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Thursday, October 13 at 7:30 p.m.
Amy Strauss Friedman special guests Toni Nealie & Jessica Walsh
Book Launch Party
Friday, October 14
at 7:30 p.m.
Reading featuring high school and college students as well as a few professional poets
Tuesday, October 18
at 7 p.m.
Kate Schatz
Reading, Q&A, and Signing
Wednesday, October 19
at 7 p.m.
Jacqueline Woodson
Reading and Signing
Thursday, October 20
at 7 p.m.
Ann Patchett in conversation with Greta Johnsen of Nerdette Podcast
Reading, Conversation, and Signing
Please note: this is a ticketed, off-site Event. Tickets on sale now through Brown Paper Tickets
Sunday, October 23
at 4 p.m.
Sarah Schulman
Reading and Signing
Friday, October 28 at 7 p.m.
Abbi Jacobson in conversation with Samantha Irby
Conversation and Meet-and-Greet
Please Note: This is a ticketed event that will be held at Senn High School Auditorium **Tickets, available through Brown Paper Tickets, are almost sold out!!**
Wednesday, November 2
at 7 p.m.
Julie Burton
Workshop
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Tuesday, September 6
at 7:15 p.m. Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
Sunday, September 11th
at 5 p.m.
Sunday, September 11th
at 6:30 p.m.
The Girls Who Went Away
by Ann Fessler
Sunday, September 18th
at 2 p.m.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Sunday, September 18th at 4 p.m. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Tuesday, September 20th
at 7:30 p.m.
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Sunday, September 25th from Noon to 2 p.m. Gift of Years by Joan Chittister
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Dear Friends of Women & Children First,
It's been a whirlwind summer! We hosted some truly powerful events, saw lots of new faces in the bookstore, and are launching several exciting additions to the bookstore's calendar, including a Social Justice Book Group and a Women Aging with Wisdom and Grace: Sunday Salon. As always, fall brings with it another phenomenal line-up of authors visiting the bookstore and a mind-blowing list of highly anticipated forthcoming books from some of our greatest living authors, including Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith, Michelle Tea, and Ursula K. LeGuin! Check out our fall recommendations HERE. We do have some disheartening news. Last week, Amazon announced that it will be opening a brick-and-mortar bookstore right here in Chicago in 2017. This won't be our first fight against a profit-driven monolith. In 2005, Borders moved into our neighborhood. We slayed that dragon and are confident that, with your help, we can slay this one, too. If you want to learn more about the devastating effect that Amazon has on local, small businesses, check out an eye-opening recent study HERE. As always, you can keep up to date with everything happening at W&CF on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thank you for your continued support of your local feminist bookstore! With love, W & CF |
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Chinaka Hodge
Dated Emcees
Wednesday, September 7 at 7:30 p.m.
Poetry Reading
Chinaka Hodge came of age along with hip-hop, and its influence on her suitors became inextricable from their personal interactions. Form blends with content in Hodge's poetry collection Dated Emcees, as she examines her love life through the lens of hip-hop's best known orators, characters, archetypes, and songs, creating a new and inventive narrative about the music that shaped her heart, just as it also changed the music landscape. Chinaka Hodge is a poet, educator, playwright, and screenwriter. Originally from Oakland, California, she graduated from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and was awarded USC's prestigious Annenberg Fellowship and earned an MFA in writing for film and TV there. In the fall of that 2012, she received the SF Foundation's Phelan Literary Award for emerging Bay Area talent.
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Christine Reilly
Sunday's on the Phone to Monday: A Novel
Thursday, September 8 at 7:30 p.m.
Reading and Signing
The Middlesteins meets the Virgin Suicides in 90s New York in this arresting family love story about the eccentric yet tight-knit Simone family, coping with tragedy and struggling to heal and reconnect with one another. Claudio and Mathilde Simone, once romantic bohemians hopelessly enamored with each other, find themselves running a struggling vinyl record store and parenting three daughters as best they can: Natasha, an overachieving prodigy; sensitive Lucy, with her debilitating heart condition; and Carly, adopted from China and quietly fixated on her true origins. With prose that is as keen and illuminating as it is whimsical and luminous, debut novelist Christine Reilly offers a deft exploration of the tender ties that bind families together, even as they threaten to tear them apart. Christine Reilly lives in New York City. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Dalton School, and Collegiate School. She earned her bachelor's degree from Bucknell University and her master's degree in writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
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Sappho's Salon
co-curated by Liz Baudler and Eileen Tull
Tuesday, September 13
Doors open at 7 p.m. Show starts at 7:30 p.m.
 Come out to Sappho's Salon for a night of confronting gender, sexuality and feminism in various ways, some entertaining, some moving. Here's our performers for this month. H. Melt is a Chicago poet whose collection The Plural, the Blurring was released in 2015. They write about trans identity and the joys and heartbreak of being queer. They also work at Women & Children First bookstore, among other things. Ash Barker is a trans woman from Nashville, Tenn. She writes songs about trans issues, dating, depression, and video games. Mango Braggadocio is a clown, performer, and all-around superstar. She's a familiar face all over Chicago, from Abbie Fest to Dramageddon. Most recently, she produced and starred as Kim Kardshian in The Church of Hip-Hop at the Playground Theater. Admission is $7-10, sliding scale. Same great food from the Middle Eastern Bakery. Same great co-hosts.
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Iris Waichler
Reading, Workshop and Signing
In Role Reversal, author Iris Waichler, MSW, LCSW, draws on her personal experience of caring for her beloved father as well as her 40 years  of professional experience as a patient advocate and medical social worker. Offering both information and resources to aid individuals who find themselves in this ultimate role reversal, Waichler's book provides guidelines on how to build a support network, coping with grief and memory loss, and finding the right level of care for your loved one. Please join us for a reading and discussion on this life-changing topic that eventually affects so many of us. Wine and sweets will be served.
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Gina Frangello in conversation with
Rachel DeWoskin
Thursday, September 15 at 7:30 p.m.
Book Launch Party
Every Kind of Wanting explores the complex intersection of three unique families and their struggle to have a "Community Baby." Miguel could not be more different from his partner Chad, a happy-go-lucky real estate mogul from Chicago's North Shore . When Chad's sister, Gretchen, offers the couple an egg, their search for a surrogate leads them to Miguel's old friend Emily, married to an eccentric Irish playwright, Nick, with whom she is raising two boys. Into this web falls Miguel's sister Lina, a former addict and stripper, who begin s an affair with Nick while deciphering the mysteries of her past. But every action these couples make has unforeseen consequences. As the baby's birth draws near, a shocking turn of events and the secret Lina's been hiding threaten to break them apart forever.
READ MORE
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The Art of Waiting is a brilliant exploration of the natural, medical, psychological, and political facets of fertility, Boggs' collection covers everything from the way that longing for a child is depicted in the Coen brothers' film
Raising Arizona to the financial and legal complications that accompany alternative means of family making. She reports, with great empathy, complex stories of couples who adopted domestically and from overseas, LGBT couples considering assisted reproduction and surrogacy, and women and men reflecting on childless/childfree lives. Boggs deftly distills her personal time of waiting to become pregnant into an expansive contemplation of the many possible roads to making a life and making a family. Belle Boggs is the author of Mattaponi Queen. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, Slate, and many other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
Eula Biss is the author of On Immunity, Th e Balloonists, and Notes from No Man's Land, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and which Salon deemed "the most accomplished book of essays anyone has written or published so far in the twenty-first century." Her work has appeared in the
Believer, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times. She lives in the Chicago area and teaches at Northwestern University.
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Roald Dahl Birthday Party
Saturday, September 17 at 3 p.m.
Kids' Party for ages 4 to 8
Join us to celebrate Roald Dahl's birthday with games, snacks, and an appearance by the Big Friendly Giant! This event will be hosted by the one and only Miss Mack!
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Qigong Demonstration and Q&A with Francesca Segal
Sunday, September 18 at 6 p.m.
 Qigong is an ancient Chinese healing practice and the precursor to tai chi. Qigong practice can contribute to self-healing, stress reduction, energy enhancement, emotional balance, and spiritual insight. Instructor Francesca Segal has taught all over the Chicago area for 19 years; she's been studying for 24 years. The following Sunday, Sept. 25th, we will launch an ongoing qigong class that will be held every Sunday morning from 9:15 to 10:45. The classes will be $11 per session, open to beginners and up, and focus on the Treasures of the Eight Taoist Immortals form. Contact Lynn at [email protected] with questions or for more information.
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Christine Sneed and Gioia Diliberto:
On Fame, Sex, and Feminism
Wednes day, September 21 at 7:30 p.m.
Reading, Conversation, and Signing
A READ LOCAL Event
Listen in as two local authors, Christine Sneed and Gioia  Diliberto, discuss the intersection of fame, sex, and feminism as related to their respective new books. Christine Sneed's newest story collection, The Virginity of Famous Men, features protagonists attempting to make peace with the choices--both personal and professional--they have made. Long intrigued by love and loneliness, Sneed leads readers through emotional landscapes both familiar and uncharted. These probing stories are explorations of the compassionate and passionate impulses that are inherent in--and often the source of--bot  h abiding joy and serious distress in every human life. Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts and the story collection Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry. She received the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, Ploughshares' Zacharis First Book Award, and the Chicago Writers Association's Book of the Year Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. In her sweeping biography Diane Von Furstenberg: A Life Unwrapped, Gioia Dilberto brings to life the iconic designer. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Furstenberg burst onto New York's fashion scene in 1969 and within a few years became an international sensation with the creation of the wrap dress.
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Reading, Q&A, and Signing
In 1992, Julie Tarney's only child, Harry, told her, "Inside my head I'm a girl." Harry was two years old. Julie had no idea what that meant.  Wasn't it her role to encourage and support her child? Would Harry be bullied? Could she do the right thing? What was the right thing? The Internet was no help, because there was no Internet yet. And there were almost no books for a mom scrambling to understand a toddler who had definite ideas about gender identity. Instead, there were mainstream experts who theorized that a "sissy" boy was the result of a domineering mother. Lacking resources or a positive role model of her own, Julie embarked on an unexpected parenting path. Despite many missteps, she learned to rely on listening carefully and letting Harry lead the way. Julie Tarney is a board member for the It Gets Better Project, blogs for the Huffington Post's "Queer Voices" pages, and is a contributing writer for TheParentsProject.com and the True Colors Fund's Give a Damn Campaign. She volunteers for the PFLAG Safe Schools Program. A longtime resident of Milwaukee, she now lives in New York City.
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Aging with Wisdom and Grace:
Sunday Salon/Discussion Group
Co-facilitated by Connie Kiosse and Lynn Mooney
Sunday, September 25 from noon to 2 p.m.
Author Joan Chittister writes, "Every life is simply a series of lives, each one of them with its own task, its own flavor, its own brand of errors, its own glories... its own plethora of possibilities, all designed to lead us to the same end--happiness and a sense of  fulfillment." Join co-facilitators Connie Kiosse and our own Lynn Mooney as we kick off a new salon series devoted to women and aging. We will explore what it means to age in our youth-driven society and how each of us faces the challenges and rewards of getting older. For this first meeting, we suggest reading the introduction and the first five essays in Joan Chittister's The Gift of Years. This Sunday Salon is a potluck--attendees are encouraged to bring a dish to share. Questions? Contact Connie at [email protected].
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From David Arnold, the bestselling author of one of our staff's favorite YA novels, Mosquitoland, comes another batch of unforgettable characters in Kids of Appetite, a  tragicomedy about first love and devastating loss. Victor Benucci and Madeline Falco have a story to tell. It begins with the death of Vic's father, and it ends with the murder of Mad's uncle. David Arnold lives in Lexington, Kentucky with his (lovely) wife and (boisterous) son. Previous jobs include freelance musician/producer, stay-at-home dad, and preschool teacher. He is a fierce believer in the power of kindness and community. In his New York Times-bestselling debut, Adam Silvera introduces sixteen-ye ar-old Aaron Soto who, after his father's suicide, is trying to find happiness again with his girlfriend Genevieve and his overworked mom. When Genevieve leaves for a couple of weeks, Aaron spends time hanging out with this new guy, Thomas. Aaron can't deny how happy Thomas makes him feel, despite the tensions their friendship is stirring with his friends--and girlfriend. Adam Silvera was born and raised in the Bronx. He has worked in the publishing industry as a children's bookseller, marketing assistant, and book reviewer. He writes full-time in New York City and is tall for no reason.
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Wednesday, September 28 at 7:30 p.m.
Poetry Reading
Join us to celebrate the recent release of former Chicagoan  Lindsay Tigue's debut poetry collection, System of Ghosts, and to hear the work of two acclaimed local writers, Suman Chhabra and Helene Achanzar. Lindsay Tigue is a recent winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University and is a current PhD student in Creative  Writing at the University of Georgia. She lives in Athens, Georgia. Suman Chhabra is a multi-genre writer and cellist. She is the author of Demons Off, a chapbook through Meekling Press. Chhabra is a Kundiman Fellow. She teaches courses in English and Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Helene Achanzar is a Kundiman fellow who has earned awards from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. She is a freelance writer who has written for Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Vice Media.
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Thursday, September 29 at 7:30 p.m.
Reading and Signing
Three sisters and a brother, complete with children, a new wife, and an ex-boyfriend's son, descend on their grandparents' dilapidated old home  in the Somerset countryside for a final summer holiday. After three long, hot weeks, tensions and secrets rise to the surface as the house triggers childhood memories of the time when Mom took them the children to the old house after leaving their father. As the family's stories and silences intertwine, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a bourgeois way of life winds down to its inevitable end. Embraces by readers and critics alike, The Past is a work of breathtaking scope and beauty that is widely considered Hadley's most ambitious and accomplished novel yet. Tessa Hadley is the author of five highly praised novels: Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award; Everything Will Be All Right; The Master Bedroom; The London Train, which was a New York Times Notable Book; and Clever Girl. She is also the author of two short story collections, Sunstroke and Married Love, which were also New York Times Notable Books. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker. She lives in London.
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Friday, September 30 at 7:30 p.m.
A READ LOCAL Event
The third installment in the beloved Dave Cubiak series  begins on a bracing autumn day in Door County when a prominent philanthropist disappears. Is the elderly Gerald Sneider--known as "Mr. Packer" for his legendary support of Green Bay football-suffering from dementia or just avoiding his greedy son? Is there a connection to threats against the National Football League? As tourists flood the peninsula for the fall colors, Sheriff Dave Cubiak's search for Sneider is stymied by the FBI. When human bones wash up on the Lake Michigan shore, the sheriff has more than a missing man to worry about. With the media demanding answers and two puzzles to solve, Cubiak must follow his instincts down a trail of half-remembered rumors and local history to discover the shocking truth. Patricia Skalka is the author of Death Stalks Door County and Death at Gills Rock, the first two books in the Dave Cubiak Door County Mystery series. A former writer for Reader's Digest, she presents writing workshops throughout the country and divides her time between Chicago and Door County, Wisconsin.
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Jennifer Fosberry
Isabella: Girl in Charge
Saturday, October 1 at 11:15 a.m.
Kids' Story time with the author!
Perfect for ages 4 and up
Come meet the author who created purple-haired  Isabella, star of the New York Times-bestselling picture book series! A big event has Isabella ready to leave home at the crack of dawn. But that's a motion her parents are not likely to pass. After a two-to-one vote, it's decided that some things need to happen before Isabella can leave the house--like eating breakfast and brushing her teeth! If her house is going to work like a democracy, Isabella knows what she has to do: call an assembly and campaign her way out the door! Taking inspiration from the women who trail-blazed their way onto the political map of America, Isabella celebrates the women who were first to hold their offices. Jennifer Fosberry is a science geek turned children's book writer. After working in Silicon Valley and running away to Costa Rica for a few years, she returned to the San Francisco Bay area to read and write. She lives with her husband and three children and her little dog, too.
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John Freeman, Aminatta Forna,
Aleksandar Hemon, and Nami Mun
Wednesday, October 5 at 7:30 p.m.
A READ LOCAL Event
Following a debut issue on the theme of Arrival, critically acclaimed literary journal Freeman's circles a new topic whose definition is constantly challenged by the best of our writers: family. Even in the darkest moments, humor abounds. The journal's founder, John Freeman, is a renowned
 literary critic and former editor of Granta. With outstanding, never-before-published pieces of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from literary heavyweights and up-and-coming writers  alike, Freeman's: Family collects the most amusing, heartbreaking, and probing stories about family life emerging today. In an essay called "Crossroads," Aminatta Forna (The Hired Man) muses on the legacy of slavery as she settles her family in Washington, DC, where she is constantly accused of cutting in line whenever she stands next to her white husband. Aleksa ndar Hemon (The Lazarus Project, The Making of Zombie Wars, The Book of My Lives) tells the story of his uncle's desperate attempt to remain a communist despite decades in the Soviet gulag. Nami Mun (Miles from Nowhere) will also be joining the panel to discuss her contribution to the forthcoming anthology, A Tale of Two Countries.
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Margot Livesey
Mercury
Thursday, October 6 at 7 p.m.
Reading and Signing
An optometrist in suburban Boston, Donald is sure that  he and his wife, Viv, who runs the local stables, are both devoted to their two children and to each other. Then Mercury--
a gorgeous young thoroughbred with a murky past--arrives at Windy Hill, and everything changes. Everyone is struck by mercury's beauty and prowess, particularly Viv. Viv begins to dream of competing again, reconnecting with the her old ambitions, which then morph into consuming desire and even obsession. Margot Livesey is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street, The Missing World, and Criminals, among others. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Born in Scotland, Livesey currently lives in the Boston area and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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Naomi Jackson
Friday, October 7 at 7:30 p.m.
In the summer of 1989, two sisters, ages ten and sixteen,  are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados to live with their grandmother Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah. One sister spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother's limits, and wanting to go home; the other explores Bird Hill (where her family has lived for generations) accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother's mysterious life. This tautly paced coming-of-age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters. Naomi Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the Maytag Fellowship for Excellence in Fiction to complete her first novel. Jackson traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an MA in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. Jackson lives in Brooklyn, where she was born and raised by West Indian parents.
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Tickets for Ann Patchett in conversation with Greta Johnsen of WBEZ's Nerdette podcast on Thursday, October 20th are going fast! Get them while they last: 
Tickets for Abbi Jacobson in conversation with Samantha Irby on Friday, October 28th are ALMOST sold out! 
