Award-winning Chicago author Bayo Ojikutu’s latest novel “Free Burning” was released in October 2006, but the race, class and cultural themes within its pages are not old news. The novel follows a young black man living on the South Side of Chicago who loses his corporate job at a downtown insurance firm after the economic devastation of 9/11 and due to pressures to provide for his family, he succumbs to drug-dealing. On Thursday, Ojikutu will speak at the Blackstone Branch of the Chicago Public Library about the “strains of life” that both the underprivileged and the wealthy face living in an ever-changing capitalist-driven super city. “The city is changing, yet the city is full of its citizens, and this change is sometimes beyond us,” Ojikutu says. The acclaimed novelist and DePaul University professor attributes the inspiration for his book to his own observations growing up in Chicago’s South Side and witnessing his community’s adaptations to the economic and social changes. “I’m reflecting on the city and I think there is a growing generation of people, perhaps my age or younger, who should have a fresh insight to say where our city is going,” Ojikutu says. “Our city should be going somewhere, and if it is where is it going and how do we speak to this process of change?”
We Can’t Delay Our Joy: An Interview with Roger Reeves About His New Book, “Dark Days: Fugitive Essays” Reeves has a shelf full of honors, but his new book, “Dark Days,” is not poetry, but essays. In rich and heady prose, Reeves mixes memoir, theory and literary criticism. His subjects range from an opera singer breaking a silence curfew by singing in the streets to the “hush harbors,” where enslaved people would steal away to pray.
Lit 50 2023: Who Really Books In Chicago Our role in the world seems increasingly ephemeral, which is why so many of us take refuge in the endurability of words on paper, whether in novels, poems, essays or biographies. And Chicago's role in the world of literature has never been stronger.
