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.

Join us for Evanston's second annual Type-In, a get-together for people interested in typewriters. Write a letter, bang out some instant poetry, try some speed typing, or just admire different kinds of beautifully made typers, which we'll provide for your use.

Sometimes writers just need the tiniest of nudges to get them off and running on a story. In this workshop, led by author Thomas Burke (Eastbound into the Cosmos), we’ll discuss the generative process, as well as writing practices, but more than anything, we will power through many different writing prompts. Participants will leave this workshop with a number of scenes, characters, and scenarios which can serve as building blocks to new work. Due to the limited size of the workshop, free registration is required; register here.

Photo: Hamilton Poe

About the Instructor: Thomas Burke received a BA from Union College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Eastbound into the Cosmos is his first novel. He has contributed work to Tin House, The Rumpus, Playboy, Hobart Pulp and St. Petersburg Review, among other places. He has taught at UMass Amherst, the Newberry Library, and Northwestern University, where he is currently assistant director of the Kaplan Humanities Institute. Formerly Burke helped direct the Summer Literary Seminar in Russia and co-founded its sister program in Kenya. He is the recipient of the Eugene Yudis Prize for fiction, a fellowship from the UMass Amherst MFA Program, and a residency at Art Omi’s Ledig House, among other honors. He lives in Evanston, IL with his wife and two children.

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

As part of the Northwestern University Spring Writers’ Festival, join writer Lesley Nneka Arimah, whose debut story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky (Riverhead, 2017), offers a “humanizing portrait of both the Nigerian citizen and first-generation young female immigrant” (Liz von Klemperer). Evocative, wrenching, and subversive, this dazzlingly accomplished collection explores the ties that bind us–parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends–to one another and to the places we call home. This event is held in conjunction with the Northwestern University English Department and the Block Museum.

Anyone can write a book. The question is, “How do you draw attention to it?” The Evanston Public Library is offering a service that aims to answer that question. Introducing Biblioboard. Learn how this and other related products can help you format, publish, and showcase your self-published materials. Want to get your ebook into the library? Now you can. Join Collection Development Manager Elizabeth Bird in a lecture format as she walks you through the process. Chicago Writers Association and Off-Campus Writers Workshop cosponsor this program.

About the Speaker: Elizabeth Bird is the Collection Development Manger of Evanston Public Library. Her blog A Fuse #8 Production is hosted by School Library Journal. Elizabeth reviews for Kirkus Reviews and the New York Times. She is the co-author of Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children's Literature and the upcoming picture book The Great Santa Stakeout, out this September.

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.

Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, won the Whiting Award in 2018, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.

This workshop, brought to you by CHI PRC's Wasted Pages Workshop, will challenge you to create written work by eliminating rather than adding words to the page. Materials provided. All skill levels are welcome! Led by Alison Thumel, whose chapbook of erasure poems won Salt Hill's Dead Lake Chapbook Contest. This event is free, but preregistration is required; go to https://writingbyerasing.eventbrite.com/ to preregister. 

Everyone has a story to tell—learn how to tell it well in a workshop conducted by the former Ernest Hemingway Writer-in-Residence, award-winning author and memoirist, and WBBM Radio Reporter—David W. Berner.

Whether it’s a short personal essay, a mini-memoir, or a book length manuscript, writing the stories of our lives is a dream for many. This workshop is your chance to find that story and discover how best to tell it no matter where you are in the process. Whether you’re only thinking about the writing, just beginning the storytelling, or you’ve already put down words, this workshop will help you find your narrative.

The workshop will focus on styles of personal story, on the craft of storytelling, issues of privacy, and will offer exercises to help guide you toward your best writing.

The event is free but advance registration is required at this link.

Join us for Evanston's first-ever Type-In, a get together for people interested in typewriters. Write a letter, bang out some instant poetry, try some speed typing, and admire different kinds of beautifully made typers. Have your own typewriter? Bring it! If not, we'll have several for you to try out.