Description:

Northwestern University Summer Writers' Conference is hosting a special literary reading in connection with the Evanston Literary Festival. This amazing lineup will give a glimpse of what's to come in August. You're not going to want to miss this!

6:00pm Doors and snacks
6:15pm Program begins

Lineup to include:
Gint Aras
Susanna Calkins
Krista Franklin
Alex Higley
Nami Mun
Kenyatta Rogers
Mark Turcotte

FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Lineup bios:

Gint Aras (Karolis Gintaras Žukauskas) is the author of The Fugue, finalist for the 2016 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year. His prose and translations have appeared in The St. Petersburg Review, Quarterly West, Curbside Splendor, Dialogo, The Good Men Project, STIR Journal, ReImagine and other publications. He is a community college instructor of Rhetoric and Humanities and lives in Oak Park, Illinois with his family.

Susanna Calkins is the author of the award-winning Lucy Campion historical mysteries and the Speakeasy Murders (all published by published by St. Martin's Minotaur). Her novels and short stories have been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Anthony, the Agatha, the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery (Lefty) and the Sue Feder Historical Mystery (Macavity) awards. A historian by training, Susanna works at Northwestern University where she directs learning and teaching initiatives for faculty. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she lives outside Chicago now, with her husband and two sons.

Krista Franklin is an interdisciplinary artist whose work appears in POETRY magazine, Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, Vinyl, BOMB magazine, and the anthologies Encyclopedia, Vol. F-K and L-Z, The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences Working Toward Freedom, The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. She is the author of Under the Knife (Candor Arts) and Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books). Her art has exhibited at Poetry Foundation, Konsthall C, Rootwork Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Chicago Cultural Center, National Museum of Mexican Art, and the set of 20th Century Fox’s Empire.

Alex Higley is the author of Cardinal (longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction) and Old Open. He has been previously published by Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, New World Writing, PANK, and elsewhere. He lives in Evanston, Illinois with his wife and daughter.

Kenyatta Rogers is a Cave Canem Fellow and has been awarded multiple scholarships from the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. He has also been nominated multiple times for both Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. His work has been previously published in or is forthcoming from Jubilat, Vinyl, Bat City Review, The Volta, PANK, MAKE Magazine among others. He is as a co-host of the Sunday Reading Series with Simone Muench, an Associate Editor with RHINO Poetry and currently serves on the Creative Writing Faculty at the Chicago High School for the Arts.

Nami Mun is the author of the novel Miles from Nowhere. She has won a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and has been shortlisted for The Orange Prize for New Writers and The Asian American Literary Award. Her work can be seen in The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, The Iowa Review, and Tales of Two Americas. She currently teaches creative writing in Chicago.

Kenyatta Rogers is a Cave Canem Fellow and has been awarded multiple scholarships from the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. He has also been nominated multiple times for both Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. His work has been previously published in or is forthcoming from Jubilat, Vinyl, Bat City Review, The Volta, PANK, MAKE Magazine among others. He is as a co-host of the Sunday Reading Series with Simone Muench, an Associate Editor with RHINO Poetry and currently serves on the Creative Writing Faculty at the Chicago High School for the Arts.

Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) is author of four poetry collections, including The Feathered Heartand Exploding Chippewas. Turcotte has been the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Grant, two Literary Fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and a Josephine Gates Kelly Memorial Fellowship from Wordcraft Circle. He was the 2008/09 Visiting Native Writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and served as Visiting Writer-In-Residence for Spring 2014 at the Center For The Writing Arts at Northwestern University. Since 2009 he has been a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at DePaul University.