His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Nebula Awards Showcase 2004, Year's Best SF 7, Tales From the Red Lion, Visual Journeys, Hell in the Heartland and Cthulhu and the Coeds, or: Kids and Squids; and in the magazines Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories and Space and Time. His poetry has appeared in Year's Best SF 8, Strange Horizons, Tales of the Unanticipated and most recently in the tribute anthology 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin.

A lifelong Chicagoan, Chwedyk received his undergraduate degree from Columbia College Chicago and an M.A. in in English from Northwestern University. He currently teaches the regular and advanced Science Fiction Writing Workshop courses for Columbia College Chicago. He has led or moderated numerous writing workshops since 1991, taught Freshman Rhetoric/Composition and Short Story Writing for several area community colleges. He is currently working on a collection of stories. Rumors of a novel are getting louder.

Join Tuesday Funk April 3 at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Richard read!

At our March Tuesday Funk reading, the versatile Joe Weintraub pitched us this curveball, charting a Cubs pennant race from the vantage point of home...

And if you enjoyed that, then by no means should you miss our next event, Tuesday, April 3, 2012, which features readings from Mary Anne Mohanraj, J.H. Palmer, Charlotte Hart, Mare Swallow, and Richard Chwedyk.

At last week's Tuesday Funk reading, Sunday Night Sex Show impresaria Robyn Pennacchia explained in no uncertain terms exactly why she won't swim with dolphins, and it went a little like this...

And if you enjoyed that, then by no means should you miss our next event, Tuesday, April 3, 2012, which features readings from Mary Anne Mohanraj, J.H. Palmer, Charlotte Hart, Mare Swallow, and Richard Chwedyk.

Calling all book lovers! Calling all beer lovers! Have we got the evening for you! Our 44th episode of Tuesday Funk will feature readings from Mary Anne Mohanraj, J.H. Palmer, Charlotte Hart, Mare Swallow, and Richard Chwedyk! You'll also get a new Poem By Bill, not to mention your pick of dozens of varieties of cold beer at the bar.

The evening gets underway with your co-hosts Sara Ross Witt and William Shunn on Tuesday, April 3, 2012, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark St., Chicago. Arrive early for a seat, and grab a beer from Johnny at the cash-only bar. We start seating at 7:00 pm and no earlier. Admission is always free, but you must be 21 or older. And come early or stay late after for some great Belgian-style food downstairs.

Please bring plenty of friends, and become a fan of Tuesday Funk on Facebook so you never miss an invitation to one of our readings. See you there!

It was certainly a Super Tuesday last night at Hopleaf—a Super Tuesday Funk, that is! Your humble co-host brought you election updates throughout the evening (see the video below), but the real excitement was in seeing what surprises our five candidates for literary greatness would bring us next!

The program kicked off with Joe Weintraub, who related the hilarious and sad portrait of marriage whose fortunes founder along with the Cubs'. Former Tuesday Funk host Hallie Palladino walked us delicately through the joys and perils of intimacy after childbirth. And Maggie Kast transported us back to the Jazz Age with a stirring excerpt from her novel-in-progress.

After a halftime break for beer and a Poem by Bill, Sunday Night Sex Show impresaria Robyn Pennacchia explained in no uncertain terms the risks involved in swimming with dolphins. (We can't wait to bring you video of that one!) And horror maester John Everson wrapped things up in a bloody bow with two tales of unspeakable evil.

But if you weren't there, don't eat your heart out! We'll be posting video from the evening's performances over the coming days and weeks so you can catch up on everything you missed. And of course Tuesday Funk will be back on April 3rd with our guests Mary Anne Mohanraj, J.H. Palmer, Charlotte Hart, Mare Swallow, and Richard Chwedyk. Be sure to join us!

Our remarkable lineup tonight includes John Everson, Robyn Pennacchia, Maggie Kast, Joe Weintraub, and former Tuesday Funk host Hallie Palladino, not to mention one of our patented Poems By Bill.

So "like" us today on Facebook, strap on those walking shoes, grab one of dozens of varieties of beer from the bar, and get set for an evening of entertainment worth the trek.

Hopleaf Bar is at 5148 N. Clark St. in Chicago. The reading begins at 7:30 pm in the upstairs lounge. The lounge opens at 7:00 pm. Arrive early if you want a seat.

As always, the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf is cash-only and 21 and over. Remember also that no food can be brought in from the restaurant.

Robyn Pennacchia lives and writes in a cloistered convent in Chicago's Ukranian Village. She was raised in the Swiss Alps by her gruff but kindly hermit grandfather and a goatherder named Peter until she was adopted by a rich family from England. It was there that she taught Elizabeth Taylor how to walk again, and came up for the idea for The Sunday Night Sex Show, a creative non-fiction reading which she hosts at The Burlington (3425 W. Fullerton) the last Sunday of every month.

Join Tuesday Funk March 6 at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Robyn and the rest of our remarkable lineup read!

Hallie Palladino is a Chicago writer and writing instructor. Her current focus is cultural trends in parenting. She is a contributor to the forthcoming books Stay-at-Home Mothers: An International Perspective and Intensive Mothering: The Cultural Contradictions of Modern Motherhood (both from Demeter Press). She is also an occasional contributor to the natural parenting blog Birthing Shifrah. She lives in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago with her husband and their two young children. Hallie was also one of the original organizers of Tuesday Funk.

Join Tuesday Funk on March 6 at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Hallie and the rest of our remarkable lineup read!

John Everson is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Covenant, as well as the novels Sacrifice, The 13th, Siren and The Pumpkin Man, all released in paperback from Dorchester/Leisure Books. His sixth novel, an erotic horror descent into dark desire centered around a mysterious adult club called NightWhere will be released by Samhain in the summer of 2012. He has had several short fiction collections issued by independent presses, including Creeptych, Deadly Nightlusts, Needles & Sins, Vigilantes of Love and Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions. Over the past 20 years, his short stories have appeared in more than 75 magazines and anthologies. His work has been translated into Polish, Italian, Turkish and French, and optioned for potential film production. He is also the founder and publisher of the independent press Dark Arts Books.

John shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark illustrations and a large stuffed Eeyore. There's also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker courtesy of Charlee Jacob, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that he can't really play but that his son Shaun likes to hear him beat on anyway. Sometimes his wife Geri is surprised to find him shuffling through more public areas of the house, but it's usually only to brew another cup of coffee. In order to avoid the onerous task of writing, he holds down a regular job at a medical association, records pop-rock songs in a hidden home studio, experiments with the insatiable culinary joys of the jalapeno, designs photo collage art book covers for a variety of small presses, loses hours in expanding an array of gardens and chases frequent excursions into the bizarre visual headspace of '70s euro-horror DVDs with a shot of Makers Mark and a tall glass of Newcastle.

Join Tuesday Funk on March 6 at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear John and the rest of our remarkable lineup read!

Maggie Kast is the author of The Crack between the Worlds: a dancer's memoir of loss, faith and family. She has published fiction in The Sun, Nimrod, Rosebud, and others, and her essays have appeared in America, Image, Writer's Chronicle and others. She has received two Pushcart nominations and a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council and is currently working on a novel.

Join Tuesday Funk on March 6 at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Maggie and the rest of our remarkable lineup read!