This month’s column explores another reason Chicago’s literary scene is “lit”: the wide variety of live literature events held in neighborhoods across the city. From conversations with award-winning authors to […]

The 2023 Chicago Review of Books Awards shortlist includes literary works ranging in subject matter from queer motherhood to belonging and migration, Chicago’s Black cowboy culture, and women’s overlooked heroism during World War II.

At one point in Kathleen Rooney’s bewitching new novel From Dust to Stardust, the iconic Hollywood flapper Doreen O’Dare says to an interviewer, “What I’ve figured out is that the […]

Chicago author Kathleen Rooney writes in many genres—fiction, non-fiction, essays, poetry—even Poems While You Wait. She has written several historical fiction novels in her own distinctive style. Heavily researched, novelized, written in […]

I first encountered Chicago author Kathleen Rooney years ago at The Neo-Futurists’ funky New Year’s Eve bash, where her collective Poems While You Wait was delightfully typing up custom poetry […]

Edna Ferber’s The Girls, a novel about three independent-minded South Side women yearning for vibrant lives, was originally published more than a century ago, but it’s written with such verve […]

The title of Where Are the Snows, Kathleen Rooney’s new, award-winning collection of poetry, serves as both question and commentary to start off the book. Where are the snows, anyway? […]

The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and FabricationsBy Aaron AngelloRose Metal Press In a piece titled “Think,” Aaron Angello tells of two conversations about what makes a poem a poem. In […]

Chicago writer Kathleen Rooney recently released her latest novel, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. A fictional retelling of the true story of World War I’s “Lost Battalion” (though mostly regarding […]