May May
               May 2016 Events
 
Save the Date!


Wednesday, June 8
at 7:30 p.m.
Alison Flowers
Exoneree Diaries: The Fight for Innocence, Independence, and Identity
Reading and Signing

Thursday, June 9
at 7:30 p.m.
Andi Zeisler
We Were Feminists Once
Reading and Signing

Tuesday, June 14
at 7 p.m.
Sappho's Salon

Wednesday, June 15
at 7:30 p.m.
Alida Brill
Dear Princess Grace, Dear Betty: The Memoir of a Romantic Feminist
Reading and Signing

Saturday, June 18
at 7 p.m.
You're Being Ridiculous: LGBTQIA Pride Show!
Live Lit Event

Thursday, June 23
at 7:30 p.m.
C. Russell Price
Tonight We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of
Each Other
Book Launch Party and Happening

Friday, June 24
at 7 p.m.
Kim Baker
Girls' Guide to Healthy Dating: Between the Breakup and the
Next U-Haul
Reading and
Lesbian Singles Mixer





May Book Groups 

Tuesday, May 3rd
at 7:15 p.m.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Sunday, May 8th
at 2 p.m.
In the Shadow of the Banyan  
by Vaddey Ratner

Sunday, May 8th
at 5 p.m.
The Ice Whale by
Jean Craighead George
 
Sunday, May 8th
at 6:30 p.m.
At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle McGuire

Tuesday, May 15th 
at 7:30 p.m.
Stone Mattress  
by Margaret Atwood
 
Sunday, May 15th
at 2 p.m.
The Flame Throwers 
by Rachel Kushner
Dear Friends of Women & Children First,
  
May is just around the corner, but first April 30th is Independent Bookstore Day! We, along with indie bookstores around Chicago, will be celebrating all day! We'll have free food, live music, special IBD merchandise, and a star-studded author reading with Ana Castillo and Cyn Vargas!

Then, May 12th at 7 p.m., Jane Hamilton will be returning to the bookstore to celebrate her new novel, The Excellent Lombards!

Stay connected to W&CF on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to make sure that you're one of the first to know about some other BIG author announcements. 

Many thanks, 
W & CF 
Independent Bookstore Day, featuring
Ana Castillo (Black Dove) and Cyn Vargas 
Saturday, April 30, an all-day celebration with
Live Music from 12:30 to 2 p.m. and an author 
reading and conversation at 4 p.m.  
A READ LOCAL Event    

Indie Bookstore Day--a national celebration of independent bookstores--is back! We'll have refreshments from The Coffee Studio, exclusive Indie Bookstore Day merchandise, and great deals all day! At 12:30, there will be live music brought to you by Freda Love Smith! Freda and her husband, Jake Smith, will play a short set as The Mysteries of Life from 12:30 to 1:15. Afterwards, they'll hang out to chat and sign Freda's memoir, Red Velvet Underground: A Rock Memoir with Recipes. Freda will also bring samples of "flexitarian" recipes from her book--mostly vegetarian, but adaptable for meat-eaters. Then, at 4 p.m., we'll be hosting a not-to-be missed author conversation between Ana Castillo and Cyn Vargas. Ana and Cyn will be discussing Ana's new essay collection, Black Dove: Mam�, Mi'jo, and Me. This collection looks at what it means to be a single, brown, feminist parent in a world of mass incarceration, racial profiling, and police brutality. Through startling humor and love, Castillo weaves intergenerational stories from Mexico City to Chicago. And in doing so, she narrates some of America's most heated political debates and urgent social injustices through the oft-neglected lens of motherhood and family. Ana Castillo is the author of So Far From God and Sapogonia, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, as well as many other books of fiction and poetry. She divides her time between Chicago and Albuquerque. Cyn Vargas, the author of the story collection On the Way, holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago and is the recipient of a Ragdale Fellowship and the 2013 Guild Literary Complex Prose Award in Fiction. Cyn was named one of Guild's Literary Complex's 25 Writers to Watch in 2014 and has received two top citations in Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers contests. She is a company member of the award-winning storytelling organization 2nd Story. She teaches creative writing workshops around Chicago and online and can be found online at cynvargas.com.
Co-editors China Martens and
Mai'a Williams, as well as contributor Karen Su

Sunday, May 1 at 4 p.m.
Reading and Signing

Inspired by the legacy of radical and queer black feminists of the 1970s and '80s, Revolutionary Mothering
places marginalized mothers of color at the center of a world of necessary transformation. The challenges we face as movements working for racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice and 
queer liberation and against violence and imperialism are the same challenges that many mothers face every day. Oppressed mothers create a generous space for life in the face of life-threatening limits, activate a powerful vision of the future while navigating tangible concerns in the present, and embrace collective solutions. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together. Mai'a Williams is a writer and poet and lives in the U.S. with her daughter, Theresa.  In 2014 and 2015, she worked in Quito, Ecuador, as a journalist for teleSUR English, the global Venezuelan revolutionary news agency. Since 2003, China Martens has facilitated workshops to create support for parents and children in activist and radical communities. In 2009, she co-founded Kidz City, a radical childcare collective in Baltimore. Karen Su is a clinical assistant professor in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where she directs the Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) Initiative. She lives in Oak Park with her two children, where she helped establish a parents' organization called Families and Friends of Asian American Students. She is working on a series of children's books that shares the everyday life stories of Asian American girls and women.
Desiree Cooper in conversation with Jasmine Sanders 
Friday, May 6 at 7:30 p.m.  
Author Reading and Signing 

In Know the Mother, author Desiree Cooper explores the complex archetype of the mother in all her incarnations. In a collage of meditative stories, women--both black and white--find themselves wedged between their own yearnings and their roles as daughters, sisters, grandmothers, and wives. A 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, and Detroit community activist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010, and Tidal Basin Review, among other online and print publications. Cooper is a fellow with Kimbilio, a national residency for African American fiction writers, and was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets. Jasmine Sanders is from the South Side of Chicago and writes about trauma and mental health. Her current project is a collection of Midwestern ghost stories. Her essays can be found at BuzzFeed and Catapult. Follow her on Twitter: @ToniAliceZora. For this event, the two authors will have a cross-generational conversation around choice. They were both pregnant at 19, and their choices profoundly affected their lives and views of reproductive justice. Desiree will also read selections from her book.

Sappho's Salon  
Co-curated by Eileen Tull and Liz Baudler 
Tuesday, May 10 at 7:30 p.m., doors open at 7 p.m. 
A monthly performance salon, featuring expressions of queerness, gender, and feminism

Sappho's Salon is back and showing off another showcase! New faces and old friends will be on stage in May. Alicia Swiz is an interdisciplinary artist and educator with a critical eye and a feminist heart. You can find her in the classroom or on a stage facilitating dialogue about gender and media. She hosts Sluttalk, a feminist performance and dialogue. Anita Mechler is a librarian and archivist by day and a writer right before a deadline. She has told stories at Story Lab, You're Being Ridiculous, the Self-Publishers of Chicago, Story Corps, The Cat Diaries, and Is This a Thing?
Bea Cordelia is an award-winning Chicago-based poet, playwright, essayist, [solo] performer, teaching artist, and researcher. A recent graduate of Northwestern University, to date six of her plays have been produced, and many of her poems and essays have been published--including her poetry chapbook 28.06 // Dear Sylvia. Her autobiographical solo show Chasing Blue was recently selected to be part of the Brick Theater's Trans Theatre Festival in Brooklyn. She has been featured at the Goodman Theatre, Victory Gardens, the Green Mill, OUTspoken!, and many more venues and events throughout Chicagoland. St. Sparklebear is a writer, performer, cultural critic, and minister to queers and heathens. They are part Judy Garland, part John Waters, a little Yoko Ono, and all genderfantastic femme. They have featured before at Kinky Butch Witching Hour and New American Folk Theater's This is Christopher Guest cabaret. You can follow them on twitter or Instagram @stsparklebear. The $7-10 sliding scale admission includes the usual spread from the Middle Eastern Bakery. BYOB.   
Jane Hamilton
The Excellent Lombards
Thursday, May 12 at 7 p.m.  
Reading and Signing     

Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is deeply in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it. She is content to spend her days planning capers with her brother William, one-upping her bratty cousin Amanda, and expertly tending the orchard. The last thing she wants is for anything to change, but change is inevitable, and threats of urbanization, disinheritance, and college applications shake the foundation of Frankie's roots. As Frankie is forced to shed her childhood fantasies and face the possibility of losing the idyllic future she had envisioned for her family, she must decide whether loving something means clinging tightly or letting go. Jane Hamilton is the author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World. She lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Rochester, Wisconsin. 
Anne Elizabeth Moore
Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking
Friday, May 13 at 7:30 p.m.
Book Launch Party
A READ LOCAL Event

Threadbare draws connections between the international garment trade and human and sex trafficking in a beautifully illustrated comics series. Anne Elizabeth Moore pulls at the threads of gender, labor, and cultural production to paint a concerning picture of human rights in a globalized world. Moore's reporting, illustrated by members of the Ladydrawers comics collective, takes the reader from the ateliers of Vienna to sweatshops in Cambodia, and from the life of a globetrotting supermodel to the politics of the sex trade. With thoughtful illustrations, this book offers a practical guide to a growing problem few truly understand. A Fulbright scholar, Anne Elizabeth Moore is the Truthout columnist behind Ladydrawers: Gender and Comics in the US, and the author of several books, including Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh and Unmarketable. She was co-editor and publisher of the now-defunct Punk Planet and founding editor of the Best American Comics series. She has twice been noted in the Best American Non-Required Reading series. Moore teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Andersonville Wine Walk   
Sunday, May 15 from 3 to 6 p.m.
 
This fundraiser for the Andersonville Chamber of Commerce transforms,
for just one night, Andersonville's offices and retail shops (including ours!) into wine tasting destinations. The event features two routes (North and South), each including twelve Clark Street businesses. Both routes feature 36 wines brought to you by In Fine Spirits.
Event tickets cost $35 per person in advance, or $40 per person starting on May 9. Tickets include event admission, wine tastings, and a commemorative wine glass. 
Gemma Correll
The Worrier's Guide to Life
Tuesday, May 17 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.
Meet and Greet

 
Gemma Correll is a cartoonist, writer, illustrator, and the author of A Cat's Life, A Pug's Guide to Etiquette, and
The Worrier's Guide to
 Life. She publishes the comic Four Eyes on GoComics.com  and at The Nib on Medium.com. She also draws a monthly Skycats column for the Emirates Airlines Open Skies magazine. Her illustrations have been featured in the New York Times and the Observer.  
Dinitia Smith
The Honeymoon
Wednesday, May 18 at 7:30 p.m.
Reading and Signing  
 
Based on the life of the author of Middlemarch, this spellbinding novel recounts George Eliot's honeymoon in Venice in June 1880 following her marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior. When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of twenty-six years. In her youth, Mary Ann Evans, who would later be known as George Eliot, was a country girl and considered too plain to marry. In an era when female novelists were objects of wonder, she became the most famous writer of her day. The Honeymoon explores different kinds of love and the possibilities of redemption and happiness even in an imperfect union. Dinitia Smith is the author of two previous novels, Hard Rain and Remember This. She is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and has taught creative writing at Columbia University. She is now a national correspondent for culture at the New York Times and lives in New York City.
Zoe Zolbrod
Friday, May 20 at 7:30 p.m
Book Launch Party
A READ LOCAL Event 
 
Zoe Zolbrod remained silent about her early childhood molestation for nearly a decade. Through a kaleidoscopic series of experiences, The Telling traces Zolbod's evolving sexuality, her relationships with men, and the cultivation of her motherhood in the shadow of her childhood sexual abuse. Bolstered with research, this is both a an intimate examination of one woman's experience and a plea for the empowerment of its victims. Zoe Zolbrod's work has appeared in Salon, the Nervous Breakdown, and the Rumpus, where she serves as the Sunday Editor. Her debut novel Currency won a 2010 Nobbie Award and received an honorable mention from Friends of American Writers. Zoe Zolbrod studied at both Oberlin and the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Zolbrod lives in Evanston with her husband and children.
Li'l Buds Theatre Company
Saturday, May 21 at 3 p.m.
Kids Event for ages 3 to 6 

Join us for theater fun and games with local kids' theatre company, Li'l Company, members will bring their popular interactive story time to our bookstore.
Come join the fun and help us bring beloved stories from page to stage!   
Erika Janik
Wednesday, May 25 at 7:30 p.m.
Reading and Signing 
 
From its very beginning, police work was considered a male domain, far too dangerous and rough for women. But a handful of women proved those meant wrong and, in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries, became real-life sleuths. Other women, either inspired by them or their own imaginations, wrote mysteries with female characters who handily solved crimes, such as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and  Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski. Pistols and Petticoatsis a lively exploration of the struggles faced by women in law enforcement and mystery fiction for the past 175 years. Erika Janik is the author of A Short History of Wisconsin and Odd Wisconsin: Amusing, Perplexing, and Unlikely Stories from Wisconsin's Past. Her work has appeared in Midwest Living and the Onion. Originally from Redmond, Washington, she now lives in Madison with her husband.
The Mighty Return of: 
Coloring Book Night!
Thursday, May 26 from 7 to 9 p.m. 
BYOCB & BYOB

Our first Coloring Book Night back in February was a huge success, with table upon table of color-ers! For our second coloring event, we'll provide a few bottles of beverage along with a small selection of colored pencils. Attendees are welcome to bring their own coloring books and preferred coloring utensils, and we won't be mad if you bring a bottle of wine to share! PLUS, all our adult coloring books will be on SALE from 7 to 9 p.m. exclusively for this event. Everyone from beginners to experts are welcome! 
Tasha Golden
Once You Had Hands
Friday, May 27 at 7:30 p.m.
Poetry Reading and Signing

When singer-songwriter-frontwoman Tasha Golden left years of full-time touring with her band Ellery (ellerymusic.com) to study poetry, she also began leading creative writing workshops for young women in juvenile detention facilities. Week after week, Golden watched as her students bravely shared poems about difficult histories. Eventually, she promised them she'd follow their example; that she too would share her work--poems haunted by domestic violence and conservative evangelicalism. That promise became Once You Had Hands. For this event, Golden will discuss how song and poetry writing interact. She'll also discuss her experience working with incarcerated young women. Currently a PhD student at the University of Louisville, Golden researches the impact of the arts on stigmatized issues. Her songs have been heard in major motion pictures, TV dramas, and radio, and her prose and research have been published in Ploughshares, Pleaides, and Ethos Journal, among others.
Dale Boyer
Wednesday, June 1 at 7:30 p.m. 
Book Launch Party 
A READ LOCAL Event
      
What is the difference between friendship and love, and once one has realized that it is, in fact, love, how does one open the door to that love, especially if it is forbidden? Set in a small college town in 1979, The Dandelion Cloud is the story of three friends: Kyle, Craig, and Justin. When Justin begins to realize that his feelings for Kyle have deepened into love, that knowledge will test the bonds of the three friends and force Justin to confront once and for all who he really is. Dale Boyer studied writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Vermont College. His work has appeared in such publications as the Writer's Chronicle, the Windy City Times, the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, and many other publications. He is married to Scot O'Hara and currently lives in Chicago.
 
Rana B. Khoury in conversation with Thomas Geoghegan
Reading and Signing
 
Since 1904, Ohioans have voted for the winner in every presidential election but two. So one might ask, if the nation follows Ohio, then where is America headed? Rana Khoury traveled across her home state of Ohio during the 2012 election season, interviewing Americans hit hardest by the recession--students smothered by debt, farmers struggling to make a profit, displaced factory workers, and those made homeless by the housing crisis. Khoury details how the core tenets of the American Dream are now strained at best, and outmoded myths at worst. Rana B. Khoury has earned degrees from Georgetown and American Universities and is pursuing a PhD in political science at Northwestern. Khoury has lived as far afield as Syria and Singapore, but Ohio is the place she calls home. For this event, Rana will be joined by Thomas Geoghegan. Geoghegan is a practicing labor lawyer and the author of several books, including the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Which Side Are You On? and, most recently, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? He has written for the Nation, the New York Times, and Harper's Magazine. He lives in Chicago. 
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