Category: Local writer/artist

  • Logan Square Literary Review Reads: Halloween Edition

    Kick-off your Halloween weekend with the Logan Square Literary Review Reads: Halloween Edition! Grab your pumpkin beers and trick-or-treat bags and prepare yourself for the spooky, scary and creepy as read by: Lara Levitan, Michael McCauley, Alicia Hilton and others!

    The Logan Square Literary Review is a not-for-profit quarterly journal based in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, IL. This publication aims to facilitate expression and add to the thriving community of arts and ideas in Logan Square. The Logan Square Literary Review is dependent upon submissions from the public. This event is to celebrate issue VIII Fall 2011.

    Long live 60647!

  • Kevin Coval Performs Poetry From L-Vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems

    Spoken-word poet Kevin Coval, co-founder and Artistic Director of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, will perform at Quimby’s in support of his third collection of poetry L-vis Lives! Racemusic Poems (Haymarket Books, September).

    Coval, who has been hailed as “a new glowing voice in the world of literature” by Studs Terkel, explores the dynamic intersection of race and culture in America today with “L-vis,” an imagined persona and pastiche of artists who have used and misused Black music. In Coval’s poetic novella, L-vis’s story is equal parts autobiography and forgotten and re-imagined history. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history’s more obscure “whiteboy” heroes and antiheroes. A free audio preview of L-vis Lives!, with poems read by Coval and beats by Coolout Chris, can be heard here: http://bit.ly/oXSIxZ
    “This book is bold, brave and morally messy – twelve rounds of knock-down, drag-out shadowboxing against a shapeshifter. The dark humor, intellectual fervor, and emotional rigor Coval brings to bear animates these pieces, turns caricatures to characters…”
    —Adam Mansbach, author, Go the F**k to Sleep

    For performance, interview, and review requests, contact: Jon Kurinsky, Haymarket Books, jon@haymarketbooks.org

    Wed, Oct 12th, 7pm

    from hero to most
    i am a hero
    to most. the great hope
    of something other.
    a complex back-story.
    something other than
    the business of my father.
    bland’s antonym.
    jim crow’s black sheep.
    the forgotten son
    left to rise in the darkness
    among the dis
    carded in the wild
    of working class, single
    mother hoods.

  • Joe Janes and Friends Read from 50 Plays 10/1

    50 Plays by Joe Janes is the follow-up to the remarkable and insane 365 Sketches of 2010.  

    Joe Janes spent months working with fifty local directors and their chosen casts to write a ten-minute(ish) play for each one.

    A “Best of” presentation of pieces at Donny’s Skybox at Second City in August was hailed by the Chicago Reader as “”silly, bizarre, violent, and provocative” “…the pieces showcase Janes’s willingness to take risks of all kinds.”

    Joe Janes is a teacher, writer, actor, improviser and director in Chicago. He is the Improv Program Director in Columbia College’s Theater Department. At Second City, he teaches all levels of the writing program. He has worked for Second City for over a dozen years and in that time has performed in the national touring company, produced and directed at Second City – Detroit, directed for the touring company and Second City – Las Vegas.  He spent time as the artistic director of ComedySportz-Chicago where he developed their training center curriculum and created BattleProv. As a comedy writer, he wrote for and provided voices for Jellyvision’s You Don’t Know Jack series of CD-ROM trivia games, freelanced for SNL’s Weekend Update and won an Emmy for his work on Cincinnati’s Club 19. He is a founding member of The WNEP Theater Foundation for which he has written and performed for 20 years in such shows as The (Edward) Hopper Project, Metaluna and the Amazing Science of the Mind Revue, The Armageddon Radio Hour and Soiree Dada. He is also the artistic director of Robot vs. Dinosaur and a former company member of the hit show Improvised Shakespeare. Joe began his career as a stand-up comedian where he toured the country for five years opening for such acts as The Monkees, Bill Hicks, Rita Rudner, and Paula Poundstone. You can follow his exploits on his blog biteandsmile.blogspot.com and Twitter and become a fan of 365 Sketches on Facebook.

    Joe Janes can be contacted at jjanes@secondcity.com

     

    Sat, Oct 1st, 7pm  

  • Todd Dills and Friends Celebrate All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10 on 10/3

    THE2NDHAND’s founding editor, Todd Dills, joins contributors to launch the mag’s 10th-anniversary anthology: All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10

    THE2NDHAND began its life as an 11-by-17-inch block of black text on white paper peppered variously with photo-illustrations, comics, line drawings and distributed in storefronts first in Chicago, then in an ever-growing list of cities around the U.S. New writing, simply, has been its focus since editor and publisher Todd Dills (author of the novel Sons of the Rapture) founded it in 2000—a small format its physicality, but a loud mouth and a big heart its most important parts.

    “And without Quimby’s, where we began hosting readings shortly after we launched,” says Dills, “we would never have built the community of writers and readers we now enjoy.”

    After a successful Kickstarter campaign raised funds to print the book, All Hands On: THE2NDHAND after 10 arrived in August to lay down the best of the mag’s 10+ years of publishing writing by the budding insurgents of the American lit landscape—and others, no doubt. True to form, the book begins with a section of new, as-yet unpublished work, and follows with sections devoted to some of its best repeat writers, including those on the program for this event.

    Joining Nashville, Tenn.-based Dills at this event them are Time Out Chicago books editor and Featherproof Books publisher Jonathan Messinger (Hiding Out) and longtime THE2NDHAND contributors and Chicago residents Kate Duva and Jill Summers. For more about the book, as well as the writers, visit the2ndhand.com/THE2NDHANDTXT/books

  • Anne Elizabeth Moore Reads From Cambodian Grrrl With Sara Drake 9/29

    In Anne Elizabeth Moore’s new book Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh, the writer and independent publisher brings her experience in the American cultural underground to Cambodia, a country known mostly for the savage extermination of around 2 million of its own under the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge.

    “1000000000000000% punk rock.” –The Jacksonville Public Library

    “The best travel book I’ve read this year.” -USA Today

    Moore is a columnist for Truthout, and has written for The Progressive, Bitch, Annalemma, Tin House, the Boston Phoenix, and The Onion. The former editor of Punk Planet and the Comics Journal, Moore received a Fulbright to continue her work in Cambodia in 2010, and recently held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her book Unmarketable was said to offer “something distinctly more radical than merely protesting against consumerism: a total rejection of the competitive ethos that drives capitalist culture” by the LA Times; deemed “a work of honesty and, yes, integrity” by Kirkus and called “sharp and valuable muckraking” by Time Out New York. It was also named a Best Book of 2007 by Mother Jones. See more at: anneelizabethmoore.com

    Moore will be joined by Chicago cartoonist and writer Sara Drake, currently planning a comics project in Cambodia. Find out more here: http://iydcpc.wordpress.com

    Thurs, Sep 29th, 7pm

  • Caroline Paquita of PEGACORN PRESS, reads and shows works with Jo Dery and Edie Fake

    Caroline Paquita will be in Chicago to release the first two official works out on this small, “queer, feminist, total-art-freaker,” publishing house, Pegacorn Press. Using Risograph duplicators to create such works as her comic-zine WOMANIMALISTIC and an annual calendar, this once informal self-publishing venture officially expanded and became it’s own formal entity earlier this year.

    In celebration, a 2012 calendar will be released, as well as a new comic compilation, featuring some of Chicago’s finest- Edie Fake and Jo Dery. Fake, Dery and a handful of artists in the U.S. and Germany were asked to create works surrounding the loose theme of of “2012,” and/or “THE FUTURE.” The result is a scintillating cornucopia of hilarity and social commentary, printed in an assortment of colored ink and paper-stock. Paquita’s yearly calendar features ”Womanimals” and other fanciful creatures gallivanting in jolly and curious environments. Wolves wearing wigs howl at the full moon, while tribes of Womanimals live in the trees with snakes and sloths- in 2012, anything is possible!

    Also joining the bill is Edie Fake and Jo Dery. Both will be presenting work at this event, including some of Jo’s stunning animations.

    Caroline Paquita is an artist/musician living and working out of Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been shown and distributed internationally and printed in such publications as Maximum Rock and Roll and Cometbus. A longtime creator of zines (Brazen Hussy, Zine Libs and most currently, WOMANIMALISTIC), a printmaker, and in general, a lover of all things made by hand, she began compiling heavy printing equipment in the hopes that one day she might begin a small publishing venture. PEGACORN PRESS is the result of this and her desire to create an environment where artists, particularly women and queers, are able to have the luxury to make work that will get printed and distributed to a larger audience. When she has spare time, she tends to her bees and hangs out with the chickens in her backyard.


    Jo Dery     is an artist who experiments with narrative form, using both traditional and new media. Her works include short films/videos, drawings, prints, illustration, installation, and artist/small-press book publications. Through the playful invention of characters and events, she investigates her relationship to the built environment, natural phenomena, history and current events, as well as aspects of cognition and consciousness. She currently lives in Chicago.

    Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 2002 and has since clocked time in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Baltimore. He’s received a Critical Fierceness Grant for queer art and was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists. His drawings have been included in Hot and Cold, Creative Time Comics, and LTTR. Gaylord is his first full-length book. Currently, he lives in Chicago where he works as a minicomics sommelier for Quimby’s Books.

    For more info:
    http://pegacornpress.blogspot.com/
    www.carolinepaquita.com
    http://www.jodery.com/
    http://vimeo.com/jodery
    http://www.ediefake.com/

  • Rebekah Mercuri Reads From Weeding the Seeds of Deceit 9/15

    Many of the events experienced by the main character of Rebekah Mercuri’s debut novel echo the true-life experiences of the author, who herself, was involved in a Christian Cult.

    Weeding the Seeds of Deceit is a story of Hope Locker, a young woman seeking closure to the haunting and vivid memories of an impoverished life, beginning with the manipulations and contradictions from a Christian Cult her parents joined in her youth.  When the prophet of the cult threatens their lives, the family escapes to Texas to live with Hope’s paternal grandfather. The deep affliction her parents feel from dragging the family into such annihilation leads them down an even more despairing and destructive path. Despite the cult experience, Hope maintains her faith through prayer, and music later becomes her sole outlet from life’s chaos, and provides her with the inspiration to follow her dreams.

     

    REBEKAH MERCURI is a writer and mother of two. She had a unique and nomadic childhood as a member of a Christian cult. Her experiences inspired her to pen her debut fiction novel, Weeding the Seeds of Deceit. Mercuri was born in Anaheim, California and was educated at Columbia College Chicago, where she received a Bachelor’s degree in Fiction Writing. She also holds an Associate’s degree in Marketing and Business Management from Cincinnati State Community College. She resides in Chicago, Illinois and is currently working on a her next novel.

     

    Thurs, Sep 15th, 7pm

  • CCLaP Releases American Wasteland: Bleak Tales of the Future On the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11

    With all the talk of “hope” and “honor” that was bound to arise during the tenth anniversary of September 11th, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (CCLaP) thought it was important to also remind the future of what the last ten years have REALLY been like. That’s why the center put together this latest anthology, which took a dark science-fiction conceit as its core and then invited a series of writers across the nation to pen stories set within that alternative universe. In this case, the stories look back from a fictional twentieth anniversary of 9/11, but one where John McCain won the 2008 and ’12 elections, then Sarah Palin in 2016 and ’20; and with no government bailouts, no withdrawals from the Middle East, and no attempts to move away from an oil-based economy, the US has become a much bleaker and more terrible place, a nation that is now used to rolling electricity blackouts two or three days a week and that is just about to go to war with Mexico, where the permanently unemployed squat in half-finished McMansions out in crumbling suburbs that almost completely lack both gasoline and fresh fruit. A sobering reminder of what life under Tea Party rule would likely be like, “American Wasteland” is an antidote to the false cheeriness and optimism that has come with the tenth anniversary of 9/11, a more realistic look at all the mistakes this nation has made between then and now.

    Various local contributors to this anthology will be performing at Quimby’s that night, including DELPHINE PONTVIEUX (“ETA: Estimated
    Time of Arrest”), MARK R. BRAND (“Life After Sleep”) and LAWRENCE SANTORO (“Just North of Nowhere”). CCLaP itself (cclapcenter.com) is a
    mostly online organization that has been open since 2007, a regular publisher of both electronic and handmade paper books, as well as such other activities as a podcast, 150 book reviews a year at its blog, and half a dozen live events annually at various venues across the city.

    Friday, September 9th, 7pm

  • Anders Nilsen Celebrates Big Questions at Lula Cafe with Quimby's 8/30

    Anders Nilsen’s graphic novel collection of Big Questions is coming out, and we’re going to celebrate with him at Lula Cafe on August 30th at 7pm.

    A haunting postmodern fable, Big Questions is the magnum opus of Anders Nilsen, one of the brightest and most talented young cartoonists working today. This beautiful and minimalist story, collected here for the first time, is the culmination of ten years and over 600 pages of work that details the metaphysical quandaries of the occupants of an endless plain, existing somewhere between a dream and a Russian steppe. A downed plane is thought to be a bird and the unexploded bomb that came from it is mistaken for a giant egg by the group of birds whose lives the story follows. The indifferent and stranded pilot is of great interest to the birds–some doggedly seek his approval, while others do quite the opposite, leading to tensions in the group. Nilsen seamlessly moves from humor to heartbreak. His distinctive, detailed line work is paired with plentiful white space and large, often frameless panels, conveying an ineffable sense of vulnerability and openness.

    Big Questions has roots in classic fable–the story’s birds and snakes have more to say than their human counterparts and there are hints of the classic hero’s journey, but the easy moral that closes most fables is left here as open and ambiguous. Rather than lending its world meaning, Nilsen’s parable lets the questions wander out to go where they will.

    Paperback, 7.25 x 9.25, colour, 658 pages

    Anders will be joined by John Porcellino of King-Cat Comics and Stories, and local fiction writer Kyle Beachy (The Slide) and Zak Sally (Like a Dog Recidivist, former bassist of Low, editor of La Mano Press).

    Please note that this event is NOT AT QUIMBY’S!

    It is at Lula Cafe which is at 2537 N. Kedzie Blvd, Chicago
    lulacafe.com
    773-489-9554

  • Carrie McGath Reads From So Sorry to See You Go

    Carrie McGath’s first collection of poems, Small Murders, was released in 2006 from New Issues Poetry and Prose. Ward-Eighty-One and The Chase are her self-published, limited-edition collections released in 2008 and 2009, respectively. Her newest self-published chapbook, So Sorry to See You Go is in a limited 50-edition run with the cover design by Bailey Romaine. The poems are inspired by Carrie’s thesis research at the Newberry Library about the presence of the circus in the Midwest. Carrie grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown’s strange persona remains with Carrie, along with her dark Irish ancestral roots seeped in secrets, illness, and superstition. Carrie currently lives in Chicago where she is a poet, visual artist and art writer for Chicago Art Magazine She also contributes to Art:21 Blog’s “Open Enrollment” column. Her blog dollwork.org is devoted to film, literature, art, and other nooks of culture where dolls appear.  She lives with her sweet and spoiled cats, Seamus and Hortense.

    “Juxtaposing imagery of fractured delicacy, birds’ wings, eggshells and doll’s heads, with uncompromising hardness of gun barrels and wooden chests, she captures an uncanny world where a semblance of normality veils overripe fantasies and violence.”    ~~ Aisha Motiani, Milwaukee’s Shepherd Express

    For more info: carriemcgath.com