You Haven’t Heard This One Before …
Dear friends of the Guild Literary Complex,
A Poet, A Novelist and an Essayist Walk Into a Bar…
No, really, you haven’t heard this one before! Why? Because it’s the theme for the Guild Literary Complex’s annual benefit, “A Poet, A Novelist and an Essayist Walk Into a Bar…”
Please join us from 6-8:30 p.m. April 24, at
Lagunitas Brewing Company, 2607 W 17th St, Chicago, IL 60608,
For a fun night celebrating the written (and in this case also *spoken*) word.
We’re thrilled to announce that acclaimed Chicago writers Nate Marshall, (a poet) Christine Sneed, (a novelist), and Barrie Jean Borich, (an essayist) will represent the evening’s theme and read works that will at least include the word “beer,” in reference to the night’s host, Lagunitas Brewing Company.
Tickets for this year’s benefit are $45 (limited $15 tickets for students) and include entertainment and food. The benefit will also have a cash bar, photo booth, music, a literary trivia station, raffles and book giveaways.
Mark Your Calendars! Save the Date!
And please click here to GET YOUR TICKETS on Eventbrite or to donate to the Guild’s Annual Benefit today.
About the writers
Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts, and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men (Bloomsbury USA & Bloomsbury UK).
Her stories or essays have been included in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the Midwest, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New England Review and a number of other periodicals.
She received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Ploughshares’ Zacharis prize, the Society of Midland Authors Award in Adult Fiction, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association. Her most recent novel, Paris, He Said, was also a 2016 Illinois Reads selection, and The Virginity of Famous Men was a finalist for the Chicago Review of
Books best book of the year, fiction category.
She lives in Evanston and is the faculty director of Northwestern University’s MA/MFA program in creative writing; she is also on the fiction faculty of Regis University’s low-residency MFA program.
Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He is the author of Wild Hundreds and an editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. Wild Hundreds has been honored with the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s award for Poetry Book of the Year and The Great Lakes College Association’s New Writer Award. His last rap album, Grown came out in 2015 with his
group Daily Lyrical Product. Nate is a member ofThe Dark Noise Collective. He completed a B.A. in English and African American Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at The University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Nate has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Poetry Foundation, and The University of Michigan. He is the Director of National Programs for Louder Than A Bomb Youth Poetry Festival and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.
Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Body Geographic (UNP American Lives Series), winner of a Lambda Literary Award and an IPPY Gold Medal in Essay/Creative Nonfiction. In a starred review, Kirkus
called Body Geographic “an elegant literary map that celebrates shifting topographies as well as human bodies in motion, not only across water and land, but also through life.” Her previous book, My Lesbian Husband (Graywolf), won the ALA Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction. Borich is an associate professor at DePaul University in Chicago where she edits Slag Glass City, a digital journal of the urban essay arts.
About Lagunitas Brewing Company: Fom points distant and beyond we all converged on Petaluma in 1993 and ’94 with an unenunciated desire to be more than we were before. The core of Lagunitas came from Chicago, St Louis, Memphis, Walker Creek, and the highlands of Quincy.
The Chicago contingent initiated the brewing and the gravitational effect of its suchness did the rest. We all loved the beer but the mission was larger than the ordinary joy of a hoppy-sweet quaff. It was driven unseen by an urge to communicate with people, to find our diasporidic tribe, and to connect with other souls adrift on a culture that had lost its center and spun its inhabitants to the four winds to wander lost and bereft with a longing to re-enter the light. Beer, we have learned, has always been a good lubricant for social intercourse!
The Lagunitas Brewing Co. was not so much an act of ordinary ‘foundling’ as it was willed into being by the unspoken desire of supportive beer-lovers in Northern California after which they continued to nurture their creation and urged us forward to fulfill the unifying needs of that same beer-loving diaspora from coast to coast and beyond. It is good to have friends!