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• Magazine and Journal Editor Panel: Christine Maul Rice, Kira Tucker, John McCarthy, Laura Joyce Hubbard

  • When
    May 29, 2025
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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  PANELISTS:
  Christine Maul Rice 

  

  Christine’s novel, Swarm Theory, was called "a gripping work of Midwest Gothic" by NPR and won numerous awards. Christine was included in New City's Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago's Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of Hypertext Magazine and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University. Her novel, based on the Flint water crisis, will be published in 2026.

  Kira Tucker  is a poet and artist from Memphis. The 2024-2025 Artist in Residence in Creative Writing at Northwestern, Kira is an Associate Agent with the Shipman Agency and the current Assistant Managing Editor for TriQuarterly. Their poems appear in The Iowa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Jazz & Culture, and elsewhere. Kira is also at work on a hopeful debut collection—a poetic investigation spanning the mythos of the American Dream and the landscapes of our collective unconscious.

  John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize; and Ghost County (Midwestern Gothic Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Best New Poets, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Pleiades, and Quarterly West, among others. John is the Managing Editor of RHINO.

  Laura Joyce Hubbard's nonfiction and poetry appear in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere. Laura’s poetry manuscript was a recent semifinalist in Copper Nickel and Milkweed Edition’s Jake Adam York Prize. Writing awards include winner of The Iowa Review’s Veteran Writing Award, winner of the 2023 Porch Prize in Poetry, winner of the 2021 Nonfiction Contest at Southeast Review, and winner of the Individual Poem Prize (2021) and Essay Prize (2020) in the William Faulkner Pirate’s Alley Writing Competition. Her nonfiction was selected as a “Notable” in the Best American Essays 2022 and 2023 and won an AWP Intro Journal Award (2023). Laura’s work has been supported by the Ragdale Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts with a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is a veteran US Air Force pilot, a fiction editor for TriQuarterly, an MFA candidate at Northwestern University, and currently the inaugural Highland Park Poet Laureate.

  
  

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• Michael Zapata - Make a Mess

  • When
    June 05, 2025
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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  Rescheduled!

  In a society so fully bent toward production at all costs, we should remember, as art critic David Sylvester once said, “Artists must be allowed to get into a mess.” As we consider how we might listen, slow down, and make a mess in support of our own work, we’ll take our inspiration from writers like Jon Fosse and Gayle Jones, who write as if it were an act of listening, and the painter Mark Bradford who said, “I pillage my own work. I tear it down and build it up in traces.” Guided analytical and inquiry-based discussions and writing activities will encourage writers to build a sustainable writing practice that embraces both their own artistic impulses and the material worlds in which they live. 

  Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop-out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.

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• The Honest Island: Greg Jackson

  • When
    June 26, 2025
  •  
    10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    REMOTE

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  Peter Hoppock launches the summer series with a discussion of Greg Jackson's  breathtaking high-wire act of writing craftsmanship, The Honest Island,  which was first published in the New Yorker in November 2024. 

   The Honest Island by Greg Jackson  chronicles the last few days a man named Craint spends on an island where he doesn’t speak the native language, has no idea how he got there, and doesn’t remember his life before arriving there. Tension builds after he befriends a new visitor to the island and begins in earnest to question who he is, why he is there, and what possible future he might have. His struggles to understand mirror the reader’s struggles to understand what the truth is.

  Peter Hoppock will discuss how the author blends the exterior setting in poetic evocations of place with provocative explorations of the protagonist's interiority as he struggles to reconnect with his identity.

  Hosted by: Sam Farler

  DOWNLOAD DISCUSSION MATERIALS HERE:

  • The Honest Island

  BIO: Peter Hoppock kicks off the Summer Sessions calendar for the fifth year in a row. He has published numerous short stories and novellas in a variety of literary magazines, both online and print, including Adelaide, Curbside Splendor, The Write Launch, Dillydoun Review, and more. He has co-edited two anthologies of short stories and creative non-fiction for OCWW, published by Windy City Press: Turning Points (2021), and Meaningful Conflicts (2023).  His short story Blues For Rashid was selected by Palasatrium for their June 2023 publication, and his novella Precipice  won honorable mention in the 2024 Black Orchid Novella Award Contest. 

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• Supernova: Kosiso Ugwueze

  • When
    July 24, 2025
  •  
    10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    REMOTE

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  Sam Farler will lead a discussion of Kosiso Ugwueze’s short story Supernova.

  Supernova is the story of a suicidal young woman who is kidnapped and held for ransom in the jungle of northern Nigeria. 
  It explores the dark shadow early childhood abandonment has cast across her life, alternating between the stages of the kidnapping and key events of her life.  Noteworthy is how the story treats childhood trauma without being heavy-handed.

  Ugwueze was born in Nigeria and raised in Southern California.  She earned an MFA from Johns Hopkins and has served as managing editor of the Hopkins Review.  For Supernova Ugwueze received the 2023 New England Review Award for Emerging Writers.  The story was included in Best American Short Stories 2023.

  Hosted by: Anne Beall

  DOWNLOAD DISCUSSION MATERIALS HERE:

  • Supernova
  • Kosiso Ugwueze Bio

  BIO: Sam Farler is a writer based in St. Charles.  His focus is the impact of trauma and mental illness on perceptions of self and others.  He has been writing full-time since 2018, completed a first memoir in 2024, and is currently working on a second.  He has taken craft classes and participated in writing workshops at the University of Texas, Austin; University of Chicago; StoryStudio Chicago; Storm Writing School; The Loft; and others.

  He volunteers teaching coping skills for adult children of parents with borderline personality disorder. He has been an active member and Zoom host of Off-Campus Writers’ Workshop since 2020 and is the project manager and a critique group leader for OCWW’s 80th anniversary anthology.  

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• North Country - The Edge of the World: Roxanne Gay

  • When
    August 21, 2025
  •  
    10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    REMOTE

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  Roxane Gay’s short story North Country, a 2012 Best American Short Stories selection, focuses on Kate a young African- American academic grappling with the loss of her stillborn child. The North Country’s wintry backdrop at once represents the natural setting and her state of mind; it is an apt metaphor for disconnection, isolation, and the loneliness of grief. Gay effectively employs other craft elements such as scene and summary, theme, character, and plot to evoke emotion and insight in the reader. Finally, Gay’s dry humor and raw honesty make this story poignant and unforgettable. 

  Roxane Gay is an American essayist, fiction writer, editor and cultural critic known for her witty and empathetic style. Her writing is concerned with the themes of feminism, race, gender identity, body image and sexual violence. She is the author of  best-selling collections Ayiti (2011) and Bad Feminist (2014), a 2014 novel An Untamed State, the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017) for which she was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in Autobiography.  

  Hosted by: Della Leavitt

  DOWNLOAD DISCUSSION MATERIALS HERE:

  • North Country
  • Supplemental Materials

  BIO: Moira Sullivan has been participating in writing groups since 1993. She hosted a community open mic at the former Café Express in Evanston and continues to write poetry and short stories. She served as an associate editor for “RHINO: the poetry forum,” and participating in the Highlights Program. In graduate school, she collected political poetry in Brazil and became a professional translator and marketer at a global humanitarian association. Her short story The Pawnbroker’s Deal appeared in the collection titled Further Persons Imperfect (2007). Her story Caught in the Net appeared in Turning Points, the 75th Anniversary OCWW Anthology (2021) and her story Man of the House appeared in OCWW’s Meaningful Conflicts: The Art of Friction anthology (2023). An OCWW member since 2018, she currently serves on the promotion committee and on the board as Secretary. These days you might find her working on a sci-fi novel at a local Evanston cafe as a member of the 2024-25 cohort in the “Novel in a Year Program” sponsored by Story Studio.

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