It’s been a good year. Our season started with the Poetry Foundation celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Powerlines anthology. This was an important book at the time, celebrating the mix of writers both local and national, but even then, who knew that this anthology would be home to the early works of five Pulitzer Prize winning writers (Brooks, Jess, Kizer, Komonyakaa, and Mueller), three IL Poet Laureates (Brooks, Jackson, and Turcotte), one US Poet Laureate (Joy Harjo) and the most recent, National Book Award winner in poetry (I’m looking at you Patricia Smith). These are just some of the incredible writers included in the anthology. I could go on, but it always strikes me at how diverse this collection was — writers from varying demographics (age, education, socioeconomic, country of origin, and race). It boggles the mind how it all came together with a small press, like Tia Chucha Press. Just know it would be unlikely that it would happen today. Just goes to show, literature lasts.
Also included in the Powerlines anthology was the great Tony Fitzpatrick, a talented artist and a great friend to the Guild Complex. His artwork can be found on the cover of the anthology. Tony provided covers for several Tia Chucha books. Not sure what he would make of all the pomp and circumstance after his death. Tony seemed to me very much mano e mano. He could talk to anybody, but he wouldn’t talk to everybody and definitely not all at once. He was an artist, not a performer, always true to himself and his work. If Carl Sandburg’s poem, Chicago, was a person, it would be Tony FitzPatrick.
I remember sitting at a salon at Haymarket House hearing Gabe Lyon, Executive Director for the Illinois Humanities, in an effort to invoke the importance of community, read a quote from Gwendolyn Brooks, and as I mouthed along with the familiar lines, I thought Ms. Brooks would be so pleased to know how much her words mattered.
This Fall, we held another fire edition of Transvengence at its new home at Podlasie Club. We held an amazing open mic. I always get in my feelings hearing the readers because I know how important it is to hold space for people to be comfortable speaking their own truths. It lifts us all up because their words matter.
Or how, even during ICE raids throughout the city, we held our Slam Diáspora open mic at El Mezquite while helicopters flew overhead. There we were in community with one another, defiantly unafraid. Again, it lifts us all up because las palabras importan.
Whether it’s me drinking in Eiren Caffall’s book All the Water in the World, or devouring Jim Stewart’s Defiant Acts, or thumbing through a book of poetry and finding a gem of a poem, or breaking bread in a gathering with the 2025 Writing Freedom Fellows.
The Guild Literary Complex celebrates and provides a platform for the diversity and inclusiveness of writers that make up Chicago and beyond — its words and its song, no matter what neighborhood, street, or language. From Austin to South Chicago, from Hyde Park to Humboldt Park, we thank you for your attendance and your attentiveness, for your smile and your words, for your applause; to every writer, performer, venue, and host, for every board member, staff, and volunteer. Your time and your donations are all the things that help to sustain us. I am constantly reminded how much literature lasts and words matter.
Your donation, no matter how large or small, makes a difference.
So from the Guild Literary Complex,
our gratitude and thanks.
It’s been a good year.
Andrea L Change
Executive Director