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.

Founded as a grassroots poetry workshop in Evanston in 1976, RHINO Poetry publishes an award-winning annual journal of poetry, flash prose, and translations.  We also host The Poetry Forum--free monthly poetry workshops at the Evanston Public Library--and RHINO Reads!--free monthly readings at Bookends & Beginnings. 

As part of Evanston Lit Fest 2019, we are thrilled to host a reading of global poetry and translations, with work in English translated from Japanese, Serbian, Punjabi, Portuguese, and Spanish.  As editors, we believe that poetry crosses borders in powerful and important ways.  Readers and audiences deserve to hear the voices that emerge around the globe in a variety of languages.  We would like to welcome these voices to the Evanston community and hope you will join us! The reading will be followed by a 15 min. open mic for poets. Featuring host Virginia Bell and readers Naoko Fujimoto, Faisal Mohyuddin, Zafar Malik, Carlo Matos, Lucina Schell, Maja Teref, and Steven Teref.

Northwestern University Summer Writers' Conference is hosting a special literary reading in connection with the Evanston Literary Festival. This amazing lineup will give a glimpse of what's to come in August. You're not going to want to miss this!

6:00pm Doors and snacks
6:15pm Program begins

Lineup to include:
Gint Aras, Susanna Calkins, Krista Franklin, Alex Higley, Nami Mun, Kenyatta Rogers, and Mark Turcotte

A reading by Layli Long Soldier, part of Northwestern University’s Spring Writer’s Festival.

Bio: Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016.

Please join us at Bookends & Beginnings as we kick off the week-long 2019 Evanston Literary Festival with local poets and writers. Reading new work on themes of renewal, celebration, and gratitude, hosts Dina Elenbogen and Ignatius Valentine Aloysius will join authors Reginald Gibbons, Chris Green, Mary Hawley, Parneshia Jones, Mike Puican, Cornelia Maude Spelman, Sachin Waikar, and Nancy Burke. ​

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/632085643882352/

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.

Daniel Borzutzky, the National Book Award-winning poet (The Performance of Becoming Human) will read from his new book, Lake Michigan, a series of 19 lyric poems imagining a prison camp located on the beaches of a Chicago that is privatized, racially segregated, and overrun by a brutal police force. Patricia Smith noted, "Borzutzky’s surreal and terrifying lakeside dreamscape—sparked by the real-world specter of the city’s infamous ‘blacksite’ interrogation warehouse—is deftly crafted and chilling in its proximity to the real.”

He will be joined by Peruvian poet and professor Margarita Saona, who will also be reading her poetry. She is head of the department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois. She has published numerous articles, two books on literary and cultural criticism, Novelas familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea  (Rosario, 2004) and Memory Matters in Transitional Perú (Londres, 2014), two books of short fiction, Comehoras (Lima, 2008) and Objeto perdido (Lima, 2012). Corazón de hojalata/Tin Heart  (Chicago, 2017) is her first book of poems.

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)

Northwestern University Press is proud to present Black Women as Giants: A Celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks. Acclaimed poets, Toi Derricotte, Nikky Finney, Vievee Francis, Angela Jackson, and Patricia Smith come together as an unprecedented collective on the campus of Northwestern University to celebrate and reflect on the life, work and impact of Chicago’s literary giant. This roundtable discussion, moderated by Parneshia Jones, will focus on the literary impact of Gwendolyn Brooks in American literature and her social and artistic influence as a cultural and community worker. Ms. Brooks wrote stark literary portraits of the often overlooked and oppressed black life in America. The panelists will reflect and discuss Brooks’ significance on their personal literary careers, her importance during the Black Arts Movement, and how her work and legacy continue to be a defining voice in literature. Generous support provided by the Poetry Foundation. This event is co-sponsored with the Northwestern University Libraries, Center for Writing Arts, Department of African American Studies, Department of English, Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, Women’s Center, Department of American Studies.