WMG Literary Event: FLOW (For Love of Writing)
Event Date: Date TBA (to be announced)
Location: 1332 S. Halsted St., Chicago, IL 60607
The event on Sunday, October 27 had to be cancelled. We’ll update our community once we have a new date. Can’t wait for FLOW to read again at WMG.
Learn more about the readers who will participate:
Heather Byrd is an international award-winning poet, writing coach, and CEO of Byrd’s World Publishing. She’s on a mission to empower 1,000 women of color towrite and publish their books, turning their message into a movement. Author of “Igniting Ink: 30-Day Writing Journey” and “Mahogany: A Love Letter to Black,” Byrd’s work has been featured in festivals and publications, including Expressions from Englewood, Hope Ignited, and Trouble The Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue – a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and Locus Award. She earned the International Anthem Award for her DEI curation in the “I See You” issue of the Cornell Report, standing alongside industry giants like HBO, Google, BBC, National Geographic, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Her favorite words are balloon and bubble.
Tina Jenkins Bell is a published fiction writer, playwright, academic, freelance journalist, and literary activist. Bell has had numerous short works published in journals and anthologies, including “To the Moon and Back,” Hypertext Journal, which was nominated for an Illinois Arts Council award and “Swimming,” Jet Fuel Review, which was selected as best small fiction by Somber Press and also recently nominated as best short fiction on the web. More recently, “The Visit,” Re-Living Mythology received a favorable write up in the Publisher’s Weekly. In 2023 National League of American Pen, Inc. competition, Bell’s work was a Top Ten Finalist. A playwright, Bell’s two plays, Cut the Baby in Half and A Conversation with Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks, a collaborative piece were produced as staged readings at the Green Line Performing Arts Center and the Chicago Humanities Festival, respectively. Bell conducts writing workshops regionally. She is a co-founder of FLOW (For Love of Writing) and has collaborated with numerous writing and arts organizations, authors, and bookstores to offer literary programming in Chicago’s underserved communities. Bell currently working on the novel, Down and Dirty in Kosciusko, Mississippi and her play, Death of a Marriage, was recently chosen to be part of Definition Theater’s Amplify New Plays Program.
Janice Tuck Lively is a published writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and a playwright. Her work celebrates and examines the joys and struggles of Black women’s lives and has appeared in such literary journals as: Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Jet Fuel Review, So to Speak: Feminist Journal of Language and Art, and Valley Voices: A Literary Review. Tuck Lively’s work has also appeared in the anthologies They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, Ella @ 100: A Celebration of The First Lady of Song, and Perspectives on African American Literature among others. Her play Indignant Women: A Conversation between Gwendolyn Brooks and Lorraine Hansberry co-written with Sandra Jackson-Opoku and Tina Jenkins Bell was performed at the 2019 Chicago Humanities Festival. Tuck Lively is a 2019 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award winner and a 2016 Pushcart Award nominee. She has received a Summer Literary Seminars 2014 Editor’s Choice Award and was a Semi-Finalist in 2015 for the Dana Award in the Novel. Tuck Lively has also been awarded residencies at Ragdale Artist Colony, Callaloo Writer’s Workshop at Brown University, and the Turkey Land Cove Artist Colony at Martha’s Vineyard. Janice Tuck Lively is a Professor in the Department of English at Elmhurst University where she teaches Beginning and Advanced Fiction Writing, Creative Non-Fiction, Multi-cultural Postcolonial Literature, and Feminist Poetry.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of the award-winning novel, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him, an Essence Magazine Bestseller in Hardcover Fiction. She also coedited the anthology Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works are widely published and produced, appearing in Adi Magazine, Midnight & Indigo, Aunt Chloe, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, New Daughters of Africa, Obsidian, Another Chicago Magazine, storySouth, Lifeline Theatre, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and others. Professional recognition includes a Plentitudes Journal Fiction Prize, the Hearst Foundation James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell Arts, a US National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, an American Library Association Black Caucus Award, a City of Chicago Esteemed Artist Award, the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, a Globe Soup Story Award, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Call for Entries for WMG Literary Series 2025
Aftermath: Election Edition
Event Date: Sunday, January 26, 2025 | 2–4 p.m.
Location: 1332 S. Halsted St., Chicago, IL 60607
Entry Due Date: November 20, 2024 | Notifications: December 2, 2024
Curated by WMG’s Literary Events Curator Jae Green, “Aftermath” is a yearly literary event that focuses on renewals, farewells, reconsiderations, new beginnings, and psychic housekeeping.
For our second annual season we are asking for literary and text-based mixed media submissions that reflect on the Harris/Trump presidential race and the myriad of avenues that intersect for the creative, feminist community.
In one way or another our world will change November 2024 – let’s make as many voices as possible heard…and understood.
- Submit up to three poems, one short form fiction or one mixed media piece.
- The in-person reading is on Sunday, January 26th from 2 to 4 pm at WMG. There are also opportunities to have your literary works published on the WMG website. Please, include your interest in one or both programs when submitting.
- Submissions must be received by November 20, 11:59 p.m. Decisions will be emailed by December 2, 2024.
Please email your entries in the body of an email message to Jae Green: jae@womanmade.org
If you know of someone whose work might fit here, please spread the word! This is a great opportunity to sell books and read with other talented people in a very special environment.
- Admission: Free | Donations are appreciated: http://womanmade.org/donate
- Follow WMG on FB: https://www.facebook.com/WMGpoetry/
WMG’s Literary Events Curator
Jae Green – WMG Literary Events Curator Jae Green is connected to Woman Made Gallery since its early days when the organization was located at its first location in Ravenswood Manor on Chicago’s northwest side. Jae is a visual artist, writer and published poet. She serves since 2020 on WMG’s Board of Directors and is also part of WMG’s Program Committee. In celebration of Woman Made Gallery’s 30th Anniversary she co-juried the Generations group exhibition in 2022 together with Gallery Coordinator, Marisa Miles.
WMG’s Former Literary Team
Nina Corwin Much gratitude goes to Nina Corwin and her years of service as WMG’s Literary Events Curator until Covid prevented us from planning any public events. Nina is a published poet, Founding Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and psychotherapist/advocate for victims of sexual assault. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Uncertainty of Maps and Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Her work has appeared in ACM, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, Verse and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Corwin is an Advisory Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and co-edited Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art By Women. She has read and performed her work across the country, at times set with musical or choreographic compositions.
Jennifer Steele Thank you Jennifer Steele for your service as WMG Literary Events Outreach Coordinator for several years. She is a published poet and educator and serves as Partnerships Coordinator for Teen Services at Chicago Public Library. She served as co-founder and co-curator of the Revolving Door Reading Series. Her work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Callaloo Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Warpland Journal, So To Speak, and others, and is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow. She has taught creative writing and digital media arts across Chicago since 2008 and has collaborated with numerous youth organizations and cultural institutions, designing innovative arts programming.
Kurt Eric Heintz We are grateful to Kurt Eric Heintz who served as WMG’s Literary Events Audio Recordist through 2019. Kurt once taught computer graphics programming at Columbia College, and worked as an independent web developer. He’s since become the lead video director at Britannica. Kurt is known for his poetry videos, begun in the early 1990’s. He also video-conferenced his colleagues’ poetry in the late 1990’s — years before Skype and the iPhone. He was a technical advisor to the Electronic Literature Organization in its earliest years, and is the video content editor for Another Chicago Magazine.
Thank you Angela Narciso Torres, for your wonderful work and support for WMG and our past Literary Program!
Woman Made Gallery is supported in part by grants from The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events; The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; The Illinois Arts Council Agency; the Arts Midwest GIG Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from the Illinois Arts Council Agency; the Puffin Foundation; a major anonymous donor; and the generosity of its members and contributors.