Join the Writer’s Studio community for instructor Cecilia Pinto's FREE craft mini-lesson on The End in Sight, looking at the connection between story beginnings and endings. After that, at 5:30pm, it's time for our always-inspiring, often-instructive creative writing open mic! 

REGISTER HERE

This signature event is an opportunity to foster your writing, hear the ideas and work of others, and, if you’re so inclined, add your voice and stories to the mix.

To read at the open mic, please prepare up to two double-spaced pages in twelve-point, Times New Roman font. You can hold an open mic spot in two ways: online through the event registration link or in person. When you register for the event, this question will allow you to sign up to read as well: Will you be reading/performing at the open mic? If you answer yes to that question, you will receive a personalized email confirming your open mic spot. If you do not see that question, the online reader signup has closed, so you will need to sign up in person. Three or more spots will be held for in-person signup at the event. Please arrive early to be added to that list.

About the Instructor: Cecilia Pinto has had her poetry and prose published in a variety of journals including Quarter After Eight, Fence, The Seneca Review, Triquarterly, and RHINO. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry and an Illinois Arts Council award and won the Esquire short fiction contest. She is also a CAAP grant recipient. In 2015, she was voted a writer to watch by The Guild Literary Society.

Various kinds of migrations—their own and those of others, chosen and forced, geographical and emotional—inform the work of many writers. The ones featured in this reading will share writing situated along contested borders and within official documents, in sites of historical significance and in classrooms, in remembered homelands and in imagined family trees—work that explores what it means to find a home in this world, what it takes to secure a sense of belonging despite the forces of fear, exclusion, xenophobia, even shame.

Readers include Jan-Henry Gray, Nestor Gomez, Kimberly Dixon-Mays, Daniela Morales, Nina Sudhakar, Jeremy T. Wilson, Foster Monroe, and Liam Hubbard, and the event is hosted by Faisal Mohyuddin.

Refreshments will be served, and free parking is available directly across the street from the event space.

J. Rohr joins us for the May offering of Fresh Meat, a live workshop session for Chicago-area storytellers. He will be performing a run through of his one man show “I’m Not Batman”, a comedic exploration of growing up and failed heroism as a romantic burns out into a cynic — feedback is appreciated. Doors open at 8:00. Event begins at 8:15. Food and drink are available all evening. 

J. Rohr is a Chicago storyteller, who grew up in Skokie then lived in the city for too short a time before moving back to the suburbs.  His personal adventures have included near death experiences, run ins with the law, romance, stabbings, and things he’s legally advised not to mention.  He performs stories and poetry throughout the city, and his fiction has appeared in periodicals such as Ireland’s Dodging the Rain, Perihelion, and The Mad Scientist Journal.  He currently writes the blog Honesty is Not Contagious.

Please join us for a special RHINO Poetry reading, featuring Annah Browning, Aricka Foreman, Faisal Mohyuddin, and David Welch, and RHINO editors, including Darren Angle, Naoko Fujimoto, Gail Goepfert, Beth McDermott, and Nick Tryling.

Annah Browning recently completed her Ph.D. from the Program for Writers at The University of Illinois-Chicago. She is the author of a chapbook, The Marriage (Horse Less Press, 2013), and her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Willow Springs, and other journals. She is poetry editor of Grimoire, an online literary magazine of dark arts. 

Aricka Foreman’s chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber was released by YesYes Books in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Drunken Boat, Torch Poetry: A Journal for African American Women, Minnesota Review, Union Station Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, RHINO, shufPoetry, Day One, and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin), among others. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Callaloo Writers Workshop, and is the Enumerate Editor for The Offing.

Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear, 2018), winner of the 2017 Sexton Prize for Poetry, and The Riddle of Longing (Backbone, 2017). He teaches English at Highland Park High School and lives in Chicago.

David Welch is the author of the forthcoming collection, Everyone Who Is Dead, and of a chapbook, It Is Such a Good Thing to Be In Love with You. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Greensboro Review, Pleiades, Meridian, and RHINO. He teaches creative writing and popular literature at DePaul University, where he is Assistant Director of Literary Programs and Outreach.

Tell your story! We give you 7 minutes and thunderous applause. You tell your story any way you want--off book, from paper, from your phone, from the signal from your fearless leader. Just want to listen? Sure, come and hear stories. You might get tempted to sign up...and we're ok with that. Sign up starts at 5:30. Stories start at 6:00.

Be a part of non-violent action. Join us as we gather again this year at Bookends and Beginnings in Evanston to offer our voices in resistance to the current state of local, national, and global affairs that threaten to pull us apart and even set us against each other. The world is on fire! Bring your voices and hearts to this singular event, as you hear authors and activists read from original works expressing their thoughts and opinions based on this year's theme. 
Our reading lineup is (not in order):
Nina Kavin (activist and founder/writer of Dear Evanston) 
Rachel Jamison Webster (poet/writer/Director of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Northwestern University)
Dan Stolar (writer)
Liana Wallace (ETHS student) 
Jerry Brennan (author/editor of Tortoise Books)
Liz Radford (writer/co-founder Women's March Chicago)
Dina Elenbogen (poet/event host)
Ema Wallace (student)
Natania Rosenfeld (poet/writer) 
Faisal Mohyuddin (writer, artist, educator)
Ignatius Valentine Aloysius (writer/event host)