Dispatches from Kapittel

The Guild is sending six Chicago writers to the Kapittel International Festival of Literature and Freedom of Speech in Stavenger, Norway as a part of our ongoing work with writers living in exile and advocating for freedom of speech.

Our six attendees are blogging on their experiences at GuildDispatches.tumblr.com.

About the Attendees:

Adam Gottlieb is a poet/teaching-artist from Chicago. He got into spoken word at age 14 via the Young Chicago Authors teen poetry slam festival Louder Than a Bomb, and was featured in the documentary film by the same name. He recently graduated from Hampshire College, where he studied poetry and critical pedagogy. He seeks to promote the use of poetry as a medium for dialogue, self-expression, and positive social change.

L’Oréal Patrice Jackson is an artist rooted in theatre, music, movement and writing. As an arts educator she teaches theatre performance, improvisation, storytelling, and multi-disciplinary art. She has worked with Steppenwolf, Writers Theatre, and Columbia College Chicago, among others. She serves as a youth leader for Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a lay Buddhist organization dedicated to peace culture and education. She is the Education Associate at About Face Theatre, a production company with a focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and ally arts.

Sahar Mustafah writes about “the others”—Arabs in the United States and abroad—who are often deemed strange and disparate from the larger racial community. Her work has appeared in anthologies and journals including Great Lakes Review, Word Riot, Flyleaf, Hair Trigger, and Chicago Literati, and she’s performed with 2nd Story Chicago. She’s the recipient of a Pushcart nomination. She is a teacher and co-founder of Bird’s Thumb, an online literary journal devoted to new and emerging voices. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago.

Erika L. Sánchez is a Fulbright Scholar, CantoMundo Fellow, and winner of the “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Witness, Anti-, Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Copper Nickel, Boston Review, “Latino USA” on NPR, and is forthcoming in diode and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Penguin 2015). Her nonfiction appears in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Rolling Stone, Salon, NBC News, Cosmopolitan, and many others.

M. Quinn Stifler received a B.A. in Creative Writing and Women’s & Gender Studies at DePaul University. Stifler has worked with Threshold, DePaul’s student-run literature and arts journal, and is a co-founder and editor of No Assholes Literary Magazine. Stifler was a finalist for the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open-Mic Poetry Award, and regularly participates in and organizes house readings around Chicago.

 John Rich is the Director of Guild Literary Complex, a cross-cultural presenting organization in Chicago celebrating 25 years of supporting diverse, divergent, and emerging voices. John is a founding member of Chicago Writers House and Chicago Book Expo. He earned an MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught writing and creativity for several years. He is a recipient of the Vaclav Havel Fellowship in Playwriting from Western Michigan University and a Ragdale Foundation residency in writing. He co-founded the collaborative theater group Attention Deficit Drama (1997-2003) and has performed with Every House Has a Door.