Jotham Burrello teaches in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago where he directs the Publishing Lab, a resource for emerging writers. His multimedia company, Elephant Rock Productions has produced two critically acclaimed instructional DVDs for writers and will publish Patricia McNair's story collection "The Temple of Air" in early 2011.

He lives, writes and farms flowers in lovely Ashford, Connecticut, with his wife and three little boys. You can read his essay about moving to New England, "Speed of Life," online at Drunken Boat.

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

Take a well-deserved break from the holiday rat-race with Tuesday Funk and our lineup of readers both naughty and nice—JOHANNA STEIN, ANNE CALCAGNO, JOTHAM BURRELLO, FRASER COFFEEN, NAOMI BUCK PALAGI, and possibly a bonus poem from one of our hosts. No mere stocking-stuffers, these! You'll be glad you spent your money here on beer instead of on presents for those whiny nieces and nephews.

Tuesday Funk convenes Tuesday, December 7, 2010, 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. Stay afterward for some great Belgian-style food downstairs!

Please bring your friends and show your support for Tuesday Funk. Help us deliver a record turnout so we can keep staging these readings at Hopleaf, the finest food-and-drink establishment on the north side.

Please also become a fan of Tuesday Funk on Facebook, so you never miss an invitation to our readings. And watch this space over the next dozen days for spotlight posts about our readers.

If you missed our Tuesday Funk reading for November—which you probably didn't, because we had about our best turnout of all time—but if you were among the unfortunate few who missed out, here are some of the amazing things you didn't see:

Sondra Morin knocked our socks off with poems from her new chapbook Inviting the Expanse (which we were able to buy direct from her, but which you can pick up at Quimby's, The Boring Store, or Transistor for a mere five bones).

Kristin Lueke melted our faces with her poetry, some of which you can read here.

Lauryn Allison Lewis froze our blood with her short story "Bear vs. Snake," which only means you should not miss her when she debuts her mixed-media-performance-art-reading this coming Sunday, November 14, at Come Home Chicago at Underground Wonder Bar.

Dave Snyder rattled our bones and our brains with his erudite poems, which you probably won't read in his rooftop farming blog at the Huffington Post.

And Lori Ann Stephens, our special guest from Texas, brought the house down with excerpts from her novel Song of the Orange Moons, excerpts we can't ... er ... really describe to you without saying that you had to be there. But you can lay hands on her novel (which comes out November 16) at Amazon or Barnes & Noble and fill yourself in.

So that's what you missed at the last Tuesday Funk. The good news is that we'll be back at Hopleaf on Tuesday, December 7 with an all-new slate of readers, including Johanna Stein, Fraser Coffeen, Naomi Buck Palagi and more. We'll have further announcements about the December lineup soon, but mark your calendars now. You won't want to be left out in the cold next month!

Chicago Writers Association inducts the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame initial class on November 20, 2010, at the Northeastern Illinois University Auditorium (3701 W. Bryn Mawr Avenue, Chicago IL).

The Hall of Fame's inductees include:

• Nelson Algren (1909-1981)
• Saul Bellow (1915-2005)
• Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
• Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)
• Louis "Studs" Terkel (1912-2008)
• Richard Wright (1908-1960)

Featured guests for the ceremony include emcee Rick Kogan, Stuart Dybek, Audrey Niffenegger and Sara Paretsky. Speak Easy Ensemble and Lori Lippitz are among performers.

The evening begins at 6 p.m. Ticket price includes pre- and post-ceremony reception.
Tickets may be purchased at http://clhofinduction.eventbrite.com/

You voted today—right? right?—so reward yourself this evening. Come out to Hopleaf tonight, Tuesday, November 2nd, for our 28th entry in the theoretically infinite Tuesday Funk reading series. We're bringing you elect poetry and fiction from the likes of Lori Ann Stephens, Lauryn Allison Lewis, Kristin Lueke, Dave Snyder, and Sondra Morin. That's five great readers for the mere price of a beer. Or maybe two. (But if you have one for each reader, please get someone else to drive you home.)

28: it's a perfect number, which makes this the perfect evening to vote a straight Tuesday Funk ticket!

Hopleaf is at 5148 N. Clark St. in Chicago. The reading begins at 7:30 pm in the upstairs lounge. Arrive early for a seat.

As always, the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf is cash-only. Be prepared with cash for your beer, but if don't have cash you can get your beer downstairs with a credit card and bring it up. Please also remember, though, that no food is allowed in the upstairs lounge, so finish eating before you come upstairs.

Sondra Morin lives in Chicago and is a small town New Englander at heart. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and poems have appeared in vis a tergo and Curbside Splendor.

When she was five, she was scolded for drawing lowercase A's with a tail instead of a stick. She has been interested in language innovation and radical snail poetics since. You can read more on her blog at snailsaregood.blogspot.com."

Join Tuesday Funk on November 2nd at 7:30 p.m. to hear Sondra and all of our other talented readers!

Dave Snyder is a poet and gardener. Dave's poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Dave has received fellowships and awards from the Illinois Arts Council, the Iowa Review, Writers @ Work, and the Jentel Artist Residency.

As a grower, he is the director for America's first organically certified rooftop farm at Uncommon Ground, is founder of the Chicago Rarities Orchard Project, and blogs for the Huffington Post.

Join Tuesday Funk on November 2nd at 7:30 p.m. to hear Dave and all of our talented readers!

Lori Ann Stephens's debut novel, Song of the Orange Moons, will be released in November 2010 by Blooming Tree Press. When she's not writing or teaching writing, she dabbles in gardening, dancing, and eating the best gourmet, home-cooked meals. She is not the cook. She lives in Plano, Texas with her family.

Lori Ann's writing has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, The Blue Moon Review, Aries, Sojourn, and collected in several anthologies including Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Minuscule Fiction.


Join Tuesday Funk on November 2nd at 7:30 p.m. to hear Lori Ann and all of our talented readers!

Lauryn Allison Lewis lives and writes in Evanston, Illinois. Her work has appeared in Bartleby Snopes, Dogzplot, Mad Licks Magazine, the inaugural issue of Chicago Pulp Stories, and most recently, an interview with author Stuart Dybek in Knee Jerk Magazine.

Lauryn will debut her mixed-media-performance-art-reading with the reading series Come Home Chicago on November 14th at the Underground Wonderbar. She is in the final stages of editing her novel-in-stories, The Beauties, and also: she loves eating cake and dancing, often simultaneously.

Join Tuesday Funk on November 2nd at 7:30 p.m. to hear Lauryn and all of talented readers!

Kristin Lueke was born and raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California, an experience which in no way prepared her for real life. After graduating from Princeton in 2005, she moved to Chicago for a boy. Normal 21-year-old stuff. After hanging out for a while, she went balls to the wall for a comically useless degree in the Humanities and Creative Writing from the University of Chicago, where she now works surrounded by graduate students and professors. All told, it's not so bad.

Her poetry has appeared in Sliced Bread, elimae, and Decomp Magazine, and on her close friends' personal blogs. Just maybe it'll appear elsewhere at some point in the undetermined future.

Join Tuesday Funk on November 2nd at 7:30 p.m. to see Kristin and all of our talented readers!