Panelists, Presenters and Performers
Randall Albers chairs the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago, one of the largest undergraduate and graduate writing programs in the country, and is the founding producer of the Story Week Festival of Writers. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Chicago Review, Northfield Magazine, Mendocino Review, Writing from Start to Finish, F Magazine, Writing in Education, and elsewhere. A former winner of the Columbia College Teaching Excellence Award, he is the co-writer and co-producer of the Story Workshop teaching of writing video tapes, The Living Voice Moves and Story from First Impulse to Final Draft. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a chapter from his novel-in-progress, All the World Before Them, appeared in the last issue of F Magazine. Photo: ryan klos
Andrew Allegretti is the winner of numerous Illinois Arts Council Fellowships and Literary Awards, and is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate programs of the Fiction Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago. His fiction has been published in many magazines, including TriQuarterly, Private Arts, Stand, Bandit-Lit. com, and F Magazine. "Heat Lightning," the prologue to his novel, Winter House, was a semifinalist for the James Fellowship for Novels in Progress, sponsored by the Heekin Foundation. An excerpt from his novel-in-progress, A Fool's Game appeared in f4. Allegretti has chaired the John Schultz & Betty Shiflett Story Workshop Scholarship Fund gala and is a board member of the Story Workshop Institute, as well as an active member of the Cultural Committee of the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation. Photo: Katie Powers
Hillary Carlip’s memoir Queen of the Oddballs: And Other True Stories from a Life Unaccording to Plan (HarperCollins, 2006), was an American Bookseller's Association Book Sense Pick, and was selected by Borders as one of the Top Literary Memoirs of 2006. She has appeared on countless radio and TV shows, including Oprah, who dedicated an entire episode to her first book, Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out (Warner Books, 1995), as well as the Ellen Degeneres Show. Hillary’s second book, Zine Scene (Girl Press, 1999), won an American Library Association Award. Hillary is the creator, host, and editor of the acclaimed literary website www.freshyarn.com. Her fourth book, À la Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers, will be released by Virgin Books in March 2008. Find out more about Hillary at www.hillarycarlip.com. Photo: Barbara Green
Chris DeGuire earned his BA in Fiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago, where he is now an MFA/MA candidate in Fiction Writing and the Teaching of Writing. His work has appeared in Hair Trigger and No Touching. In 2007 he won the John Schultz and Betty Shiflett Story Workshop Scholarship. He has taught Story Workshop classes for the Story Workshop Institute, and is currently a part-time faculty member in the Columbia College Fiction Writing Department. Photo: Steff Adams
Ann Hemenway earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has published fiction and creative nonfiction in Writing from Start to Finish, Emergence, Private Arts, Sport Literate, The Thing About Hope Is..., f5, and other magazines. Hemenway is an AWP Intro award winner, and the recipient of a Ragdale residency. Her artwork has been shown at the ARC and Gahlberg galleries. She is a Certified Story Workshop Master Teacher and full-time professor in the graduate and undergraduate programs of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. PHOTO: JESSICA TIERNEY
Ian Jack is a writer, and editor, and weekly columnist for the Guardian in London. He has written for Granta since 1987 and edited the magazine from 1995 to 2007, as well as edited and published many books on the Granta list. He began his career in journalism on a small-town newspaper in Scotland in the 1960s. Between 1970 and 1986 he worked for the Sunday Times as a reporter, editor, feature writer, and foreign correspondent (mainly in the Indian subcontinent. He was co-founder of the Independent on Sunday in 1989 and edited that newspaper between 1991 and 1995. His awards in Britain include those for reporter, journalist, and editor of the year. An anthology of his writing, Before the Oil Ran Out, was published by Secker and Warburg in 1987 and republished by Vintage in 1997. The Crash That Stopped Britain, published by Granta, appeared in 2000. He lives with his family in London. Photo: Stephen Gill 
Sheryl Johnston, artistic director and publicist of the Story Week Festival of Writers, has been involved with the festival for eleven years. Johnston earned her BA in fiction writing from Columbia College Chicago, and her work has appeared in Emergence, Hair Trigger 16 and 17, Bandit-Lit.com, and others. Before attending Columbia, Johnston was an editorial writer at WLS-TV, a vice-president in public relations at J. Walter Thompson, and president of her own communications agency. She has served as a judge for the WBEZ-FM Stories on Stage contest, as an editor for Hair Trigger and Bandit-Lit.com, and as a panelist for the Northwestern University Summer Writer's Conference 2007. She currently handles publicity and event management for authors and other clients involved with education, the arts, and entertainment.
Eric Kirsammer is the owner of Chicago Comics and Quimby’s, two of the city’s most beloved independent bookstores. Kirsammer was born in Detroit, raised in rural Michigan, and moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute, where he earned his BFA in 1986. In the 1990s, Kirsammer purchased what would become Chicago Comics and Quimby’s, moving them to their current respective locations on Chicago’s North Side. Chicago Comics has won several comic industry awards, the Eisner Spirit of Retailing Award, and was named Capital City’s Master Retailer. The store has also been listed in the “Best of Chicago” issues of Chicago Magazine and NewCity. Kirsammer resides in the city with his wife and baby daughter. For more information, visit www.chicagocomics.com and www.quimbys.com. 
Marcela Landres is an Editorial Consultant who edits manuscripts, critiques proposals, and advises on how to launch a writing career. She was formerly an editor at Simon and Schuster, where she acquired and edited the best-selling authors Karen Rauch Carter and Dora Levy Mossanen. A member of the Women’s Media Group, she has acted as a judge for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and speaks frequently for organizations such as the Learning Annex. For more information visit www.marcelalandres.com. Photo: Shirley Miranda-Rodriguez
Eric May graduated with a BA in Writing/English from Columbia College Chicago in 1975. He attended American University's MFA in Creative Writing Program in Washington DC, where he was also a reporter for the Washington Post. May is now a professor in the graduate and undergraduate programs of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and in such literary anthologies as Fish Stories: Collective I, Sport Literate, Angels in My Oven, f5, f6, and other publications. May is a Certified Story Workshop Director, an Associate Faculty member at the Stonecoast Writers' Conference in Maine, and a past Board of Judges member for the Columbia University Scholastic Press Association. He is currently at work on a novel and a memoir. Photo: Jessica Tierney
Patricia Ann McNair has had her fiction and creative nonfiction appear in various anthologies, journals, and magazines, including American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, Other Voices, F Magazine, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and Air Canada's en Route magazine. She is also published in The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction edited by Dinty Moore, and is a regular contributor to Elks Magazine. Her honors include a number of Illinois Arts Council Awards and Pushcart Prize nominations in fiction and creative nonfiction, a Writer's Grant and residency at the Vermont Studio Center, a residency at the Glen Arbor Arts Association, and Writer in Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. McNair is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate programs of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. Photo: David C. Wurtzel
Jonathan Messinger is the author of Hiding Out, a collection of short stories released in October 2007. He is also the books editor of TimeOut Chicago and founder and co-host of The Dollar Store Show, a literary and comedy series featuring performances inspired by junk purchased from a dollar store. He co-publishes Featherproof Books, a Chicago-based small press publishing full-length fiction and downloadable mini-books. His fiction has appeared in Resonance, Rainbow Curve, and most recently in Other Voices and Awake!, an anthology from Soft Skull Press. Photo: Nathan Keay
Mucca Pazza is an astounding, thirty-person, “circus punk,” marching band that plays everything from Gainsbourg to Le Tigre, Bar-Kays to Ali Hassan Kuban, as well as many original compositions. One would think that only in Dr. Seuss’s imagination could a marching band perform in ten canoes going down the Chicago River, but Mucca-Pazza did! They’ve also played in punk venues, orchestral halls, public parks, private extravaganzas, diva palaces, dive bars, at Lollapalooza, and on the Conan O’Brien Show. For more about the band and their newly released CD, visit www.mucca-pazza.org or www.myspace.com/muccapazza.
Photo: Justin Schmitz
Tom Mula is an MFA candidate in the Fiction Writing Department, and teaches at Columbia as an artist in residence. He has been an award-winning playwright, actor, and director for nearly thirty years. In 1991, he received two Joseph Jefferson Awards for his play Golem at the National Jewish Theatre and for his work on Nicole Hollander's hit musical, Sylvia's Real Good Advice. In 1995, Adams Media published his novel, Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol, and it became a Chicago Tribune bestseller; the stage version premiered at the Goodman Theatre and received an After Dark Award and the Cunningham Prize from the Goodman School of Drama at DePaul. Mula’s recent work, W!, a cabaret-style satire on the Bush administration, played in Chicago and Portland, and received a Jeff Nomination for Outstanding New Work. Last fall, Mula and Columbia’s Theater Department Chair Sheldon Patinkin, co-directed a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Getz Theatre. Photo: Jennifer Girard
Chris Maul Rice’s fiction and essays have appeared in Bandit-Lit.com, Pigeon, the Beacon, Emergence II, and Hair Trigger. Her feature stories have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Gravity Magazine, and Detroit’s Metro Times and Metro Parent newspapers. Rice is an adjunct professor in the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department. She is the chair and director of the department’s Young Authors Writing Competition, has been the faculty advisor for the student anthologies Hair Trigger 23-30, and has judged and presented at the 2007 Columbia University Scholastic Press Association convention and Southwest Prairie Conference 2007. Photo: David Rice
Lisa Schlesinger is a professor in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. Her plays include Our ( ) Town, Wal-martyrs, Celestial Bodies, Twenty-One Positions (with Naomi Wallace and Abdel Fattah AbuSrour), Same Egg, Manny and Chicken, Rock Ends Ahead, Bow Echo, and The Bones of Danny Winston. She has received commissions from the Guthrie Theatre, the BBC, various universities, and is currently under commission by the Ensemble Studio Theatre and Portland Stage Company for Harmonicus Mundi, an opera, and the International Writing Program's Global Play Project. She is a winner of the BBC International Playwriting Competition and the NEA/TCG Playwrights Residency, has received grants and fellowships from the NEA, TCG, CEC Artlinks International, and the Sloan and Bush Foundations. Photo: b. schlesinger
John Schultz is the originator of the Story Workshop® approach to the teaching of writing and professor emeritus of the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department. His numerous publications include The Tongues of Men (stories and novellas), No One Was Killed, The Chicago Conspiracy Trial, Writing from Start to Finish, and the Teacher's Manual for Writing From Start to Finish. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many journals and collections, including Big Table, Evergreen Review, Georgia Review, Chicago Reader, College English, and the UMKC Law Review. He has been featured in several television documentaries, including The Chicago Conspiracy Trial (A & E, American Justice, Court TV), Daley: The Last Boss (PBS), and the BBC Radio Drama The Chicago Conspiracy Trial. He was a featured participant in the showcasing of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial at the national ABA convention in Chicago, August 2001. He is also the founder and president of F Magazine, a literary anthology that publishes excerpts from novels-in-progress, stories, essays, and poetry. Schultz is the co-producer of the instructional videos The Living Voice Moves and Story from First Impulse to Final Draft, and was a visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. The Story Workshop video and written text was presented on Brown University's Education Alliance Web site, The Knowledge Loom (www.knowledgeloom.org). He is also founder and president of the Story Workshop Institute and SGI, (Schultz Group, Inc.) offering supplementary education programs. Photo: Tony Ortega
Donna Seaman is a critic, reviewer, and associate editor for Booklist. A regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other literary venues, Seaman has created the fiction anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness. The recipient of several Illinois Arts Council grants, Seaman has received the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, the Writer Magazine Writers Who Make a Difference Award, and two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions. Most recently, Literacy Chicago presented her with their 2008 Literacy Hero Award, in recognition of all that she does to encourage reading. Seaman hosts the radio show Open Books on WLUW-FM in Chicago. Her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, which has been hailed by the Chicago Tribune as a "trove of insights into the creative processes and cultural observations" of diverse writers. Photo: David Siegfried
Shawn Shiflett is a professor in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago, where he is a Story Workshop Master Teacher. His novel Hidden Place was included in Library Journal's "Summer Highs, Fall Firsts," a 2004 list of most successful debuts. He was born and raised in Chicago, the son of civil rights activist parents. His honors include the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award, Honorable Mention Finalist for the James Fellowship novel-in-progress contest (sponsored by the Heekin Group Foundation), and several Pushcart Prize nominations. He is working on a second novel, Hey, Liberal!, about a white kid in a predominantly African-American high school right after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. An excerpt from Hey, Liberal! will appear in the upcoming spring issue of F Magazine. Shiflett has also presented on numerous panels at AWP (Associated Writing Programs) conferences. Photo: Jessica Tierney
Johnny Temple is the publisher and editor in chief of Akashic Books, an award-winning Brooklyn-based independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction. Temple won the American Association of Publishers' 2005 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing. Temple plays bass guitar in the band Girls Against Boys, which has toured extensively across the globe and released numerous albums on independent and major record companies. Temple has contributed articles and political essays to various publications, including the Nation, Publishers Weekly, AlterNet, Poets & Writers, and BookForum.
Robert Weil is an executive editor at W.W. Norton & Company. Before coming to Norton, he was a senior editor at St. Martin's Press, where his authors included Henry Roth, Oliver Stone, and John Bayley. At Norton, he edits nonfiction (history, biography, memoir, popular culture) and literary fiction. His authors include Clive James, Patricia Highsmith, Jerome Charyn, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Nadine Gordimer, Primo Levi, Paul McCartney, Michael Oren, David Levering Lewis, and E. O. Wilson.
Sam Weller, faculty artistic director of the Story Week Festival of Writers, is the author of The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, winner of the 2005 Society of Midland Authors Award for Best Biography. Weller is the former Midwest correspondent for Publishers Weekly magazine. He is a frequent literary critic for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Punk Planet, and Playboy.com. He has written for the National Public Radio Program All Things Considered and is a contributor to the WBEZ radio program Eight-Forty-Eight. He is a fill-in host for the WBEZ program, Hello Beautiful! As a staff writer for the Chicago alternative weekly, NewCity, Weller received the Peter Lisagor Award for arts criticism. His short fiction has appeared in Spec-Lit and Tales from the Dim Unknown. He is currently at work on creative nonfiction historical mystery. Weller is a member of the full-time faculty in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. Photo: Barry Breichesen