1990s! Queer Girl Shenanigans! Women & Children First! Join writers and former Women & Children First booksellers, Jamika Ajalon, Kathie Bergquist, and Chelsey Clammer for an in-person event as they read from recent works and discuss 1990s Chicago dyke culture and their formative years as feminist booksellers.
Please note: all in-person events held at Women & Children FIrst require masks and proof of vaccination.
Interdisciplinary artist, and author Jamika Ajalon's debut novel Skye Papers came out last summer to critical review (new york times/kirkus review...). Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including, Lit Hub, Speculative City, and the groundbreaking collection We Travel Spaceways: Black imagination; Fragments and Diffractions. She has also published a book of poetry Take Back The Narrative, 2017, whose experimental/conceptual sonic version will be soon available for consumption (TBA), as is her latest album REBOOTED ( jamika & the argonauts) . She currently resides between London and Paris. https://www.jamikaajalon.com/
Kathie Bergquist is a Lambda Emerging Writer fellow, and editor of the anthology, “Windy City Queer”. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Reader, The Advocate, Curve mag, among others, and she has published four biographies of pop stars for teens. She teaches writing at Columbia College Chicago and SAIC and worked at Women & Children First from 1989-1995 and 2005-2012.
Chelsey Clammer is the author of the award-winning essay collection, Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017) and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Hobart, Brevity, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Normal School and Black Warrior Review. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing and is a freelance editor. Her next collection of essays, Human Heartbeat Detected, is forthcoming (Fall 2022) from Red Hen Press. www.chelseyclammer.com