At the March 5th edition of Tuesday Funk, our monthly Poem by Bill raged against the ticking clock, and it went a little like this...

And if you enjoyed that, please join us at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013, upstairs at Hopleaf, for an evening with Suzanne Clores, Mary Beth Hoerner, Robert McDonald, Dion Walton, and former co-host Sara Ross Witt!

Mary Beth Hoerner is a Chicago playwright and fiction writer. Her play Atomic Honeymoon was performed at the CORNservatory, she is a network playwright at Chicago Dramatists, and she was the recipient of a Ragdale residency in playwriting. Her short fiction has appeared in Hair Trigger and Hypertext, and her memoir "Night Games" appears in the anthology Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. She co-hosts The Chicago Way literary reading series and is a board member of 2nd Story. Her education includes an M.A. in English from the University of Illinois and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia College Chicago.

Please join Mary Beth and all our outstanding readers on Tuesday, May 7th, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older-only event is free.

At our April 2nd edition, Tuesday Funk co-founder Reinhardt Suarez returned to our mike to read from his new novel, The Green Ray of the Sun, and he brought some musical friends to back him up...

And if you enjoyed that, please join us at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013, upstairs at Hopleaf, for an evening with Suzanne Clores, Mary Beth Hoerner, Robert McDonald, Dion Walton, and former co-host Sara Ross Witt. Don't miss it!

Originally a theater performer for 25 years, Dion Walton has been writing for the past ten. He's a published writer (Our Legacies: Writings from Chicago's Older Gay Men), a singer, and an artist who has presented work in galleries in the Chicago area.

At present he is writing his autobiography, The Happening, and also writing and performing with The Goodman Theater. Follow him on Facebook at his page "Where is Dion Now?"

Please join Dion and all our outstanding readers on Tuesday, May 7th, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older-only event is free.

At our April 2nd edition, Mary Robinette Kowal brought us this magical excerpt from her new novel Without a Summer. And you'll want to watch all the way to the end because she brought shadow puppets too!

And if you enjoyed that, please join us at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013, upstairs at Hopleaf, for an evening with Suzanne Clores, Mary Beth Hoerner, Robert McDonald, Dion Walton, and former co-host Sara Ross Witt. Don't miss it!

Sara Ross Witt is the former co-producer and co-host of Tuesday Funk and a graduate of The New School MFA in Creative Writing program. She was raised in Ohio as a psychic by her biological mother, a detail she writes about in some of her short stories. Since leaving Ohio she has lived in New York City, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis and has pursued a very non-psychic career as a technical writer for the United States Government, which included writing for the Office of the President.

Her writing has appeared in Arch City Chronicle and Parent to Parent. For more information on Sara's thoughts on pregnancy, motherhood, and the movie Aliens, visit her site Pregphobic and Pregnant.

Sara lives with her husband, their 18-month old son, and two cats in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood.

Please join Sara and all our outstanding readers on Tuesday, May 7th, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older-only event is free.

At our April 2nd edition, co-host William Shunn gave his short-short story "What Changed?" (originally written for 20x2 in Austin) its Chicago debut, and it went a little like this...

If you enjoyed that, please join us at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013, upstairs at Hopleaf, for an evening with Suzanne Clores, Mary Beth Hoerner, Robert McDonald, Dion Walton, and former co-host Sara Ross Witt. Don't miss it!

Robert McDonald's prose and poetry have appeared in a wide variety of print and online journals, including Sentence, The New York Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Prose-Poem Project. He lives in Andersonville, works at in independent bookstore, and blogs about poetry and other things at Lives of the Spiders. With Kathie Bergquist, he is the author of A Field Guide to Gay & Lesbian Chicago.

Please join Robert and all our outstanding readers on Tuesday, May 7th, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older-only event is free.

Suzanne Clores is an author of narrative nonfiction, and is working on her second book, titled Invisible: How I Came to Accept the Extraordinary. She has written for The Huffington Post, Smith, The Nervous Breakdown, Next Avenue, Natural Health, Martha Stewart Living, and Shambhala Sun, among other publications. She was once hired to write and produce a documentary for MSNBC on the neo-pagan movement, which, strangely, never aired. Her essays have run on Chicago Public Radio. She learned to take storytelling seriously both from her Italian grandfather and while working with David Isay a million years ago on several pieces for All Things Considered.

Suzanne's work often revolves around the American psycho-spiritual movement, a category into which her piece for May 7th also falls. Please join her and all our outstanding readers upstairs at Hopleaf that night at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older-only event is free.

There was a lot of luring going on at our April 2nd edition! When Wesley Chu stepped to the mike to read us an chapter from his forthcoming novel The Lives of Tao, it went a little like this...

If you enjoyed that, please join us at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013, upstairs at Hopleaf, for an evening with Suzanne Clores, Mary Beth Hoerner, Robert McDonald, Dion Walton, and former co-host Sara Ross Witt. Don't miss it!