It’s time once again for the Printers Row Lit Fest, which combines three of the greatest pleasures in life: walking, talking about books, and the serendipitous discovery of new books (sometimes at incredible prices). The fest goes on all weekend in the south Loop near the intersection of Dearborn and Polk with events inside Jones College Prep (700 S. State).
Here are some talks worth interrupting your book browsing for:
Saturday
Cooking Demo With Bill Kim, 11:15 AM Kim is the chef at BellyQ and Urban Belly and author of the cookbook, Korean BBQ: Master Your Grill in Seven Sauces. Because Korean BBQ is the best BBQ (at least if you are the sort of poor sap who only has a grill and not one of those superfancy smoker contraptions).
Steve Almond and Dawn Turner Trice, 11:30 AM Steve Almond is just as bothered about what’s happened to our country as you are. In his new book, Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, he tries to find meaning in literature from our collective past.
Arlene Stein and Rebecca Makkai, noon Stein is a sociologist and professor and the author of Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity, which follows four strangers who meet in Florida while awaiting top surgery.
Young Chicago Authors: Louder Than a Bomb showcase, noon Chance the Rapper was part of YCA when he was a teenager. So was Eve Ewing. And Jamila Woods. And Femdot. Come see what the next wave of young Chicago poets is up to.
Nicole Hollander and June Huitt, noon Someone at Printers Row has a sense of humor: at the same time as YCA, they’ve scheduled cartoonist Hollander and editor Huitt, the duo behind the storytelling series Louder Than a Mom.
Lorrie Moore and Christopher Borelli, 1 PM These are two lively, funny writers who always manage to find an unexpected way to look at the world, and it’ll be fun to see what they come up with together. Moore is plugging her new collection of criticism, See What Can Be Done.
Rabih Alameddine and Aleksandar Hemon, 1 PM Another pair of great writers who seem likely to have a great conversation. They’ll be talking about their latest books, Alameddine’s novel The Angel of History and Behind the Glass Wall, Hemon’s account of his year as a writer in residence at the United Nations.
Ben Austen, Sarah Kendzior, and Ethan Michaeli, 1:30 PM Austen wrote High Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing, Kendzior wrote The View From Flyover Country and regularly and intelligently eviscerates Donald Trump on Twitter, and Michaeli wrote The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America. It’s likely they’ll be covering some of the territory Almond and Trice did this morning, but from an entirely different angle.
Faith, Hope and Love, 1:30 PM Four romance novelists, including the wonderful Sonali Dev, chat about their work, which for many people provides an antidote to the regular horrors of the news.
Josh Noel and Ray Daniels, 1:45 PM Noel, a Tribune reporter, just published Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out, an account of how Goose Island went from a local craft brew to part of an international conglomerate, and it’s pretty great.
Kevin Young and Natasha Trethewey, 2:30 PM Trethewey, who now teaches at Northwestern, has served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate. Young, who is also an accomplished poet, published an interesting book last year on the history of bunk.
’63 Boycott: Student Activism Then and Now, 2:30 PM This is a stirring short film about how on October 22, 1963, also known as Freedom Day, nearly half of all CPS students skipped their classes and marched to City Hall to protest segregation in their schools. (Does this sort of student activism seem familiar?)
826 CHI, 4 PM The young authors from 826 CHI present their latest book, A Flower Blooming in the Dark, a collection of poems, stories, and memoirs that challenge the standard narrative of “Chirac.”
Linda Gartz and Hermene Hartman, 5 PM Gartz, the author of the new memoir Redlined about growing up during West Garfield Park’s transition from majority white to majority black, and Hartman, publisher of N’digo Magapaper, discuss the absence of African-Americans in mainstream media.
Sunday
Nadine Strossen, Laura Kipnis, and Geoffrey Stone, 11 AM Strossen, a former president of the ACLU and author of Hate: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship, and Kipnis, a Northwestern professor whose new book Unwanted Advances is about what happened when she became the subject of a Title IX complaint, talk with Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Colleen Taylor Sen, Bruce Kraig, and Bill Daley, 11:45 AM Between these three—Sen and Kraig are two of the three editors of The Chicago Food Encyclopedia, to which Tribune food writer Daley contributed—you can probably find out anything you want to know about eating in Chicago.
Mommy Dearest: Motherhood, Writing and the Parenting Industrial Complex, noon Six Chicago writers, including Megan Stielstra, Zoe Zolbrod, and Gina Frangello, talk about—well, the title says it all.
Adrian Tomine, Nick Drnaso, Chris Ware, and Hillary Chute, 1:30 PM Three great comics creators and one great comics scholar sit down for a chat.
Black Girl Magic Performance & Conversation, 2:30 PM Hosted by Jamila Woods, featuring Eve Ewing, Raych Jackson, and other contributors to the recent poetry collection also called Black Girl Magic.