| | | | | | | | 2024 FEATURED ARTISTS | | | | | | | JIMIN HAN | | | Jimin Han is the author of The Apology, a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick; named a best audiobook of the year by Booklist, a best book of the summer by the LA Times, Vanity Fair, Shondaland, Apple Books and more. She is also the author of A Small Revolution. Additional writing can be found at American Public Media’s Weekend America, Poets & Writers, and other media outlets. She teaches at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, Pace University, and community writing centers. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she grew up in Providence, Rhode Island; Dayton, Ohio; and Jamestown, New York. Her work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.
www.jiminhan.net |
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| | | | | PAUL HARDING | | | Paul Harding is the author of three novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, Enon, and This Other Eden, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN America. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The Michener Center for Writers, and Harvard University. He currently teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University.
www.paulhardingauthor.com |
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| | | | | | | TANIA JAMES | | | Tania James is the author of four works of fiction, most recently the novel Loot, which was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. Her short stories have appeared in Freeman’s; Granta; The New Yorker; O Magazine; and One Story, among other places, and twice featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University and lives in Washington DC.
www.taniajames.com |
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| | | | | ANGIE KIM | | | Angie Kim moved as a preteen from Seoul, South Korea, to the suburbs of Baltimore. After graduating from Interlochen Arts Academy, she studied philosophy at Stanford University and attended Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her debut novel, Miracle Creek, won the Edgar Award and the ITW Thriller Award, and was named one of the 100 best mysteries and thrillers of all time by Time. Happiness Falls, her second novel, was an instant New York Times bestseller and a book club pick for Good Morning America, Barnes & Noble, Belletrist, and Book of the Month Club, and was named the #1 novel of the year by Oprah Daily. She lives in northern Virginia with her family.
angiekimbooks.com |
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| | | | | | | MARGOT LIVESEY | | | Margot Livesey grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands and has taught in numerous writing programs including Emerson College, Boston University, Bowdoin College and the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program. She is the author of a collection of stories and nine novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture, The Flight of Gemma Hardy and The Boy in the Field. The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing was published in 2017. She is a professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and goes back to Scotland whenever she can. Her new novel, The Road from Belhaven, was published in February 2024.
margotlivesey.com |
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| | | | | CHIGOZIE OBIOMA | | | Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) were shortlisted for The Booker Prize. He is also the author of the forthcoming The Road to the Country (2024). His novels have been translated into more than 29 languages. They have won awards including the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and the LA Times Book Prize, and been nominated for many others. The Fishermen was adapted into an award-winning stage play by Gbolahan Obisesan that played in the UK and South Africa between 2018-2019. He was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015. Obioma is the Program Director and a mentor at Oxbelly Writers Retreat. He is the James E. Ryan Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and divides his time between the US and Nigeria.
chigozieobioma.com |
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| | | | | | | SUSAN ORLEAN | | | Susan Orlean is the author of nine books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and On Animals. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film “Adaptation” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Her 2018 The Library Book won the California Book Award and the Marfield Prize and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. Orlean is a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Outside, and Esquire. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles.
www.susanorlean.com |
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| | | | | DEESHA PHILYAW | | | Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow. Her debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of Harper Collins, in 2025.
deeshaphilyaw.com |
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| | | | | | | VAUHINI VARA | | | Vauhini Vara is the author of This is Salvaged, which was named a notable book of 2023 by Publisher’s Weekly, The New Yorker and others, and The Immortal King Rao, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her third book, an essay collection called Searches, will be published in 2025. She is also a journalist, writing for Wired and others, and an editor, most recently at The New York Times Magazine. She teaches at Colorado State University as a 2023-24 Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project. She is also the secretary of Periplus, a mentorship collective serving writers of color.
www.vauhinivara.com |
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| | | | | RITA WOODS | | | Rita Woods is the award-winning author of two novels, Remembrance and The Last Dreamwalker. Remembrance was the recipient of the Southern Independent Book Association Award, the African American Literary Book Club Award for Fiction and the Hurston-Wright Literary Award for fiction 2020.
The Last Dreamwalker was the winner of the of the Midlands Authors Award 2022 and chosen as the Chicago Book of the Year for 2023.
Rita has served as a mentor for AWP’s writing program and for Cinnamon Girls, an organization dedicated to encouraging creative writing in high school girls of color. A board-certified internal medicine physician, she is the Medical Director at a state prison in Illinois, and lives in the Chicago suburbs with her family and an ever-changing number of cats. |
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| | | FRIDAY ARTIST EVENT
PROGRAM EMCEE | | | | | PETER SAGAL | | | | Peter Sagal is the host of the Peabody Award-winning NPRTM news quiz Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!™ and the author of The Incomplete Book of Running and The Book of Vice. Peter is an award-winning playwright, journalist, screenwriter, an amateur athlete, and host of several podcasts and documentaries, including The Chernobyl Podcast from HBO and Constitution USA with Peter Sagal on PBS. Peter lives quite happily with his wife, Mara Sagal, two sons and one dog just north of Chicago. |
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| | | | SATURDAY FEATURED
TABLE HOSTS | | | | | | | CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ | | | Cristina Henríquez is the author of The Great Divide, The Book of Unknown Americans, The World in Half, and Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories. She has been longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, The Oxford American, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. She earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Illinois.
www.cristinahenriquez.com |
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| | | | | ALEX KOTLOWITZ | | | Alex Kotlowitz is the author of four books, including his most recent, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago which received the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. His other books include the national bestseller There Are No Children Here, which the New York Public Library selected as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. It received the Helen B. Bernstein Award and was adapted as a television movie produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. It was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year along with his second book, The Other Side of the River also received The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. His book on Chicago, Never a City So Real, was recently released in paperback.
www.alexkotlowitz.com |
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| | | | | LUIS ALBERTO URREA | | | Luis Alberto Urrea, a Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the author of 19 books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. His latest novel, Good Night Irene, was an instant New York Times bestseller and is based on his mother’s service as a Red Cross “Donut Dolly” serving troops on the frontlines of the European theater in WWII. The Devil’s Highway, Urrea’s 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. His novel, The House of Broken Angels, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award for his collection of short stories, The Water Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North is a Big Read selection of the National Endowment of the Arts. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
luisurrea.com |
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| | | | | MORE THAN A NOVEL AFFAIR
CO-CURATORS | | | | | | | IGNATIUS VALENTINE ALOYSIUS | | | Ignatius Valentine Aloysius is a naturalized U.S. citizen, born in India and raised in Mumbai by a Tamilian father and Anglo-Indian mother. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University, where he won the Distinguished Thesis Award for fiction and is a lecturer in writing at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Ignatius is the host and curator of the reading series Sunday Salon Chicago (sundaysalon-chicago.com). A resident of Evanston, he serves as a Board of Trustees member at Ragdale and Co-Chair of its Curatorial Board; he is also a mayor-appointed board member of the Evanston Arts Council. Ignatius is the author of the experimental novel Fishhead. Republic of Want, and his prose and poetry appear in several venues, including Cold Mountain Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Porter Gulch Review, Trampset, Olney Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, and others. He is currently at work on his next book, a lyric novel.
linktr.ee/ignatius.valentine.aloysius |
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| | | | | SAMANTHA CHANG | | | Lan Samantha Chang is the author of The Family Chao, winner of an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of her first collection, Hunger, was recently published by W.W. Norton & Company. She is also the author of the novels All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritanc, which won the PEN Open Book Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she teaches at and directs the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
lansamanthachang.com |
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| | | | | REBECCA MAKKAI | | | Rebecca Makkai is the author of this year’s New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions for You as well as the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Northwestern University, UNR Tahoe, and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English; and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives in Chicago and Vermont.
rebeccamakkai.com |
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