their food. Today, these modern-day homesteaders raise pigs, sheep, cattle, goats,
chickens, and turkeys and derive their fruits and vegetable from an organic garden and
orchard. Neimann regularly presents workshops on soap making, bread baking, cheese
making, composting, and homeschooling. If it has ever been your dream to escape the
grid and live more in harmony with the earth, you will not want to miss today’s program.

Fresh out of college, with no job materializing for her drama degree, Esther
Kohler moves back to her parents’ home in the suburbs, where she is forced to take a job
babysitting for a young couple whose second child recently died. Esther soon finds
herself playing many roles within the troubled family and facing some untidy truths
about adult life. Like Lorrie Moore for the Facebook generation or Miranda July’s smart
aleck kid sister, Leigh Stein shifts effortlessly between pop-culture comedy, dead-on
dialogue, and wry psychological insight in her dazzlingly funny and heartbreaking debut
novel.

Sara Paretsky
Breakdown
V. I. Warshawski 30th Anniversary Party

Illinois’ richest and most powerful families. Preteen girls. Vampire fiction.
Murder. Chicago politics. A rabid 24-hour cable news network. After three decades’
worth of hard-hitting mystery thrillers, V. I. Warshawski is used to facing some serious
headaches, but these make for the worst one yet. Breakdown is Paretsky’s fifteenth V. I.
Warshawski novel and the 30th anniversary of the very first V. I. novel ever published.
Join us for the celebration as she takes on the most compelling – and dangerous – case of
her career. Champagne, of course, and other refreshments will be served.

“Warshawski presents an irresistible combination – a cranky, vulnerable woman with
a messy life, but a superhuman willingness to put herself in harm’s way for the sake of
justice.” – Chicago Sun Times

Motivated by a $100,000 prize, struggling divorced mother Chloe Parker
auditions for a trivia quiz about Jane Austen, only to find herself unexpectedly cast in a
public television reality dating show set in 1812, where competitors vie to win the money
and heart of Mr. Wrightman, the heir to a fabulous estate. To further distress Chloe,
contestants must dress and behave as if they were in the Regency year depicted in Pride
and Prejudice, without cell phones, indoor plumbing, or deodorant. It’s time for Chloe to
tighten her corset and flash some ankle to beat out women younger, more cutthroat, and
less clumsy than herself. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly raved that “Doornebos
gives the historical romance novel a hilarious update in this delightful debut.”

When a nameless narrator in a dead-end job, a passionless relationship and a with
bad attitude, reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island on a whim, she decides to
turn her life around by following in the footsteps of Jim Hawkins. Her best friend is
flummoxed, her sister horrified, and her parents more than a little confused when she
moves back home, $900 Amazon parrot on her shoulder, and begins espousing the
novel’s core values of boldness, resolution, independence and, of course, horn blowing.
Outrageous, hilarious and original, Sara Levine’s debut novel will have you laughing out
loud. She is the chair of the graduate writing program at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. Refreshments complements of Europa Books.

Story time Special Guest
Laura Doherty
Shining Like a Star
In her second release, award-winning children’s recording artist Laura Doherty

Sappho’s Solstice Salon Presents: The Lesbian Office Holiday Party

Benefitting Broadway Youth Center

$7-$10 includes refreshments.

Did someone spike the eggnog? Tonight’s installment of our popular salon night for lesbians and their friends offers a playful spin on the annual holiday office party. Wear your worst holiday sweater for the bad sweater contest, and bring a donation to benefit this year’s charity recipient, Broadway Youth Center, and receive a Secret Santa gift in return. Broadway Youth Center is a not-for-profit social service organization serving Chicago’s queer and homeless youth populations. BYC specifically needs new socks and underwear in all sizes, scarves, hats, coats, mittens, and long underwear, new shampoo, soap, deodorant, tampons and pads, and prepaid CTA fare cards. Eggnog, cheese logs, and holiday cookies and treats will be served against a backdrop of classic holiday tunes. Special surprise guests will help make the Yuletide gay. Look out for the floating mistletoe! All of tonight’s proceeds benefit Broadway Youth Center.

Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories

Chicanas of 18th Street: Narratives of a Movement from Latino Chicago

Overflowing with powerful testimonies of six female community activists who have lived and worked in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Chicanas of 18th Street reveals the convictions and approaches of those organizing for social reform. In chronicling a pivotal moment in the history of community activism in Chicago, in tonight’s program, three of the contributors discuss how education, immigration, religion, identity, and acculturation affected the Chicano movement. Chicanas of 18th Street underscores the hierarchies of race, gender, and class while stressing the interplay of individual and collective values in the development of community change for social justice.

What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety

What You Really Really Want is an educational and informative road map to sexuality for women, designed to help with everything from examining the formative influences of family and school to building sexual communication skills and defining boundaries. In this cutting edge guide, Jaclyn Friedman, co-editor of Yes Means Yes and executive director of Women, Action, & the Media, provides women with the tools they need to separate what they really want from what society tells them to want, and arms them with the skills to define and create their own sexual identity.

Journaling Cancer in Words and Images: Caught in the Clutch of the Crab

Journaling Cancer is more than a stirring cancer memoir by an accomplished professor of art therapy; it also contains a memoir in art with an accompanying CD of 70 pictures in full color created by the author during her treatment. In addition to her personal memoir, Wadeson discusses many issues, encounters, and relationships unique to the cancer experience, including primary care givers, medical personal, support groups, death, dread, denial, hair loss, “playing the cancer card,” and embracing creativity in meeting the challenges of cancer. Wadeson has published seven previous books on art therapy. She directs the art therapy program at Northwestern University.

Sappho’s Salon Lesbian Poetry Showcase

Featuring: cin salach, C.C. Carter, Karen Lee Osborne & Carina Gia Farrero

$7-$10 includes food and wine.

Tonight’s installment of our popular monthly salon night for lesbians and their friends features a showcase of brilliant lesbian poets all featured in the new anthology, Windy City Queer: LGBTQ Dispatches from the Third Coast, edited by Sappho’s Salon curator and host Kathie Bergquist. Founder of POW-WOW, C.C. Carter is a spoken word poet of national prominence whose work has been anthologized in more than 12 collections. Cin salach has collaborated with poets and other artists for more than 20 years, in such groups as Loofah Method, Betty’s Mouth, and ten tongues, and was recently nominated for an Emmy for her voiceover work in the PBS documentary “Schoolboy to Showgirl.” Karen Lee Osborne is the author of the novels Carlyle Simpson and Hawkwings, and the prose poem chapbook, Survival. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Carina Gia Farrero holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Her poems were most recently published or are forthcoming in Verse Daily, Arsenic Lobster, and The Encyclopedia Project. Proceeds benefit the artists and the Women’s Voices Fund.

Conjure Women

For tonight’s program, three women writers discuss the city of New Orleans as a literary muse, and its unique and powerful impact on their creative development and processes. Parneshia Jones is a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award and the Margaret Walker Short Story Award, and her work has appeared in several anthologies. Sales and Subsidiary Rights Manager and Poetry Editor for Northwestern University Press, she also serves on the board of Cave Canem, an organization focusing on the many voices of African-Americans in poetry. Ellen Hagen is a writer, performer, and educator whose work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and showcased at the New York International Fringe and Los Angeles Women’s Theater festivals. Dr. Kelly Norman Ellis is an associate professor of English and associate director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chicago State University. A Cave Canem fellow, her poetry collection, Tougaloo Blues, was published by Third World Press.

Framing Innocence: A Mother’s Photographs, A Prosecutor’s Zeal, and a Small Town’s Response

Ten years ago, amateur photographer Cynthia Stewart dropped off film at a drugstore near her home in Ohio. The rolls included two pictures of her 8-year-old daughter, Nora, in the shower. The drug store reported the photos, leading to Stewart’s arrest on child pornography charges. Framing Innocence plumbs the perfect storm of events and people that threatened a loving family in a small American town. Featuring a determined prosecutor, a fundamentalist Christian anti-porn crusader, the local attorneys for whom the case would become a crucible, and the many neighbors – friends and strangers, republicans and democrats – who came together to fight for sanity and justice, Framing Innocence is a riveting and memorable tale.