Lit Top 5: June 2019

Valerie Jarrett/Photo: Andrew Eccles

1
Printers Row Lit Fest
(South Dearborn Street from Polk Street to Ida B. Wells Drive)
The Midwest’s biggest literary event returns to its founders and its all-free-events origins. An outdoor bookselling bazaar augmented with high-profile authors like Valerie Jarrett doing events, it’s Chicago’s summer books highlight.
June 8-9

2
1919
(Harold Washington Library and American Writers Museum)
Chicago is marking one of its most inglorious years on the centennial of the 1919 race riots. On June 6 at 6pm, Simon Balto will discuss his new history of that event and its long aftermath, “Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power,” at the Harold Washington Library. On June 10 at 6pm at the American Writers Museum, Eve L. Ewing will launch her new poetry collection, “1919” with the help of Fatimah Asghar, Safia Elhillo and Nate Marshall.
June 6 & 10

3
Aleksandar Hemon
(Women & Children First)
Book launch party for Bosnian and now Chicago expat Aleksandar Hemon’s dual memoir, “My Parents (An Introduction) / This Does Not Belong to You”
June 27

4
Alison Rollins
(Seminary Coop)
The Chicago librarian discusses her debut poetry collection, “Library of Small Catastrophes,” which “interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies.”
June 22

5
Michael Moreci
(The Book Table)
Michael Moreci discusses the second installment of his Black Star Renegades series, “We Are Mayhem.”
June 3