Alyson Lyon is co-producer of Essay Fiesta. Her essay entitled "Control" recently aired on the Insects & Robots radio-show/podcast from Vancouver. She will be going up against Essay Fiesta co-producer Keith Ecker at Write Club at The Hideout on Feb 15. It is certain to be a bloodbath!

Additionally, Alyson works as a makeup artist. Check out her beauty blog: AlysonHeartsFaces.com. She also wants everyone to know that despite the controversy, she stands firm in the belief that indeed, less is more.

Join Tuesday Funk on January 4th at Hopleaf's upstairs bar (7:30 p.m.) to hear Alyson and all of our talented readers!

Born and bred in the great state of Texas, Valerie Jupe has worked as a video editor in television for over seven years, many of which were spent in New York City. She loves to travel the world, and has a particular affinity for Prague. She also loves wine from Chile, taking far too many photos, and rambling ceaselessly about Chicago architecture. She fancies herself as food critic to be reckoned with, and writes reviews for Yelp.

She also considers herself something of a poet, having been featured as a reader at The Green Muse in Austin, as well as in two reading series, The Inspired Word and An Echo, A Stain, in New York City. She is also published in poetry journals such as The Best of Stain, The Prada Poet, and in her collection Shattered Fragments of My Soul.

You can further indulge your growing Val! obsession by viewing her photos here, and reading her Yelp reviews here.

Join Tuesday Funk on January 4th at Hopleaf's upstairs bar (7:30 p.m.) to hear Valerie and all of our talented readers!

Celebrate the new year with a six-pack from your friends at Tuesday Funk—six terrific readers, that is. We're bringing you great fiction, essays, and poetry from the likes of Alyson Lyon, Suzanne Clores, Mare Swallow, Cesar Torres, Valerie Jupe, and Christopher Sweet, plus our patented Poem By Bill. Oh, and there is beer, too—80 different types of it!

Tuesday Funk convenes Tuesday, January 4, 2011, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark St., Chicago. Arrive early, stake out a table in the upper room, and grab a beer from John 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 our readings. And watch this space over the next several days for spotlight posts about our readers.

We'd like to offer a giant gusher of gratitude to everyone who helped make last night's episode of Tuesday Funk such a rousing success—readers and audience alike. Our biggest crowd yet (standing-room only!) turned out to see our fantastic five hold forth behind the magic mike. If you were one of the benighted few who failed to make it out, here's what you missed as the evening veered from the poignant to the thrilling to the hilarious.

Jotham Burrello—a return reader who earlier graced us with his essay "Speed of Life"—filled us in on his attempt to build a lean-to on his new Connecticut flower farm. Naomi Buck Palagi read poems from her chapbook silver roof tantrum and newer works too, and made us all salivate for fresh, hot biscuits. Anne Calcagno brought us a heartbreaking chapter from her pitbull of a novel Love Like a Dog.

After a break to let everyone visit our talented bartender John, co-host William Shunn read his poem "Smoke." Fraser Coffeen thrilled us with his account of the first UFC bout between mixed martial artists Ken Shamrock and Tito Ortiz. And inspired by that story, Johanna Stein tossed out what she'd planned to read and regaled us instead with the uproarious story of her throwdown with a purse thief in the ladies' room of a Winnipeg night club.

So that's what you missed at the last Tuesday Funk. The good news is that we'll be back at Hopleaf on Tuesday, January 4 with an all-new slate of readers, including Alyson Lyon, Mare Swallow, Cesar Torres, Suzanne Clores, Valerie Jupe, Christopher Sweet, and another Poem By Bill. Mark your calendars now! You never know quite where our evenings will go, and you won't want to be left out in the cold in the new year.

Okay, yes, we might have a little ice on the ground, but any day when the number of readers at Tuesday Funk does not exceed the temperature in Fahrenheit is a good day in Chicago. So take a break from your Seasonal Affective Disorder, come out to Hopleaf tonight (Tuesday, December 7th), and join your hosts Sara Ross and William Shunn for the 29th entry in our theoretically infinite Tuesday Funk reading series.

We're bringing you poetry, fiction, essays, and more from the likes of Johanna Stein, Anne Calcagno, Jotham Burrello, Fraser Coffeen, and Naomi Buck Palagi. That's five great readers for the mere price of a beer. Or maybe two. (Beers, that is. We're pretty sure about the reader count. Though one never knows what might happen behind that mike.)

And yes, today it has also been 69 years since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but please, no tasteless jokes about how the battle went down, okay? Too soon.

Hopleaf 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 for a seat!

As always, the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf is cash-only, so be prepared. Remember also that no food is allowed in the upstairs lounge, and only those 21 and over can be admitted.

Johanna is a writer/director/comedian/forward/slash/abuser whose work ranges from award-winning animated kids shows for places like Disney, Nickelodeon and PBS... to adult humor for places like the New York Times, Comedy Central, and VH-1... to really, really adult humor like this dirty little film short that has offended and titillated film festival audiences across North America.

Johanna recently wrote about her nipples in Afterbirth: Stories You Won't Read in a Parenting Magazine (St. Martin's Press)—you can buy it here; it makes a real nice Channukah present. If you'd like to learn more about Johanna, see more of her work, or email her about the $50K that is awaiting her in Nigeria, you can find her through her website, www.jojostein.com.

Join Tuesday Funk tomorrow (December 7th) at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Johanna and all of our talented readers!

Here at Tuesday Funk, we occasionally like to point you toward fun and worthwhile things to do in Chicago on those thirty lonely days of the month when you're not at Hopleaf for one of our high-class literary extravaganzas. So if you want to get to know some interesting folks you might not cross paths with otherwise, you should definitely check out Mac 'n Cheese Productions.

Mac 'n Cheese Productions helps satiate the desire of people to grow their community via non-traditional, affordable, comfortable, and fun ways.

• Minglers: People come to a converted toy-factory home for an evening of expanding networks (social, romantic, professional). The caveat—everyone must come solo.
• Coffee: People meet at a coffeehouse for a facilitated discussion on all things entrepreneurial.
• Smatterings: An e-newsletter that has a myriad of info, from job openings to grant opportunities to activity suggestions to mechanic referrals.
• Special Events: Example > Dance Experiment: Seventeen strangers who can't dance and who are scared to perform in front of others rehearse for three months in preparation for a performance in front of an audience of 350.

For more info, check out www.macncheeseproductions.com. And tell 'em Tuesday Funk sent you!

Fraser Coffeen is one of the founding editors of and a regular contributor at HeadKickLegend.com. Dedicated to presenting the latest news and analysis on the world of kickboxing, Muay Thai, and Mixed Martial Arts, HeadKickLegend was recently named one of the top 20 worldwide MMA sites by MMAPayout.com. 

Prior to his work with HKL,Fraser was a contributor at K-1Legend and Total MMA. In addition to covering kickboxing and mixed martial arts, Fraser has written a number of screenplays and radio plays with an emphasis on horror. Fraser has also worked in the weird underbelly of the Chicago arts scene as a member of the critically acclaimed and now deceased Defiant Theatre, where he honed his love for visceral, exciting entertainment. This love for the odd side of the road led him to create the two-person sideshow act Numbskull, the Human Blockhead in collaboration with Jennifer Ann Coffeen, which the pair has performed throughout the Midwest.

Today, Fraser also works as a theatrical blood effects artist.  When not writing or doing blood work, Fraser has been a professional wrestling ring announcer, a comic book character for Alex Ross, studied clowning and physical theater, and worked with numerous Chicago theater companies.

Join Tuesday Funk on December 7th at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Fraser and all of our talented readers!

For stories in her collection Pray For Yourself, Anne Calcagno received the San Francisco Foundation Phelan Literary Award, an NEA and two IAC Fellowships. Her fiction has appeared in The North American Review, TriQuarterly, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, and other publications. She won an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for her story "What's Yours?" published in Other Voices.

A dual national, Italian and American, she is also editor of Travelers Tales: Italy, which won Foreward's Silver Medal for Best Travel Book of the Year. Her reviews and travel writing have appeared in the New York Times, the Italian American Historical Society, New City, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Chicago Tribune. She's recently completed a novel about dog fighting in Chicago, titled LOVE LIKE A DOG. Calcagno teaches in the School of the Art Institute's MFA in Writing program.


Join Tuesday Funk on December 7th at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Anne and all of our talented readers!

Naomi Buck Palagi has made her way to Northwest Indiana via many stops, starting with a homesteader childhood in rural Kentucky, complete with goats and lots of bare feet, some years in the Mississippi Delta, an Oberlin College degree, and 5 years in and around the Chicago Theater scene.

She enjoys shaping all sorts of tangible things—wood, fabric, sound, words. She has work published or upcoming in Otoliths, Moria, Spoon River Review, Blue Fifth Review, and Wicked Alice, among others. Her chapbook silver roof tantrum is recently out from dancing girl press.

Join Tuesday Funk on December 7th at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Naomi and all of our talented readers!