4th Annual BrooksDay, June 7 2016

Welcome to the 4th Annual BrooksDay,
a day long celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks

Tuesday, June 7, 2016,

Chicago, IL 60602.

Our annual celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks is back, this year at the Chicago Cultural Center.  Special features, amazing readers and all things Gwendolyn Brooks will commence at 10:00 am and go until 6:00 pm. The Guild Literary Complex, Brooks Permissions, the Poetry Foundation, and Third World Press, are again partnering as hosts for Chicago’s premier celebration of all things Gwendolyn Brooks: BrooksDay. This year we return to our roots with BrooksDay being held on the anniversary of Gwendolyn Brooks’ birthday, Tuesday, June 7, 2016, from 10:00 am until 6:00 pm at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington St., Chicago, IL 60602, the location of the first-ever BrooksDay.

We are inviting you to join us this year at an event that is intrinsically Chicago!

Outdoing ourselves, this year’s program will feature Kevin Coval, Aviya Kushner, and Andrea Change, as emcees, along with many of Chicago’s top literary and artistic talent including graffiti artist Tyrue Slang Jones, artistic brother-trio Sketch N’ Tyme, and readers including Michelle Boone, Steve Young, Jackie Taylor, Calvin Forbes, Coya Paz, Eric May, Angela Jackson, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and many others. Putting together a robust day of poetry, performance, activism, and Gwendolyn Brooks, we are expecting a great and participatory audience for this event, as we are again centrally located in Chicago’s Loop, and have the full support of the City of Chicago: DCASE, as well as last year’s program sponsors including Northwestern University and Intrinsic Books.

The past three BrooksDay celebrations have brought wonderful visibility to the poetry, work and life of Gwendolyn Brooks bringing together artists and audiences representing all facets of Chicago’s diverse community. This year’s reading and performance will be yet another Chicago-must, serving as a natural launch into the summer poetry and arts festival season with this year’s event featuring thematic segments of her works and writings. As we grow each year looking towards the 100th anniversary of Gwendolyn Brook’s birth in 2017, now is the perfect time to discover BrooksDay!

Emcee: Andrea Change
Andrea Change is poet, writer and a long-time friend of the Guild Complex. She has been a part of the Chicago poetry community for over 20 years.Her work has been published in a number of poetry magazines, journals and included in such poetry anthologies from Tia Chucha Press as Powerlines and Stray Bullets. Her poetry was also included in the 2001 Steppenwolf Theatre production, Words on Fire. A hometown girl, born and raised in Chicago, much of her poetry is inspired by her experiences growing up in the city. Other influences range from the classic poetry of Browning, to Pablo Neruda, to poets from the Harlem Renaissance and the beat poets of the ‘60s. A graduate from Northwestern University, she is still learning and is constantly fascinated by the great voices she hears at local area poetry readings. She is mother to one son, Phillip and Sasha, the dog. Still an active member of the poetry and arts community, she currently resides in Rogers Park.

Emcee: Kevin Coval
Kevin Coval is the editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and is the author of Schtick, L-vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems, Everyday People, Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica and the play, This is Modern Art, co-written with Idris Goodwin. Founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and the Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, Coval teaches hip-hop aesthetics at The University of Illinois-Chicago, is a 4x HBO Def Poet and has written for a wide variety of publications including CNN.com, Huffington Post and Fake Shore Drive. The Chicago Tribune’s called him “the voice of the new Chicago” and the Boston Globe says he’s “the city’s unofficial poet laureate”. This is Modern Art is forthcoming in the Spring of 2016 on Haymarket Books and Coval’s A People’s History of Chicago is due out in the Spring of 2017, also on Haymarket Books.

Emcee: Aviya Kushner:My first book, The Grammar of God: A Journey Into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau/Random House 2015), is about the intense experience of reading the Bible in English after an entire life of reading it in Hebrew. My writing has also appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Partisan Review, Poets & Writers, A Public Space, The Wilson Quarterly, and Zoetrope: All-Story. I have worked as a travel columnist for The International Jerusalem Post and as a poetry columnist for BarnesandNoble.com. I am currently an associate professor of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, and I am a contributing editor at A Public Space as well as a mentor for The National Yiddish Book Center.

Emcee: Mario Smith is the host of News From the Service Entrance on WHPK, a contributor to
#TheDownload on WGN Radio and a Break Beat Poet

BrooksDay 2016 Readers include:

Javon Smith
Sandra Opoku
C.Russell
Fatimah Asghar
Elise Paschen
Julie Nesbitt
Stephen Young
Kimberly Dixon- Mays
Babu Atiba

Mama Edie
Kai El’Zabar
Coya Paz
Toni Nealie
Hurley Green
Elizabeth Taylor
Jill Hopkins
Nora Brooks Blakely
Angela Jackson
Quraysh Ali Lansana
Val Gray Ward
Toni Asante Lightfoot
Natasha Estevez
Haki Madhubuti
Duriel Harris
Kofi Ademola
Page May
Tiff Beatty
Bee Kapri
K’Love
Bill Ayers
Tim Samuelson
Rebirth with Sketch N Tyme

FM Supreme
M’Reld Green
Kristiana Colon
Calvin Forbes
Jackie Taylor
Rosellen Brown
Michelle Boone
Peter O’Leary
Aurora Performance Group