Ignatius Valentine Aloysius

Panelist, Manuscript Consultant

Ignatius Valentine Aloysius teaches advanced writing and experimentation in the Integrated Design and Strategy graduate program at Northwestern, and is a graduate lecturer in creative writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). A designer and lead guitarist, he co-curates Sunday Salon Chicago, a bi-monthly reading event series, and is a member of the Curatorial Board at Ragdale Foundation. His novel Fishhead. Republic of Want. is forthcoming from Tortoise Books. Ignatius carries purple pride and lives with his wife in Evanston. 

Gint Aras

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

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.

Ian Belknap

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Ian Belknap is a Chicago writer/performer/instructor and founder/Overlord of WRITE CLUB, the world's greatest competitive readings series (Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, Los Angeles, with more cities on the way). He is author/performer of the solo shows Bring Me the Head of James Franco, That I May Prepare a Savory Goulash in the Narrow and Misshapen Pot of His Skull, Wide Open Beaver Shot of My Heart: A Comedy With a Body Count, Terminal Ferocity, and Uncle Dad is Rip-Shit, You Guys. He curated and hosted the monologue shows Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Ian's Dog & Pony Show. In 2018, he will launch The Foundry, Chicago’s only dedicated storytelling academy, with Janna Sobel, and a new show called Humanities Fair. Ian's work has been featured in the live lit shows This Much is True, Truth and Lies, That's All She Wrote, Story Club Chicago, Fictilicious, Essay Fiesta, Guts & Glory, Fillet of Solo Theater Festival, and the Rhino Theater Festival, among others. He served as Fact Checker for The Encyclopedia Show, and is on the masthead of The Paper Machete as the Dean of Mean, and is a regular cast member/contributor to the fiction podcast Pleasuretown. Ian has been on panels and presented at TEDx Greenville, Arts & Business Council of Chicago, League of Chicago Theatres, Printers, Row Book Fair, Chicago Writers, Conference, and Decatur Book Fest, among others, and has appeared as a guest lecturer at Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University. He has performed at The Poetry Foundation, The Smart Museum of Art at University of Chicago, and Museum of Contemporary Art, among many other venues. He has been named to New City Chicago’s “Lit 50” list twice – in 2013 and 2015. His work has appeared in The Chicago Reader, The Rumpus, The Chicago Tribune, Crain's Chicago Business, Slackjaw, The Hit List, Bullshitist, Arts + Marketing, Untoward, Chicago Literati, Story Club Magazine, and the Reading Out Loud podcast, among others. He is co-editor and contributor to Bare-Knuckled Lit: The Best of WRITE CLUB (Hope & Nonthings, 2014), and co-host of the WRITE CLUB podcast.

Photo credit: Joe Mazza, Brave Lux Photography

Gerald Brennan

Panelist, Manuscript Consultant

Gerald Brennan earned a B.S. in European History from the United States Military Academy at West Point and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University in New York. He's the founder of Tortoise Books, and the author of Resistance, Zero Phase, Public Loneliness, and Island of Clouds. He’s been featured on WGN Radio and in Newcity, and his writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Hypertext Magazine, The Good Men Project, and Innerview Magazine. He resides in Chicago.

Susanna Calkins

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Susanna Calkins is the author of the award-winning Lucy Campion historical mysteries published by Minotaur (St. Martin's). Her books have been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Agatha for Best Historical Mystery, 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.

Henry Carrigan

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. writes about has been writing about books for Publishers Weekly for twenty-five years and was a book reviews editor at PW for five years. He also writes forBookPage and the Christian Century, and he writes a weekly book column for No Depression: The Quarterly Journal of Roots Music. A long-time book reviewer, he has written about books for the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, theCharlotte Observer, the Orlando Sentinel, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch, the State, Library Journal, American Songwriter, and Living Blues. He's the former assistant director at Northwestern University Press and the formerly North American publisher of T&T Clark International, and he's a senior lecturer in the English department at Lake Forest College.

Shannon Cason

Keynote Reader

Shannon Cason has shared his stories all over the country. Shannon is a host, MainStage storyteller and GrandSlam champion with The Moth. He is a regular on WNYC’s Snap Judgment; awarded their Best Performance of 2013. He has appeared on countless podcasts and storytelling stages, including SXSW, RISK!, Third Coast Festival, Podcast Movement, and an upcoming television pilot. He also hosts his own storytelling podcast, Shannon Cason’s Homemade Stories, which partnered with WBEZ Chicago for its 2014-2015 season.Shannon recently launched a new podcast with WBEZ Chicago called TheTrouble with Shannon Cason. His storytelling is featured in the new anthology,The Moth Presents: All These Wonders. Shannon serves as the chief educator for the Brutally Honest Storytelling workshop series, where he has worked with companies, pro athletes, and celebrities tell their stories more honestly. He is a husband, father, and is originally from Detroit. Find out more at shannoncason.com.

Sara Connell

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Sara Connell is a Chicago based writer. She has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, The View and NPR. She received the Judith Dawn Memorial Grant for fiction and has presented at Northwestern University, Printer's Row Literary Festival, Chicago Writers Association, Chicago Women in Publishing and teaches at Story Studio Chicago. Her writing has appeared in: the New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Parenting, TriQuarterly, and Mindful Metropolis. Her first book Bringing In Finn was nominated for ELLE magazine Book of the Year.

Patricia Crisafulli

Panel Moderator

Patricia Crisafulli received a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from Northwestern University in 2017 and was awarded the Distinguished Thesis Award in Creative Writing for her novel in progress, The Cross of Siena. Patricia has also studied in the prestigious Bread Loaf writers’ program (in Sicily).

Patricia has received the Silver Pen Association’s Write Well Award for three of her short stories and has published in an anthology featuring award winners. She is also the author of a collection of short stories and essays entitled Inspired Every Day: Essays and Stories to Brighten Your Day, Give You Hope, and Strengthen Your Faith, published by Hallmark.

Patricia is the author of the New York Times bestseller, House of Dimon: How JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon Rose to the Top of the Financial World (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). She co-authored, with Andrea Redmond, Rwanda, Inc: How a Devastated Nation Became an Economic Model for the Developing World (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), which was an Editor’s Choice Book on Amazon, and Comebacks: Powerful Lessons from Leaders Who Endured Setbacks and Recaptured Success on Their Terms (Jossey-Bass, 2010). Her first book, written under the name Patricia Commins, was Remembering Mother, Finding Myself: A Journey of Love and Self-Acceptance (HCI Books, 1999.

Her labor of love is www.FaithHopeandFiction.com, an e-literary magazine that features original fiction, essays, and poetry.

Kevin Davis

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Kevin Davis is a Chicago-based journalist and author of The Wrong Man (Avon), Defending the Damned (Atria/Simon & Schuster) and, most recently, The Brain Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America's Courtrooms. (Penguin Press).

J-L Deher-Lesaint

Panelist, Manuscript Consultant

Born and raised in Guadeloupe (French West Indies), J-L Deher-Lesaint has lived in the United States since 1995. He holds degrees from Harold Washington College, Loyola University Chicago, the University of Virginia and Northwestern University. His feature interviews with acclaimed authors Edmund White and Edward P. Jones have appeared in Meridian, where he served as fiction editor, and his book reviews have appeared in New Cityand the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has taught at Harold Washington College since 2004, and currently serves as Co-Chairperson for the English, Speech, Theatre and Journalism Department.

Eileen Favorite

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Eileen Favorite is the author of The Heroines: A Novel (Scribner), and her work has appeared in Triquarterly, The Rumpus, Diagram, Chicago Reader, and other publications. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Charles Finch

Workshop Instructor

Charles Finch is the USA Today-bestselling author of the Charles Lenox mysteries, including the most recent, The Woman in the Water (February 2018). His first work of literary fiction, The Last Enchantments, is also available from St. Martin's Press. Finch received the 2017 Nona Balakian Citation, for excellence in reviewing, from the National Book Critics Circle. His reviews and essays regularly appear in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.

Beth Finke

Workshop Instructor

NPR commentator Beth Finke is an award-winning author and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant. In her new book "Writing Out Loud," she reflects on the joys and challenges of teaching memoir-writing classes to older adults in Chicago and getting around the city with a Seeing Eye dog. Find out more at www.bethfinke.com.

Vincent Francone

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He graduated from Northwestern University (MA in Creative Writing Poetry) in 2008 and won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award). In 2016 he was accepted to the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry's Summer School workshop at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His poems and stories have appeared in Rhino, The Oklahoma Review, Silver Birch Press, New City Magazine, and other publications. He is at work on a collection of poems. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.

Amina Gautier

Panelist

Amina Gautier is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy and The Loss of All Lost Things. At-Risk was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award and the Eric Hoffer Legacy Award. Now We Will Be Happy was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the International Latino Book Award, the Royal Palm Literary Award, and was a Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize. The Loss of All Lost Things was awarded the Elixir Press Award in Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and was a Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award, the Paterson Prize, the John Gardner Award, and shortlisted for the SFC Literary Prize. Gautier has been the recipient of fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, the Chateau de Lavigny, Dora Maar House/Brown Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. For her body of work she has received the PEN/MALAMUD award.

Adrienne Gunn

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Adrienne Gunn is a writer, editor, and humorist based in Chicago. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon and her work has appeared in various literary magazines including McSweeney's and PANK. Adrienne previously served as managing editor and fiction editor of TriQuarterly, the literary magazine of Northwestern University, and she regularly performs stand-up and storytelling throughout Chicago. In 2016, her first one-woman show Mother of the Year! debuted and returned to sold-out audiences. Adrienne is currently the editor of the web magazine HEAUXS.

Betsy Finesilver Haberl

Workshop Instructor

Betsy Finesilver Haberl is a freelance writer and editor. She is a graduate of Northwestern University's MA/MFA in Creative Writing and co-curator of the Sunday Salon Chicago literary reading series. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, with her family.

Julianne Hill

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Julianne Hill’s award-winning nonfiction has appeared in outlets including NPR’s “This American Life” and “Morning Edition,” PBS, The History Channel, Real Simple, ABA Journal, Triquarterly Online and Writer’s Digest.

Hill’s stories often focus on health. She served as a Rosalynn Carter Fellow, awarded to journalists covering mental health, and as a National Press Foundation Fellow, given for work focusing on HIV-AIDS. She also worked as a team member earning the George Foster Peabody Award for PBS science show “The New Explorers.”

She also writes essays. Her “This American Life” piece “One Brain Shrinks, One Brain Grows” looks at a young boy’s struggle with his father’s degenerative brain disease. Her essays have appeared in The Round, Chicago Quarterly Review, Health among others. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Riva Lehrer

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Riva Lehrer is an artist, writer and curator whose work focuses on issues of physical identity and the socially challenged body. She is best known for representations of people with impairments, and those whose sexuality or gender identity have long been stigmatized.

Ms. Lehrer’s work has been seen in venues including the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, the United Nations, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Arnot Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the Frye Museum, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the State of Illinois Museum.

Awards include the 2017 3Arts MacDowell Fellowship for writing, 2015 3Arts Residency Fellowship at the University of Illinois; the 2014 Carnegie Mellon Fellowship at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges; the 2009 Prairie Fellowship at the Ragdale Foundation. Grants include the 2009 Critical Fierceness Grant, the 2008 3Arts Foundation Grant, and the 2006 Wynn Newhouse Award for Excellence, (NYC), as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the University of Illinois, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Her memoir, entitled “Golem Girl,” was recently signed to the One World imprint of Penguin/Random House, via the Regal Hoffman & Associates literary agency, NYC. 

Ms. Lehrer is on faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and instructor in the Medical Humanities Departments of Northwestern University and University of Illinois at Chicago.

Mike Levine

Panelist, Manuscript Consultant

Mike Levine offers developmental, substantive, and line editing for books, essays, and short stories, as well as appraisals of book proposals. He was an acquisitions editor at Northwestern University Press for nine years, overseeing a wide range of books, including fiction, nonfiction, drama, poetry, and scholarly titles. Among his authors were Ludmila Ulitskaya, A. E. Stallings, Amit Majmudar, Lydia R. Diamond, and David Ives, as well as novelist Jen Beagin and playwright Clare Barron, both winners of a 2017 Whiting Award. In 2015, he was named to New City's Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago. He has participated in editors' panels at the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, AWP, and other conferences. Mike earned a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in English from Rice University. Visit his website at www.mikelevineeditorial.com.

Photo credit: Andrea Bauer

Billy Lombardo

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Billy Lombardo is the author of three books of fiction The Man with Two Arms, How to Hold a Woman, The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories. He is the 2011 recipient of the Nelson Algren Award. Billy is the founder and managing editor of Polyphony HS, a student-run, international literary magazine for high school writers and editors. His most recent publication is the play, The Storm of the Century, published by Coachella Review. He teaches English literature and creative writing at the Latin School of Chicago.

Rebecca Makkai

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Borrowerand The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime -- six stories from which have appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. The recipient of a 2014 NEA Fellowship, Rebecca has taught at the Tin House Writers' Conference and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is currently on the faculty of the MFA programs at Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. Her website is www.rebeccamakkai.com.

Juan Martinez

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Juan Martinez is a fiction writer. He was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and has since lived in Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada. His work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Ecotone, Glimmer Train, McSweeney's, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, Norton's Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America, and The Perpetual Engine of Hope: Stories Inspired by Iconic Vegas Photographs. His collection of stories, Best Worst American came out from Small Beer Press in February 2017. He holds a PhD from the University of Nevada and is currently at work on a novel.

Eric Charles May

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Eric Charles May is the author of the novel Bedrock Faith, which was named a Notable African-American Title by Publisher's Weekly, and a Top Ten Debut Novel for 2014 by Booklist magazine. May is an associate professor in the fiction-writing program at Columbia College Chicago, and the 2015 recipient of the Chicago Public Library Foundation's 21st Century Award. A former reporter for The Washington Post, his fiction has also appeared in Fish Stories, Solstice, Hypertext, Flyleaf Journal, F, Criminal Class, and We Speak Chicagoese. In addition to his Post reporting, his nonfiction has appeared in Sport Literate, Chicago Tribune, and the personal essay anthology Briefly Knocked Unconscious By A Low-Flying Duck. He has taught at the Stonecoast, Solstice, Northwestern University, and Chicago writers conferences, and in Chicago has read personal essays with 2nd Story, and That's All She Wrote, and oral tellings at the Grown Folks Stories and Here's the Story personal essay programs.

Marty McConnell

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Marty McConnell lives in Chicago, where she coaches individuals and groups toward building thriving, sustainable lives and organizations. Her forthcoming second poetry collection, “when they say you can’t go home again, what they mean is you were never there,” won the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize; her first full-length collection, "wine for a shotgun," received the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Awards, and was a finalist for both the Audre Lorde Award and a Lambda Literary Award. YesYes Books recently released her first nonfiction book, "Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop.” An MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, and Indiana Review.

Adam Morgan

Panelist

Adam Morgan is the editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review of Books, a contributing writer at Chicago magazine, and a book critic at the Chicago Tribune and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. His writing has also appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.

Christine Rice

Keynote Reader, Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Christine Rice’s novel Swarm Theory was recently awarded the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award (Honorable Mention, Traditional Fiction), an Independent Publisher Book Award or ‘IPPY’ (Silver for Best First Book), and a National Indie Excellence Award – Winner (Regional Fiction – Midwest). Swarm Theory also made PANK’s Best Books of 2016, was included in Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup, the Best Books of 2016 So Far, and was called “a gripping work of Midwest Gothic” by Michigan Public Radio’s Desiree Cooper. Most recently, Christine's short stories have been published in BELT’s Rust Belt Anthology, The Literary Review, American University of Beirut’s Rusted Radishes, F Magazine, Roanoke Review, and Bird’s Thumb, among others. Her essays, interviews, and long-form journalism have appeared in The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Big Smoke, The Millions, the Chicago Tribune, Detroit’s Metro Times, among other publications, and her radio essays have been produced by WBEZ Chicago. Christine taught in Columbia College Chicago's Fiction Writing Department for over 20 years, is currently the managing editor of Hypertext Magazine, and director of the social justice storytelling nonprofit organization Hypertext Magazine & Studio (HMS). photo credit: Joe Mazza/Brave Lux

Christine Sneed

Workshop Instructor, Manuscript Consultant

Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men.  Her stories or essays have been included in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the Midwest, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Greensboro Review, and a number of other periodicals.

Her books have received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Ploughshares' Zacharis prize, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and Book of the Year from the Chicago Writers Association.  She is the faculty director for the MFA program at Northwestern University’s MA/MFA program in creative writing; she is also on the fiction faculty of the Regis University low-residency MFA program.

Emily Victorson

Panelist, Manuscript Consultant

Emily Clark Victorson is the publisher/editor of Allium Press of Chicago. After receiving degrees from Oberlin College and the University of Michigan she moved to the Chicago area. Prior to starting Allium Press she worked as a librarian, historian, and book designer for such organizations as the Newberry Library, the Chicago History Museum, and History Works, Inc.

Allium Press of Chicago was founded in 2009 as a small, independent press to publish literary fiction, mysteries, thrillers, historical fiction, and middle grade/young adult fiction, all with a Chicago connection. Titles published by Allium include Tony Romano's Where My Body Ends and the World Begins, Frances McNamara's Emily Cabot Mysteries series, and Libby Fischer Hellmann's A Bitter Veil.