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!

For the past thirty-five years Joe Weintraub has been publishing a variety of fiction, essays, poetry, and translations in all sorts of literary reviews and periodicals, from The Massachusetts Review to the Chicago Reader, from Gastronomica to Modern Philology. Many of his pieces have been anthologized, and he is a recipient of Illinois Arts Council Awards for fiction and creative nonfiction.

He's been an Around-the-Coyote poet, a StoneSong poet, and has had one-act plays produced by the Theatre-Studio in New York City, Theatre One in Middleboro, Massachusetts. and the Summer Place Theatre in Naperville, Illinois. He's also been a featured author at the Twilight Tales reading series, at "March Madness, Murder & Mayhem" for the Uptown Writers Space, as well as with the TallGrass Writers Guild at the Bourgeois Pig, and he's as pleased as punch to be returning to read for Tuesday Funk at Hopleaf, where Belgian beer is available on tap.

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

Way back at our December reading, speculative fiction writer extraordinaire Jody Lynn Nye joined us at the mike to read her short story "Howl!" (from the Esther Friesner anthology Strip Mauled), and it went a little like this...

And if you enjoyed that, then by no means should you miss our next event, Tuesday, March 6, 2012, which features readings from John Everson, Robyn Pennacchia, Maggie Kast, Joe Weintraub, and Hallie Palladino!

Find balance at our 43rd prime edition of Tuesday Funk, where we'll feature readings from John Everson, Robyn Pennacchia, Maggie Kast, Joe Weintraub, and our former Funk host Hallie Gordon Palladino! 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 Tuesday, March 6, 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 afterward 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!

This past Tuesday night, science fiction writer Dustin Monk dropped by our microphone to share his whimsical, Wallace Stevens–inspired excursion through our unknowable technological future, "Anecdote of the Singularity." It sounded a little bit like this...

And if you enjoyed that, then by no means should you miss our next event, Tuesday, March 6, 2012, which features readings from John Everson, Robyn Pennacchia, Maggie Kast, Joe Weintraub, and former Funk host Hallie Palladino. Be there!

Everyone's talking about Tuesday Funk—at least everyone who was there at Hopleaf last night to see our terrific 42nd episode. We do not exaggerate when we say the rapt audience were crammed in shoulder to shoulder to see our accomplished readers. Even Johnny the Bartender commented on the huge, thirsty crowd—and on what a contrast it was from our February 2011 reading, with its blizzard raging outside and its grand total of ten attendees. What a difference a year makes.

The program kicked off with Dustin Monk, who offered us a personalized guided tour of the world of the Singularity. Lillian Huang Cummins followed that up with two short excursions through lives we were all too painfully able to relate to. And Julia Borcherts delighted the crowd with her tale of a Miami meeting between a pregnant punk and the King of Reggae.

After a halftime break for beer and a Poem by Bill too ephemeral to have been captured by our primitive recording equipment, Lauryn Allison Lewis related a shocking tale of attempted sororicide—in the womb. And Margie Skelly brought us chugging back into the station with a series of poems about planes, trains, and destinations.

But if you weren't there, don't beat yourself up! We'll be posting video from the evening's performances over the coming days and weeks so you can catch up on (almost) everything you missed. And of course Tuesday Funk will be back March 6th with our guests John Everson, Robyn Pennacchia, Maggie Kast, Joe Weintraub, and former Tuesday Funk host Hallie Palladino! Be sure to join us so you too can be one of the ones talking about it.

A whole lot more video from last night's event is coming soon, so stay tuned!

We know our audience, and we know that nothing can hold you back from great writing or from great beer. Tuesday Funk has both on tap for you tonight in our 42nd big episode, so bring a friend and bust on in. No bolt-cutters necessary.

Our insanely gifted lineup tonight includes Julia Borcherts, Lauryn Allison Lewis, Margie Skelly, Dustin Monk, and Lillian Huang Cummins, not to mention one of our patented Poems By Bill. So "like" us today on Facebook, arrive early, grab one of dozens of varieties of beer from the bar, and get set for a evening of no-holds-barred entertainment.

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.