Author Reading

Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington DC
Featuring Gregg Shapiro, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Rebecca Villarreal, David Trinidad and Deborah Darr

Co-sponsored by Poets & Writers Magazine

Join us for a reading by contributors to the new anthology, Full Moon on K Street. Featuring more than 100 contemporary poems, this collection captures DC’s unique sense of place, from the monuments and parks,  to the bus stations, from go-go music to chili half-smokes, and the city’s many moods, from celebratory to angry to fiercely political; the result comprises a love letter – with all the complexity that love implies – to our nation’s capitol city.

Loyalty, loss, and the ties that bind – these are the ingredients of The Recipe Club, a new novel that combines the story of a friendship told via e-mails, childhood letters, third-person narration, photos, illustrations and more than 80

Chicago Area Women’s History Council

Women and Children First: Memories and Archives

Relive the excitement of W&CF’s 30th Anniversary Celebration last October as the Chicago Area Women’s History Council presents a premiere showing of the videotaped interviews conducted at the event. CAWHC members will discuss how you can participate in their larger project “Documenting the Women’s Movement in Chicago, 1960s – 1980s,” while Beth Myers from the Women and Leadership Archive at Loyola will share information about this important repository and the W&CF collection there. If you have memories or documents about W&CF, don’t miss this event.  If you were part of the feminist movement in Chicago, CAWHC needs your help!

Wednesday, March 24

7:30 p.m.

Lisa Lutz

The Spellmans Strike Again

In the fourth and final volume of her New York Times’ bestselling and addictively entertaining comic mystery series, Lisa Lutz unravels another irresistible caper featuring the irrepressible Isabel Spellman and her off-kilter family of private investigators. In this installment, Rae, Izzy’s ingenious of a little sister, gets involved in the Innocence Project and won’t stop until the rest of the family is equally committed. We’ll be raffling off “Free Schmidt” t-shirts provided by Lutz. The third volume, Revenge of the Spellmans, is now available in paperback, and a film version of The Spellman Files is currently in development with Paramount Pictures. Please join us in what is sure to be a very special evening of laughter and intrigue.

Saturday, March 20

7:30 p.m.

Sappho’s Salon: A Provocative Night of Lesbian Diversions

Featuring Jennie Brier and Elana Dykewomon, with special guest host Chelsey Clammer and guest DJ Chandra. Co-sponsored by the Lesbian Leadership Council, Chicago Foundation for Women

$7-$10 sliding fee scale includes food and wine

            The latest monthly installment of our popular salon night for lesbians and their friends features writers Jennie Brier and Elana Dykewomon. In her book Infectuous Ideas: U.S. Political Response to the AIDS Crisis, UIC Professor Jennie Brier charts the complex social and political climate of the 1980s and ‘90s through the lens of the AIDS crisis. Elana Dykewomon, formerly editor of the journal Sinister Wisdom, is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning brilliant lesbian classic, Beyond the Pale. Her new novel, Risk, examines the life of Carol Schwartz, a community activist and idealist who routinely puts it all on the line; but when the stakes become too high, will she gamble more than she can afford to lose? This event is co-sponsored by the Lesbian Leadership Council of the Chicago Foundation for Women. Proceeds benefit the artists and the Women’s Voices Fund.

Saturday, March 13

6:00 p.m.

Cynthia Kraack

Minnesota Cold

            Writer Cynthia Kraack’s book, Minnesota Cold, has been called a lovely, haunting tale, firmly grounded in the ways of the heart. Set in 2035, this is the story of Sallie Dodge, a 70-something woman living within the sociological results of the aggressive merger of government and big business, where it’s considered frugal policy to dictate the lifespan of citizens. When Dodge chooses to defy her turn to “pass,” she embarks, instead, on the journey of a lifetime. Guests are invited to join Kraack for a reception at In Fine Spirits at 5420 N Clark directly following this reading.  

Friday, March 12

7:30 p.m.

Staceyann Chin

The Other Side of Paradise            We are thrilled to once again be hosting the electrifying spoken word artist Staceyann Chin, this time to celebrate the paperback release of her searing and groundbreaking memoir, The Other Side of Paradise. Following a tradition of fierce Caribbean lesbian writers that includes Audre Lorde and Michelle Cliff, Chin’s narrative charts her course from the heartbreak and tragedy of her Jamaican childhood, to her thriving adult like in New York City. Dorothy Allison raves, “[Chin] shows me a culture I knew far too little about – the everyday life of young people in Jamaica and the threat of violence over anyone who might be too independent or queer or outrageous. How wonderful that this outrageous, talented, determined woman has given us her story.”

Sunday, March 7

4:30 p.m.

Neena B. Schwartz

A Lab of My Own

            What was it like to be a woman scientist battling the “old boys’ network” during the 1960s and ‘70s? In her new memoir, Neena Schwartz, a prominent neuroendocrinologist based at Northwestern University, tells all. Mixing details and anecdotes from her personal life as an out lesbian, with the socio-political history of American women in science in the later 20th century, Schwartz makes a case for mentoring young women in science, and why it matters that women both do and teach scientific study.   

Friday, March 5

7:30 p.m.

Nancy Stohlman

Searching for Suzi

            When Suzi, a thirty-something ex-stripper now married with kids, begins to question how she arrived at this point in her life, her search for herself means accepting her sexuality in all its contradictions and claiming herself. Denver-based writer Stohlman, who is founder and co-editor of the annual flash fiction collection, Fast Forward, reveals Suzi’s story in a novel-in-flashes.

Sappho’s Salon: A Provocative Night of Lesbian Diversions

Featuring Ifa Bumi, Barrie Cole and DJ SpinNikki

$7-$10 sliding admission includes food and wine

This month’s installment of our popular salon night for lesbians and their friends features the performance work of two outstanding queer artists. Barrie Cole, deemed “Chicago’s Champion of Lyrical Oddness” by the Chicago Reader, has had her plays, monologues, and collaborative performances staged throughout Chicago and elsewhere. Atlanta-based lesbian erotic writer, performance poet and musician Ifa Bumi is author of the collection Liquid Toffee, and the spoken word CD, Museotry. She’ll be joined by a collaborative dancer. As always, DJ SpinNikki will play us in and out of sets.

All proceeds benefit the artists and the Women’s Voices Fund.

Robyn Okrant

Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk

On January 1, 2008, Robyn Okrant, a 35-year-old Chicagoan, embarked on a unique one-year mission: to live every aspect of her life as Oprah Winfrey directed. From creating vision boards, practicing guided meditation, and participating in the Best Life Challenge; to learning to live with cellulite, de-cluttering her home, and buying “necessities” such as leopard flats and a fire pit, Okrant followed every piece of advice offered through The Oprah Winfrey Show, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Oprah.com. Her blog tracking the project attracted more than half a million visitors; now she’s compiled the experience in this funny, captivating and provocative memoir.

Kevin and Hanna Salwen

The Power of Half: One Family’s Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back

Co-sponsored by The Hunger Project

The Salwens were a typical family caught up in pursuing the American Dream – providing a good life for their children, accumulating more and more stuff, doing their part, but not really feeling it, until 14-year old Hannah Salwen spotted a homeless man alongside a glistening Mercedes.  Her subsequent epiphany inspired the Salwens to sell their spacious Atlanta home and donate half of the proceeds to a worthy charity. In the process, they hoped to make the world better in some small way, never expecting how much they would gain from the experience. This event is co-sponsored by The Hunger Project, a global non-profit committed to the sustainable end to world hunger.           

Sarah Blake

The Postmistress

Two women, an American postmistress in Franklin, Massachusetts, and a British radio journalist, are entrusted to deliver information to the newlywed wife of an American doctor in London at the dawn of WWII.  For different reasons both decide not to do so, each betraying her solemn commitment to deliver news. A new novel with extraordinary relevance to the way we live now, that is less a war novel than an examination of how people cope with the knowledge of unspeakable inhumanity in the world as they go about their daily lives. Booklist, in a starred review, predicted that “Blake’s emotional saga of conscience and genocide is poised to become a bestseller of the highest echelon.”

Princess Zindaba Nyirenda

Ta-Lakata: The Tears of Africa

Granddaughter of the Tumbaka tribe chief Mphamba of Lundazi in Zambia, Princess Zindaba “Zindie” Nyirenda was raised in an elite and privileged environment during Zambia’s economic boom years. As a young woman, Zindie relocated to the United States, and then watched in horror as life in her homeland rapidly disintegrated under economic devastation and the influx of AIDS/HIV. Unwilling to sit on the sidelines, Zindie founded a non-profit organization to equip and empower local leaders in remote areas and neglected villages of Africa. Today Princess Zindie is a graduate student at Roosevelt University and was keynote speaker at the 2007 World AIDS Day conference in Illinois.