Jesse Jordan is a writer and editor currently living in the suburbs of Chicago. He is an MFA graduate of Columbia College and a member of Reading Under the Influence (a monthly series which you can see tonight at Sheffield's)....  read

Stacy Bierlein is the author of the vibrant new story collection A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends. She is the editor of the award-winning anthology A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection (May 2008), and...  read

Sara Ross Witt is a co-producer and co-host of Tuesday Funk and a graduate of The New School MFA in Creative Writing Program. She was raised in Ohio as a psychic by her biological mother, a detail she writes about...  read

Holly McDowell lived in Colorado, Georgia and South Carolina before discovering the magical city of Chicago. She can be spotted drinking glögg, searching for the world's best tapas bar, and writing in coffee shops all over the windy city. The...  read

Scott Smith is 37 years old and the Director of Digital Strategy for Chicago magazine. Scott cites his years attending college in Ohio as his most formative, and his years since, living in Chicago, as his most enriching. In his...  read

Kristin Lueke once lived in Southern California for 17 years in a row, if you can believe it. Her poems have been published in NAP, Untoward Magazine, the Acentos Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, (in)Different Math, is forthcoming this...  read

Alex Shakar's latest novel, Luminarium, was this year's winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. It was also named a Notable Book of the year by The Washington Post, an Editor's Choice by The New York Times,...  read

Jennifer Schaefer was born in nineteen seventy-something in Waukegan. She grew up in Illinois and Wisconsin, but spent her roaring twenties in London, where she lived in youth hostels, an assortment of squalid flats, a rundown old pub, and worked...  read

Originally a theater performer for 25 years, Dion Walton has been writing for the past 10. He's a published writer, OUR LEGACIES (Writings from Chicago's Older Gay Men), a singer, and an artist that has presented artwork in art galleries...  read

B.C. Bell is the author and creator of Tales of The Bagman, Chicago's own pulp hero! Bell has written numerous pulp hero adventures--among them The Avenger, Secret Agent X, and Dan Fowler G-Man--for Airship 27, Pro Se Press, and Moonstone...  read