Kelly Swails is a childless cat lady who works in academic publishing. She's published several short stories, novels, and comic books in the speculative fiction space and has also dipped her toes into the world of the personal essay. In her free time she watches movies and hangs out with friends in various and sundry bars around Chicago. You can find her at kellyswails.com and various social media outlets. But not twitter. Twitter can suck a bag of dicks.

Please join Kelly and our other fantastic readers on Tuesday, August 6, 2024 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7:30. It's free, and 21-and-over. Please RSVP on Facebook.

Writer. Poet. Bicyclist. New Englander by Trade. Sondra Morin is an alumna of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the Juniper Writing Institute. She is published in The Rumpus, vis a tergo, SIMILAR : PEAKS ::, Curbside Splendor, among others, and is an Uptown Poetry Slam Champion. She has a poetry chapbook, Inviting the Expanse, published under Radical Snail Press. She has performed with The Neo-Futurists and at live lit readings throughout Chicago, including Write Club, Story Lab, and The First Time. Moonlighting as The Audible Snail, she DJs Wednesday nights on CHIRP Radio. You can read her prose at radicalsnail.com.

Please join Sondra and our other fantastic readers on Tuesday, August 6, 2024 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7:30. It's free, and 21-and-over. Please RSVP on Facebook.

Lauren Emily Whalen is the author of I Heart Jennifer Coolidge: A Celebration of Your Favorite Pop Culture Icon, as well as the novels Tomorrow & Tomorrow (a scary-sexy Macbeth retelling co-written with Lillah Lawson), Take Her Down, Two Winters and Satellite, and the nonfiction books Dealing with Drama and Celebrity Bios: Margot Robbie. She is a contributor to GO Magazine, Queerty and BookPage. Lauren’s creative nonfiction has appeared in several publications, including Write or Die, Blue Mesa Review and the Querencia Press Spring 2023 Anthology. She lives in Chicago with her black cat, Rosaline.

Please join Lauren and our other fantastic readers on Tuesday, August 6, 2024 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7:30. It's free, and 21-and-over. Please RSVP on Facebook.

A hundred and fifty shows!? That's exciting! Although less so because there was some slight misnumbering at one point so it's probably not actually #150. Who cares? Math is hard, that's why we deal in words.

Anyway, join us for the August edition of Tuesday Funk, featuring readings by Jitesh Jaggi, Rosamund Lannin, Sondra Morin, Kelly Swails and Lauren Whalen! It'll be a great show, and you won't have to count anything unless you want to.

Admission to Tuesday Funk is always free, but you must be 21 to attend. Doors open at 7pm sharp (tables tend to fill up fast, so don't be late!) and the show will start at 7:30pm. Please RSVP on Facebook, and while you're there, go ahead like and follow us so you get our announcements in your news stream.

On the Tuesday before July 4, we celebrated our independence with a little Tuesday Funk! Kate Lechler got the show rolling with a delightfully dread-inspiring story of self-actualization. C. Russell Price then introduce us to a cowboy ghost and his blue ghost horse friend through the medium of poetry. Then James Kennedy read portions of two of his novels, including a whirlwind scene from Bride of the Tornado.

We took a break to refill our drinks, and host Andrew Huff eased us in with some of his topical haiku. Kathleen Rooney read poems from her unpublished manuscript O Western Wind, and Edward McClelland closed out the show with an excerpt from his new book, Chorus of the Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside Their Rivalry to Save the Nation.

Join us in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf on Tuesday, August 6, when Erin will make her debut as cohost with Andrew, and we'll have readings by Jitesh Jaggi, Rosamund Lannin, Sondra Morin, Kelly Swails and Lauren Whalen. Hope to see you there!

Edward McClelland is a contributing editor at Chicago magazine and the author of How to Speak Midwestern. He will be reading from his new book Chorus of the Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside Their Rivalry to Save the Nation.

Please join Ted and our other fantastic readers on Tuesday, July 2, 2024 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7:30. It's free, and 21-and-over. Please RSVP on Facebook.

C. Russell Price is a Lambda Fellow, Ragdale Fellow, Windy City Times 30 Under 30 honoree, and a two-time Lit City Top 50 Writers of Chicago honoree. They are the author of Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other and Oh, You Thought This Was A Date?!: Apocalypse Poems. They are a poet-in-residence with the Chicago Poetry Center, a core faculty member for Story Studio, and an editor with The Anarchist Review of Books. They’re writing about a ghost cowboy and his ghost blue horse these days. Less honk, more tonk.

Please join Russell and our other amazing readers on Tuesday, July 2, 2024 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7:30. It's free, and 21-and-over. Please RSVP on Facebook.

James Kennedy is the author of the horror thriller Bride of the Tornado, which the Chicago Tribune named as one of their "Top 10 Books of 2023." James's previous books include the sci-fi novel Dare To Know, dubbed by the Times Saturday Review as the "Best Sci-Fi Book of 2021," and the young adult fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish. James is also the founder of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, an annual video contest where kid filmmakers create short movies telling the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds, screening in 10+ cities around the country for the past 13 years. He also hosts the "Secrets of Story" podcast with Matt Bird.

Please join James and our other amazing readers on Tuesday, July 2, 2024 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7:30. It's free, and 21-and-over. Please RSVP on Facebook.

Kate Lechler is a queer writer, editor, and educator who recently moved to Chicago from the otherworldly town of Oxford, Mississippi. They have too many hobbies, among them cooking, karaoke, and foraging for mushrooms, and will talk to you at length about bad TV or the best ways to deflesh scavenged bones. They write in a variety of genres but find themselves most at home in fantasy, partly because they are a witch who does actual magic. Their work has been published in Fireside, Podcastle, Shimmer, and the Deadlands, and they're currently revising a novella about a 19th century vampire-pirate who loves to fuck. Learn more at katelechler.com.

Please join Kate and our other amazing readers on Tuesday, July 2, 2024 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7:30. It's free, and 21-and-over. Please RSVP on Facebook.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, and her latest poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in Fall of 2022 by Texas Review Press. Her latest novel, From Dust to Stardust, came out in September 2023. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.

Please join Kathleen and our other amazing readers on Tuesday, July 2, 2024 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7:30. It's free, and 21-and-over. Please RSVP on Facebook.