Percival Everett has published 30-some books—mostly novels—over his career, but he has not been a well-known author in the literary zeitgeist. But the LA-based author has a large Chicago fan […]

The Chicago Humanities Festival hosted writer Roxane Gay, in conversation with writer Lindsay Hunter, at the University of Chicago’s Lab School. Like recent CHF speaker and fellow Black female author […]

This autumn’s Chicago Humanities Festival is chock-a-block with notable writers. That focus is normal for one of the Windy City’s most diverse and comprehensive cultural institutions, but especially true this […]

Fiction is a “medium that must always allow itself…the possibility of expressing intimate and inconvenient truths,” acclaimed London-born author Zadie Smith once said. She recently stopped by Lincoln Park’s Francis […]

Jennifer Berne wrote the storybook Calvin Can’t Fly: The Story of a Bookworm Birdie in 2010, and her second cousin Sarah Michaelson directed and produced a video version last year. […]

By Carr Harkrader With its dramatic palazzo ornamentation, twinkling star-lit ceiling, and mischievous cherubs nuzzling within insets, the Music Box Theatre was perhaps the perfect place for a talk with […]

Debbie Millman has been podcasting since before there were podcasts. She has produced more than 500 interviews over the 16+ years she has been talking about why Design Matters. She […]

We all carry secrets, but not everyone has the courage to sit under stage lights, before an audience awash in shadows, and tell them to the world. But immigration attorney […]

Salman Rushdie is sometimes asked why, in this age of lies, he chooses to write fiction, adding more untruths to this disjointed world. Rushdie and poet Srikanth Reddy’s Chicago Humanities […]

History doesn’t repeat, Mark Twain said: it rhymes. And, as poet and playwright Cornelius Eady and performer Joe Morton both noted during their conversation about Eady’s Brutal Imagination, it keeps […]

Both Leonnig and Mitchell cover Washington, or elements thereof, and they began the conversation by noting that the Secret Service is not, for the most part, its own beat. Since […]

The Chicago River, as many of us know, once flowed the other way, into Lake Michigan. It was reversed—a triumph of engineering, at the time—to move sewage and waste water […]