Author Reading

Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women

Local contributors read from this arousing, inspiring and bold new collection of essays exploring the journey from heterosexual relationships to finding oneself through love for other women. Bendix is blog editor of MTV & Logo’s AfterEllen.com, and she has written for Bitch, Time Out Chicago, OUT, Gay.com and The Village Voice. Michelle Renae is a writer and spoken word artist whose work focuses on feminism and spirituality as explored through her own life and sexuality. Rachel Smith is the mother of two children and an Administrative Assistant at a large teaching hospital in Chicago.

Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s

Gray-haired grandmother Helen P. Branson was about the last person you’d expect to run a gay bar in 1950s Hollywood, yet for the better part of a decade she cheerfully served up beer and sympathy to the men she affectionately referred to as her boys. Sixty years later, when writer and anthologist Will Fellows (Farm Boys) discovered a copy of her long out-of-print memoir, he knew Helen’s was a story worth telling. Combining her original text with his own biographical sleuthing, cultural criticism and historical research, Fellows brings those pre-Stonewall days roaring back to life.

Push Comes to Shove: New Images of Aggressive Women

Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir

Growing Roots: The New Generation of Sustainable Farmers, Cooks, and Food Activists

Who’s growing our food these days? With consumers turning their attentions away from the manufactured to the local and organic, Katherine Leiner goes in search of how growing food in America is changing. What she finds is surprising: a highly educated generation – many of whom were not born into the life – is redefining agriculture. Her new book includes interviews, color photos, and many mouthwatering recipes, from young farmers and food producers nationwide who share a commitment to edible sustainability.

Join us for a reading by three luminous literary talents. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s story collection American Salvage was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. She is the author of the novel Q Road and the story collection Women & Other Animals and also teaches writing. Jennifer Richter’s book, Thresholds, was chosen by poet Natasha Tretheway as the winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and CALYX. In 2011, she’ll be a visiting writer at Oregon State University. Diane Seuss’s second collection of poems, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open was the winner of the Jupiter Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press. She has published widely and is writer in residence at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

Nearly five years after her first novel, The Historian, became an instant bestseller, Elizabeth Kostova returns with a sweeping tale of historical intrigue spanning centuries and continents.

The Thinking Girl's Treasury of Real Princesses brings lyrical storytelling to some of the most inspiring—and little known—tales in history, about real princesses who managed to do what few thought possible.

In her debut legal thriller, Michigan native and Harvard Law School graduate Allison Leotta introduces Anna Curtis, a newly minted prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C.

Tonight we celebrate two new releases by local author Margaret Hawkins (A Year of Cats and Dogs). In her novel How to Survive a Natural Disaster, Hawkins uses multiple points of view to make astute observations about family dynamics; with unflinching honesty and dark humor she chronicles the unraveling of a dysfunctional family. In her memoir How We Got Barb Back, Hawkins recalls, with hard-earned wisdom, humor, and compassion, her struggle to bring her once vivacious and talented older sister back from the depths of severe, long-untreated mental illness. Hawkins teaches writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been an art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times for more than two decades.

As a state senate candidate in Illinois in 1996, Barack Obama said he favored gay marriage. As president, he is opposed to gay marriage but favors civil unions. In her new book, veteran Chicago reporter Tracy Baim takes an in-depth look at Obama’s record on LGBTQ issues through his state and federal elections and terms in office, including his first year and a half as president. Obama and the Gays includes interviews with Obama’s Chicago and national gay supporters and contributions by prominent gay activists, bloggers, and reporters, including Lisa Keen, Chuck Colbert, John D’Emilio, and Pam Spaulding.

An estimated 10 to 14 million children in the U.S. have at least one gay parent, and the number is growing every year.

Mary Catherine Bateson, sociologist, daughter of Margaret Mead, and author of the groundbreaking books Peripheral Visions and Composing A Life, sees aging today as an “improvisational art form calling for imagination and the willingness to learn.” Her new book is an ardent, affirming study of the experiences of men and women—herself included—who, upon entering the period she refers to as "Adulthood II," have found new meaning and new ways to contribute to society, composing their lives in new patterns. She challenges us to approach our later lives with the full force of our imagination, curiosity, and enthusiasm. She also speaks to us as members of a larger society concerned about the world that our children and grandchildren, born and not yet born, will inherit.

This captivating collection of new stories and essays by some of today’s best science fiction writers bears witness to the impact of the legendary writer Frederik Pohl. With stories ranging from traditional to cutting edge and from darkly serious to laugh-out-loud funny, Gateways is a must buy for science fiction readers of all tastes and a worthy homage to a pioneer of the genre. Tonight’s event will feature Pohl's wife (and Gateways' editor) Elizabeth Anne Hull, who is a Harper College professor and resident of Naperville, along with local contributors Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein and Jody Lynn Nye.

We’re having a party to celebrate the career (to date) of celebrated feminist cartoonist Nicole Hollander and the thirtieth anniversary of her most famous creation, the wise-cracking, irreverent social critic Sylvia. Nicole’s new book, The Sylvia Chronicles, looks at the formative years of our young artist as she works her way from painter to a cartoonist syndicated in hundreds of newspapers. We convinced Nicole to give us a PowerPoint presentation of her work—and then we’ll eat cake and drink champagne! We know Hollander’s friends and fans will be here; we also hope those who may not know about the iconic Sylvia will come for a slice of cultural history.