Tuesday Funk will be participating in Lit Crawl Chicago on Thursday, Aug. 18! Join us in our usual space (Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark St.) on an unusual day (Thursday) for a slightly abbreviated version of your favorite eclectic reading series. We'll be featuring readings by Jasmine Davila, James "GPA" Gordon, Steve Bellinger and Rosamund Lannin, and it all starts at 8:15pm sharp!

Come by at 7pm and watch a special episode of live lit/sketch comedy show Cassandra, and stay afterward for Quit it! Ma, They're Looking at Me! at 9:30pm! It's all free, and open to anyone 21 or older.

Learn more about Lit Crawl Chicago, and remember to RSVP on Facebook. See you there!

Join us tonight for the likes of Ryan Bartelmay, Ines Bellina, Vojislav Pejovic, Angel Simmons, and Connie Voisine... and of course, your faithful co-hosts Andrew Huff and Eden Robins!

Our readings take place at Hopleaf Bar, 5148 N. Clark St. in Chicago. We get started promptly at 7:30 pm in the upstairs lounge. Arrive early if you want a seat -- but no earlier than 7:00 pm. Our readings are free, but only those 21 and over will be admitted. No food can be brought in from the restaurant. See you there!

Angel Simmons is a Chicago south-sider who was raised in Englewood. She has a BA from Columbia College and does it all as a speaker, mentor, coach, runway and print model, president and CEO of The Message, Inc., and the current Ms. Worldwide Illinois Ambassador for the Live Out Loud Charity. She has been featured in books, magazines, the Chicago Tribune, Crain's Chicago Business, in Christian music, and as a guest on both radio and television. Angel is the author of Love's Great Design (also her blog), and columnist for both Fabulous & Money Savvy and She Can magazine. She is the co-host of Do Not Submit: Englewood and has graced some of the city's finest storytelling stages for Homewood Stories, Is This a Thing?, Loose Chicks, Miss Spoken, The Frunchroom, This Much Is True! and Story Club South Side.

Please join Angel and all our amazing readers on Tuesday, August 2, 2016, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older event is free.

Vojislav Pejovic (1972, Montenegro, former Yugoslavia) is a neurobiologist by training. His second book, American Sfumato (a novella in nine stories), was published in Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia and is being considered for the Mesa Selimovic Prize, the most prestigious annual award for a novel published in Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. The book was also a bilingual project, with four stories appearing (or about to appear) in US literary journals. He also wrote a few movie scripts and published translations of Charles Simic's poetry. Vojislav lives in Evanston, IL, with his wife and their two sons.

Please join Vojislav and all our amazing readers on Tuesday, August 2, 2016, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older event is free.

Ryan Bartelmay graduated from the University of Iowa in 1998, where he was a member of the Undergraduate Writer's Workshop, and then went on to Columbia University to receive an MFA in fiction writing in 2005. His debut novel, Onward Toward What We're Going Toward, was released in August 2013 by IG Publishing.

His short fiction has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Sycamore Review, Opium, Phoebe: A Journal of Arts and Letters, and Sweet Fancy Moses. Ryan has published non-fiction and other miscellanea in The Believer, Time Out: Chicago, Gadfly, and more. He is the Dean of General Education at Kendall College in Chicago and has been a member of the Gotham Writers' Workshop faculty since 2005. You can find him online at ryanbartelmay.com.

He lives in Chicago with his wife, daughter and two cats.

Please join Ryan and all our amazing readers on Tuesday, August 2, 2016, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older event is free.

Ines Bellina is a writer, translator and performer. She is the co-founder of the monthly Live Lit show, Is This a Thing? and has read at Story Club, Serving the Sentence, 20X2, The Marrow, Miss Spoken, Essay Fiesta, and other events around town including the Chicago Women's Funny Festival. Ines is also one of the hosts of XX,Will Travel, a podcast geared towards independent women travelers. When she's not over scheduling herself or working on a YA novel, she sings love songs to her bulldog, Charlie.

Please join Ines and all our amazing readers on Tuesday, August 2, 2016, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older event is free.

Connie Voisine lives in New Mexico where she teaches during the school year and Chicago in the summers. She has had poems published in The New Yorker, Poetry and other magazines. Her recent book is Calle Florista.

Please join Connie and all our amazing readers on Tuesday, August 2, 2016, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older event is free.

Andrew was in a political mood at the July 5, 2016 edition of Tuesday Funk.

Our nation's birthday,
favorite of nation's kids,
bane of nation's pets.

Pyromaniacs
send puppies into panic
with sonic onslaught.

Trump and Hillary
give so much ammunition
to the other side.

Elitists hate Trump.
My mom still hates Hillary
because she kept Bill.

Tuesday Funk, your favorite eclectic monthly reading series, is back Aug. 2 -- and we're now sponsored by the Chicago Review of Books! Join us in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf for readings by Ryan Bartelmay, Ines Bellina, Vojislav Pejovic, Angel Simmons and Connie Voisine! Andrew Huff and Eden Robins are your co-hosts as ever, and Sal will be behind the bar to serve you a tasty adult beverage.

Doors open at 7pm -- no earlier, please! -- and the show starts at 7:30 sharp. So get there early to grab a seat, but not overly early. As always, admission is free, but you must be 21 or older. And come early or stay late after for dinner or snacks downstairs.

Please RSVP on Facebook, and bring a friend. And don't forget to become a fan so you never miss an invitation to one of our readings.

Coming off the holiday weekend, Tuesday Funk was the perfect way to ease back into the real world -- especially since the beer was cold and the Hopleaf's air conditioning was working.

Maggie Jenkins got us started with a story about becoming a karaoke hero in enemy territory. Leland Cheuk read an excerpt from his novel The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, after which Scott Smith delivered a powerful essay on the broad brush the South Side is often painted with. To wit: "Myths are stories we tell ourselves to explain things that seem far away. Things that we don't understand. And for a lot of people, the South Side is a myth."

After the intermission, cohost Andrew Huff shared his patented topical haiku, and Hannah Gamble echoed Scott with an essay on race, bias and revolution, as well as a second essay -- disguised as a poem -- about the treatment of women in film and its relationship to sexuality. Kendra Stevens Closed out the night with a story about how fixing her teeth revealed self-consciousness she didn't realize she had.

Miss the show? You can watch the readers on our YouTube channel, along with videos of past shows.

We'll be back on Tuesday, Aug. 2 with guests Ryan Bartelmay, Ines Bellina, Vojislav Pejovic, Angel Simmons and Connie Voisine. Hope to see you there!