These five brilliant authors will be a part of all of our More than a Novel Affair festivities! Join them at a reception, and then in discussion with each other on making time and space for art at the Newberry Library on Friday, May 16. They will also be at our cocktail party and a seated dinner at Ragdale on Saturday, May 17.
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and grew up transnationally in India, Canada, and the United States. Having worked as a lobbyist, field organizer and nonprofit administrator, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where he also studied dance in the Gallatin School. Ali is the author of over two dozen books of fiction, poetry, and essay, translator of books by Marguerite Duras, Ananda Devi, and Mahmoud Chokrollahi, and editor of volumes on Shreela Ray, Jean Valentine, and Agha Shahid, as well as other anthologies. His most recent books are Sukun: New and Selected Poems, the novel Indian Winter, and a critical study, Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton. He also published a YA fantasy with Choose-Your-Own-Adventure entitled The Citadel of Whispers. Founding editor of Nightboat Books, he served as Series Editor for both the University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry series and the Under Discussion series. In 2022, he received the Banff Mountain Environmental Literature Award for his book Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water. After teaching at various colleges and universities, including Oberlin, St. Mary's College of California, Davidson College, Naropa University, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Ali currently serves as Professor of Literary Arts, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
Jami Attenberg is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including The Middlesteins, All Grown Up, and a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. Her latest novel, A Reason to See You Again, was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is also the creator of the annual online group writing accountability project #1000wordsofsummer, which inspired the USA Today bestseller 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. Jami has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, The Guardian, and others. Her work has been published in sixteen languages.
Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of Anita de Monte Laughs Last, a Reese’s Book Club Pick longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the award-winning novel Olga Dies Dreaming, named a Best of 2022 by The New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she was recognized as a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary.
Claire Lombardo is the New York Times bestselling author of Same As It Ever Was and The Most Fun We Ever Had, which has been optioned for television by Reese Witherspoon. Her novels have been translated into over a dozen languages. A former social worker, Claire has also taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and worked as a bookseller at Prairie Lights Books. She lives in Minneapolis.
Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His two novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) were finalists for The Booker Prize and have been translated into 30 languages. He has won an LA Times book prize and the prestigious Internationaler Literaturpris, FT/Oppenheimer prize for fiction, an NAACP Image award and has been nominated for two dozen prizes for fiction. He was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers in 2015 and served as a judge of the Booker prize in 2021. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Financial Times, Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. He is the Helen S. Lanier Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Georgia and the program director of the Oxbelly Fiction Writers retreat. His third novel, The Road to the Country, was published in 2024.
Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a queer writer, interdisciplinary artist, Hoodoo practitioner, and cultural strategist working at the crossroads of social justice and spirituality. Hicks currently serves as Board Chair for The Guild Literary Complex, Core Faculty with Stories Matter Foundation’s StoryStudio, adjunct faculty with the University of Reno’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Incline Village, Right of Return Alumni Consultant at the Center for Art and Advocacy, and as a District Advocate and voting member of the Recording Academy. They are the author of two poetry collections, A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), a shortlist finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Poetry Award, and HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a shortlist finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. A 2024 Grammy-nominee, Hicks is an Art for Justice Fund grantee, the winner of the Sappho Poetry Award and the Best of Net Prize for Poetry. They have received grants, fellowships, and residencies from Illinois Humanities, Black Mountain Institute, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Tin House, Lambda Literary, and the Center for Art and Advocacy, amongst others. They were recently named a 2024 Gwendolyn Brooks Living Legacy Honoree and are currently working on their debut memoir-in-essays about their incarceration, A Body of Wild Light: The Fall and Rise of An American Poet (Haymarket Books). You can find their poetry, essays, and art in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Poetry Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, The Rumpus, Slate, The Slowdown Podcast, and Yale Review, amongst others.
Helen Money is the stage name of Alison Chesley, a Chicago-based cellist. Classically trained, Alison has worked as a performing and recording artist for over 25 years, releasing 5 solo records and performing as a guest artist on many others. She has toured nationally and internationally, with artists such as Kim Deal, Sleep, Neurosis, Earth, and Shellac. Alison’s sixth record, Trace, a collaboration with producer and composer Will Thomas, is now out on Thrill Jockey Records.
The above authors will be joined by these accomplished writers at a cocktail party and dinner on Saturday, May 17th at Ragdale.
Ramona Ausubel is the author of five books, most recently The Last Animal which was a national bestseller, received the National Book Foundation Science + Nature Prize, and was a Barnes & Noble book of the month. Her previous books are Awayland: Stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and has taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars, Tin House, Writing by Writers, the Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Environmental and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family.
“Kraus brings the rigor of a scientist and the sensibility of a poet.” – The New York Times
Daniel Kraus is a New York Times bestselling writer of novels, TV, and film. His latest novel, Whalefall, received a front-cover review in the New York Times Book Review, won the Alex Award, was an L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, and was a Best Book of 2023 from NPR, the New York Times, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and more. 20th Century Fox will release the film adaptation, cowritten by Kraus, in 2026.
With Guillermo del Toro, he co-authored The Shape of Water, based on the same idea the two created for the Oscar-winning film. Also with del Toro, Kraus co-authored Trollhunters, which was adapted into the Emmy-winning Netflix series. His also cowrote The Living Dead and Pay the Piper with legendary filmmaker George A. Romero. Kraus’s The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 10 Books of the Year. Kraus has won the Bram Stoker Award, Scribe Award, two Odyssey Awards (for both Rotters and Scowler), has appeared multiple times as Library Guild selections, and more.
Kraus’s work has been translated into over 20 languages.
Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, The Common, Witness and elsewhere and is forthcoming in Ghosts of Where We Are From, an anthology of dark fiction by Latin American authors, edited by Cynthia Pelayo (Primer Sueño/Atria Books). She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Lima was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers-Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago and New York.
Adrian Matejka was born in Germany as part of a military family. He grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana and is a graduate of Indiana University Bloomington and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His next collection, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017.
His mixed media collaboration with Nicholas Galanin and Kevin Neireiter inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books), was published in 2021. His most recent collection of poems, Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), was a finalist for the UNT 2022 Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. His first graphic novel Last On His Feet : Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century (Liveright, 2023) was selected as one of ten best books of 2023 by the New York Public Library and was a finalist for a 2024 Eisner Award.
Among Matejka’s other honors are fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19. He currently lives in Chicago and is Editor-in-Chief of Poetry magazine.
Joe Meno is a fiction writer and journalist from Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize, he is the bestselling author of eight novels and two short story collections. His critically acclaimed work of nonfiction, Between Everything and Nothing, is an exploration of the asylum process in America and was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Editor's Choice. His writing has been adapted to both film and for the stage. He is a frequent contributor to Chicago Magazine and a professor at Columbia College Chicago.
Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award winning and International Latino Book Award winning author and poet. Pelayo writes fairy tales that blend genre and explore concepts of grief, mourning, and cycles of violence. She is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, Children of Chicago, Crime Scene, The Shoemaker’s Magician, Forgotten Sisters, as well as dozens of standalone short stories and poems.
Loteria, which was her MFA in Writing thesis at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was re-released to praise with Esquire calling it one of the ‘Best Horror Books of 2023.’ Santa Muerte and The Missing, her young adult horror novels, were each nominated for International Latino Book Awards. Poems of My Night was nominated for an Elgin Award. Into the Forest and All the Way Through was nominated for an Elgin Award and was also nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. Children of Chicago was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in Superior Achievement in a Novel and won an International Latino Book Award for Best Mystery. Crime Scene won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. The Shoemaker’s Magician has been released to praise with Library Journal awarding it a starred review.
Her forthcoming novel, Vanishing Daughters, will be released by Thomas and Mercer in 2025 and is inspired by Charles Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.”
Her works have been reviewed in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Review of Books, and more.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award, and her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.
Richard Cahan is the author or co-author of more than a dozen award-winning books. His specialty is telling stories found in massive photo archives—such as the tragedy of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the saga of historic buildings that have been torn down across the United States during the past century. He is a journalist, who worked as the picture editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, founded and ran a project that documented Chicago in the Year 2000, and now works as a photojournalist for his local newspaper, the Evanston RoundTable.
Please note that shopping for these authors’ books through the page above will benefit Ragdale! We will have many of these books for sale at all our events, but if you want to get your books ahead of time, please shop this page!
Poems While You Wait is a collective of poets and their vintage typewriters who provide an unexpected and unpretentious encounter with poetry. The process is simple: give us your name, give us the topic that you would like us to write a poem about (funny or sad, sexy or serious, big or small), then go enjoy the event. Upon your return you will have a custom-made, one-of-a-kind original poem to keep for yourself or to give as a gift.
Phill, also known as Phree, is a multidisciplinary visual and movement artist originally from Indianapolis, Indiana. Currently based in Chicago, Illinois, he is entering his third year as a company member with Chicago Dance Crash. Phill has had the opportunity to collaborate with esteemed organizations such as The Lyric Opera, Lollapalooza, and Marriott Theater, as well as numerous local artist groups and professionals. Committed to visibility and community engagement, Phill received the 2024 Individual Lab Artist Grant from Chicago Dancemakers Forum. As a primarily self-trained artist, his expression is predominantly showcased through Breaking, Hip Hop, and House dance styles. Additionally, he has extensive training and performance experience in Modern, Tricking, and Contemporary dance. Phill is dedicated to sharing his passion for creativity and artistic freedom, aiming to inspire social change through his work.
…and more, coming soon!
Rebecca Makkai is the author of the 2023 New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as four other works of fiction. Her last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Middlebury College and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
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. He is a lecturer in writing at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Ignatius is the current host and curator of the long-running reading series Sunday Salon Chicago. A resident of Evanston, he also serves as a mayor-appointed board member of the Evanston Arts Council. Twice Pushcart nominated, Ignatius is the author of the literary novel Fishhead. Republic of Want, and Salt Pruning, a collaborative poetry collection, co-authored with David Allen Sullivan, recent poet laureate of Santa Cruz county, CA. A second poetry collection, Bone Dust Mother is forthcoming on Glass Lyre Press in Spring 2026. Ignatius' prose and poetry appear in several venues, including Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, Another Chicago Magazine, Cold Mountain Review, Porter Gulch Review, Roi Fainéant Press, The Rumpus, and others. He is currently shopping a speculative lyrical novel and his next collaborative poetry collection.
Lan Samantha Chang is revising a novel about an Asian American family in the Midwest. She is the author of two novels, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance, and a story collection, Hunger. Hunger was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award and the winner of the Southern Review Fiction Prize. Inheritance won the PEN Open Book Award for the Novel. Samantha’s short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. She also received fellowships from the American Library in Paris, the Radcliffe Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She has taught fiction writing at Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow, and at the MFA Program for Writing at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.