Friends

Chase Bauer  an amazing poet originally from Chicago, IL, now bombing down the gorgeous winding roads of Colorado. Many of the poems included are from his alter-ego, Weatherfield.

Can I Get An Amen is the project of my dearest friend, violin-maker and Iron River wildboy Evan McBrayer Collins. Between his banjo and the smoke-inducing, pin-precise fiddle-playing of Daniel Gillespie and the ragtag revolutionary crew of minstrels the boys come across, this is quickly becoming the favorite band of everyone I know.

Dead End Days is a really cool pop-punk/singer-songwriter kind of band featuring Ohio transplant Mike Petruccelli. Mike used to be my neighbor and now we’re friends. Between Mike’s endearing personality and his catchy but thoughtful songs, you’ll probably want to be friends with him too.

Rumble Arts Center is a really awesome 501(c)3 community space whose charitable mission is to enrich and empower the lives of west side Chicago residents through art classes, youth programs, and more. They have an amazing elephant mural on the front of their building and some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet in the art world.

Windy City Story Slam is one of the first major institutions in Chicago that gave me a chance to really show off what I could do as a writer. Through their loving community, I got recognition, confidence, newspaper clippings, lasting friendships, the last two lines of my bio, and even a boyfriend or two. Oh, and a lot of fun.  If that’s not enough, they recently branched out into the scholarship world, working to restore a Columbia College fiction-writing grant so that more wayward kids might realize their wildest dreams just as Bill and I have.

Broke Chicago is the blog of my old schoolmate, Hel F. Kiernan. HK provided the first write-up for one of the events I put on at the WSSD (and it was favorable! how bout that!). Since then, we’ve become allies in the fight against inequality and injustice on Chicago’s grassroots political scene.

Zachary Green is a poet. I could say more about him, like our mutual love for Woody Allen or how he always indulges me in not being of this world or how he’s the darling of our old art school and that he deserves it undoubtedly, but that’d detract. Zach’s a poet. Deal with it.