Lit 50 2023: Nonfiction

For this year’s list, we organize everything by category.

Lit 50 2023: Who Really Books In Chicago introduction
Lit 50 2023: Comics & Kids Books
Lit 50 2023: Translation
Lit 50 2023: Poetry
Lit 50 2023: Fiction

Ben Austen/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Ben Austen
Ben Austen’s unpaid internship at Harper’s Magazine was, for the then-thirty-one-year-old, a humbling experience. That apprenticeship and subsequent full-time editorial job, plus a prior seven-year career as a high school teacher, laid the foundation for his future success. Austen applied those skills to his 2018 book, “High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing.” Booklist, Mother Jones, and others listed it as one of the year’s best. The subject of “High-Risers,” according to Austen, “is both really important in itself and is kind of a prism to see all the things that are going on in our world.” Austen’s next book, due out November 7, explores parole and mass incarceration. Austen incorporates the best traits of the novelist, journalist, historian and sociologist into writing that has included features in major national publications. Austen and Khalil Gibran Muhammad host a race-centered podcast, “Some of My Best Friends Are…” (Donald G. Evans)

Lee Bey and Blair Kamin
Lee Bey and Blair Kamin were once rival architecture critics—with Bey at the Sun-Times and Kamin at the Tribune. Lately, they’ve been working together. Bey provided photographs for Kamin’s latest collection of columns, “Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago.” Sales are brisk, and Bey and Kamin have made multiple joint appearances. They’re like architectural versions of the late Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, only more friendly. “The idea of equity in architecture is very much an issue that has legs and remains meaningful,” Kamin says. “The book frames equity as not just parity for areas that are traditionally disadvantaged, but also achieving a public realm that everyone benefits from.” Kamin, who left the Tribune in 2021, is on the design team selection committee for the Fallen Journalists Memorial, to be built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Bey, who serves on the Sun-Times editorial board and writes a monthly architecture column, continues to promote his own book, “Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side,” and is working on a new project about West Side architecture. (Mary Wisniewski)

Mark Guarino/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Mark Guarino
Journalist Mark Guarino researched his book “Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival,” for more than ten years. “I was really struck by how much was out there and was just never written about,” says Guarino. “It was overwhelming, but it was great.” Now he’s seeing what a big audience there is for this subject—with author events all over the region. Guarino is a producer for ABC, and has been a freelance journalist for the New York Times and the Washington Post. One scoop was a sit-down interview with entrepreneur and alleged cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. Guarino is writing a book about Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the unrest surrounding the shooting of a Black man by a white police officer in 2020. Guarino has also written plays, and is “shopping around a novel.” (Mary Wisniewski)

Miles Harvey/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Miles Harvey
Miles Harvey has a bouncy, welcoming conversational style that makes him seem like he has all the time in the world—yet he manages an impressive literary workload. He is director of the DePaul Publishing Institute, which produces the nationally acclaimed Big Shoulders Books, Poetry East, the student literary magazine Crook & Folly, and DePaul’s Blue Book, a national annual best-of-high-school-writing publication. “It’s awesome, it’s so beautiful,” says Harvey. “It gives you hope about young people.” Harvey also recently took over as chair of DePaul University’s English Department. Despite all these responsibilities, Harvey continues to do his own writing, focusing on fiction in the past year. His short stories have found homes in Ploughshares, Conjunctions and The Sun. He has published three nonfiction books, and now hopes to put together a short-story collection. His nonfiction collection “The Registry of Forgotten Objects” will be published in 2024 by Mad Creek Books, the trade imprint of the Ohio State University Press.  (Mary Wisniewski)

Mikki Kendall
Since the 2020 publication of her groundbreaking book “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot,” Mikki Kendall has become more involved in public speaking. “Unfortunately, many of the problems I talk about in the book have only become more pressing as the social structures in America continue to fail everyone but the richest,” Kendall says. For the past year or so, Kendall has been researching her next book, which is rooted in the last hundred years of anti-Black racism and other legal discrimination policies in the United States. “As you can imagine, that’s pretty heavy going, so I try to balance that with some fun stuff: mentoring work, some upcoming creative projects, and a little twirling fire for stress relief.” (Mary Wisniewski)

Dawn Turner Trice
Former Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice won widespread acclaim with her memoir “Three Girls from Bronzeville” in 2021. Now she’s working on a third novel and says she is “incredibly excited about it.” Her earlier novels are “Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven” (1998) and “An Eighth of August” (2000). Trice is optimistic about the state of literature, noting that book sales are up. “I think it’s a fantastic time for fiction,” Trice says. She still approaches her writing like a journalist, with questions and curiosity. “I feel like I’m telling stories in a different way,” Trice says. “It’s pursuing truth and it’s trying to encourage people to think about things and challenge what they think they know.” (Mary Wisniewski)

Rachel Jamison Webster/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

FEATURED NONFICTION

Rachel Jamison Webster
Rachel Jamison Webster is the author of four books of poetry but it was her latest book, a memoir/biographical sketch titled “Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family,” that put her in the national spotlight. “I have voices, stories and ideas pressing in my head,” Webster says, “clambering to make it onto the page. It isn’t easy to feel this pressure, to not know if a book will come together, or if it will ever be published or read. Writing is a constant return to difficulty. But it is the most meaningful difficulty I can imagine. And when I have finished a book, I feel I’ve come a little closer to fulfilling my contract with this life.” (Billy Lombardo)

Michele Weldon/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Michele Weldon
When Michele Weldon’s editor at Northwestern University Press suggested in 2020 that she make her seventh book one about the pandemic, Weldon resisted. “I said ‘Ew, no!’ not even knowing that the pandemic would last,” Weldon says. But she shifted her thinking to make it about surviving “this chunk of time,” and wound up loving the process. Weldon’s first book of essays, “The Time We Have: Essays on Pandemic Living” comes out next summer. Weldon is retired from teaching journalism at Northwestern University, but still keeps very busy—spending half her time on The Op-Ed Project, helping local, national and global leaders to write essays and op-eds, and giving TED talks. Weldon also writes essays and commentary for multiple newspapers and NBC, and does live storytelling throughout the city. (Mary Wisniewski)

NONFICTION
The Hall of Fame

Eula Biss

Jonathan Eig

Joseph Epstein

Alex Kotlowitz

Natalie Moore

Rick Perlstein

Megan Stielstra

Garry Wills

S.L. Wisenberg