Monday 4/2/2011: Cris Mazza and Lidia Yuknavitch

Please join us for the April installment of Uncalled-for Chicago, featuring the terrific LIDIA YUKNAVITCH promoting her new book, a memoir called THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER (Hawthorne Books); and Chicago's own CRIS MAZZA, reading from her new novel VARIOUS MEN WHO KNEW US AS GIRLS (Emergency Press).

Monday, April 4, 2011
6-8 p.m.
Barbara's Bookstore

1218 S Halsted St

Chicago, IL

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the new memoir The Chronology of Water from Hawthorne Books, as well as three books of short stories and a forthcoming novel. Her stories have appeared in Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, as well as in several national anthologies. She has twice been a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and is the editor of Chiasmus Press. Her essay "About a Boob, or the Hermeneutics of a Woman's Body" was just awarded a "Best of the Web" essay award. She lives with her husband Andy and her son Miles in Portlandia.

Cris Mazza has authored sixteen books, most recently Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, a novel. Her other fiction titles include Waterbaby, Trickle-Down Timeline, and the critically notable Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? In 1995-1996, Mazza was co-editor for the original Chick-Lit anthologies: Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction, and Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics. In 2006, her essay "Who's Laughing Now: Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre," explaining the co-opting and corrosion of the title, appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine and Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction (Routledge). In addition to fiction, Mazza also has published a memoir, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. A native of Southern California, Mazza grew up in San Diego County. She currently lives 50 miles west of Chicago and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Roxane Gay reviews Lidia Yuknavitch's THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER at HTMLGiant.

Davis Schneiderman interviews Cris Mazza about VARIOUS MEN WHO KNEW US AS GIRLS at Big Other.

Sat 2/26/2011: MILDRED PIERCE Chicago release party

The next Uncalled-for Chicago is doubling as the release party for MILDRED PIERCE ISSUE #4, "Comedy and the Grotesque" .... please join us in celebrating at

Quimby's Bookstore (1854 W. North Ave) ...

on SATURDAY, February 26th, 2011 at 7 pm.

Mildred Pierce is a (maga)zine, cofounded in 2005 by John Bylander and Uncalled-for Chicago co-host Megan Milks and coedited by the same. It is a somewhat annual zine dealing in art, writing and countercultural cultural criticism. This issue features, along with the artists and writers listed below, Marc Baez, John Berndt, Sabrina Chap, Max Eisenberg, Eamon Espey, Joyce Kuechler, Leeyanne Moore, Jimmy Joe Roche, Sean Samoheyl, Pippi Zornoza, and others. The cover is designed and screenprinted by Edie Fake.

Providing readings and performances at the Chicago release party are contributors James Tadd Adcox, Edie Fake, Jim Joyce, Vicky Lim, Ed Choy Moorman, and Ellen Nielsen!!!!!

Wine and refreshments plus limited-edition zines! HOLY COW see you there.

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James Tadd Adcox is editor-in-chief of Artifice Magazine. He has had fiction published in TriQuarterly, Kill Author, Another Chicago Magazine, and Mid-American Review, among other journals.

Edie Fake is the author of Gaylord Phoenix, now available as a collection from Secret Acres. He’s received a Critical Fierceness Grant for queer art and was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists. His drawings have been included in Hot and Cold, Creative Time Comics, and LTTR. Currently, he lives in Chicago where he works as a minicomics sommelier for Quimby’s Books.

Jim Joyce graduated from St. Rita High School in 2004. His zine, Or Let It Sink, explores desire, failure, and personal mythology. Jim works in the education field and enjoys keeping a journal.

Vicky Lim has a zine (Dear Jaguar) and a blog (Personal Statements) and lives in Chicago.

Ed Choy Moorman is a New Jersey-raised, Minneapolis College of Art and Design-schooled, Chicago-based cartoonist. He is the editor and publisher of the 2009 Xeric Award-winning Ghost Comics anthology from Bare Bones Press. (http://edsdeadbody.com/ + http://edchoymoorman.wordpress.com/)

Ellen Nielsen is an interdisciplinary artist whose body of work includes writing, performance, objects, video, and graphic design. She received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland and is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tues 10/12/2010: Daniel Allen Cox & Brandon Will

Please join us for the October installment of Uncalled-for Chicago, featuring special out-of-town author DANIEL ALLEN COX on tour promoting his new book KRAKOW MELT; with an opening reading by Chicago writer BRANDON WILL.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010
7-9 p.m.
The Yellow Door Project

3065 North Rockwell

Chicago, IL

Please BYOB.

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DANIEL ALLEN COX is a Canadian author, columnist, and former sex worker. Daniel is the author of the acclaimed novel is the author of the novel Shuck, published by Arsenal Pulp Press and shortlisted in 2009 for a Lambda Literary Award and a ReLit Award. His stories and essays have appeared in the anthologies Second Person Queer (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009) and Year of the Thief (Thieves Jargon Press, 2006), as well as in numerous magazines. He has appeared at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, on Canada’s national broadcaster CBC Radio One, and at McGill University. Daniel was formerly an editor for Outsider Ink magazine, an interviewer for the punk journal New York Waste, and a video porn star. His second novel, Krakow Melt, is now available from Arsenal Pulp Press.

Sat 8/14/2010: Mary Anne Mohanraj, Ivan Faute & Mike Kitchell

The next Uncalled-For Chicago is in August, featuring these fab folks at this fine location:

SATURDAY August 14th
7-9 p.m.
Rough House Theater
2131 N Milwaukee Ave
BYOB

MARY ANNE MOHANRAJ is the author of numerous books in many genres. Her books include Bodies in Motion, Silence and the Word, Torn Shapes of Desire, Aqua Erotica (ed.), The Best of Strange Horizons (ed.), and A Taste of Serendib (a Sri Lankan cookbook). Other work can be found in Oasis, Harpur Palate, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Vol. 3, and Best Lesbian Erotica 2003. She is founder of the Speculative Literature Foundation.

IVAN FAUTE writes fiction and plays in Chicago. His short stories, novels, plays, microfiction and experimental works often explore the power of memory to persuade and control our lives. Common themes also include the nature of reality and the obsessive desire we have to categorize everything. He is author of the chapbook, This is How We Will Live, Now That We are Free (Rocksaw Press). You can find his work in various literary journals, small run magazines, zines, and occasionally on stage.

MIKE KITCHELL lives in DeKalb, IL, and has stories forthcoming from No Colony, Artifice Magazine, PANK, and Lamination Colony. He has an obsession with killing himself in the ocean and refuses to acknowledge whether or not this obsession is "serious" or "ironic." He documents his presence in the world at http://topologyoftheimpossible.com/.

Sat 5/8/2010: Nathalie Stephens, Kareem Khubchandani, & Trish Bendix

Please join us for Uncalled-For Chicago's May edition, featuring the following wonderful writers/performers:

SATURDAY MAY 8th
7-9 p.m.
Las Manos Gallery
5220 N Clark St
BYOB

NATHALIE STEPHENS (Nathanaël) writes l'entre-genre in English and French. Her many books include The Sorrow And The Fast Of It (2007), Paper City (2003), Je Nathanaël (2003/2006), L'injure (2004) and ...s'arrête? Je (2007) for which she was awarded the Prix Alain-Grandbois by the Académie des Lettres du Québec. Other work exists in Basque and Slovene with book-length translations in Bulgarian. There is an essay of correspondence (2009): Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book), first published (2007) as L'absence au lieu. Also a collection of talks, At Alberta (2008). Besides translating some of her own work, Stephens has translated Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott, John Keene, and Édouard Glissant. She lives, she thinks, in Chicago.

KAREEM KHUBCHANDANI moved to Chicago in 2008 to begin his career as a full time graduate student in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Since this move, he has adapted and performed a one-person show, "Material Boy," has curated "KalaKranti: an evening of queer South Asian performance," and has performed at Serendipity Theater's "Second Story," and About Face's "The Homo Show." He was born in Gibraltar, raised in Ghana, and then spent eight years in the North East before moving here. He hearts Chicago.

TRISH BENDIX is a writer living in Chicago with her girlfriend, two pugs and two cats. She writes about the intersection of queer women and pop culture/media as blog editor of AfterEllen.com and pens fiction by night and weekend. She has written on queer life & art, music, pop culture, media and feminist issues for publications such as the Village Voice, Time Out Chicago, Out, Punk Planet, Planet Out/Gay.com, Rockpile, the Chicago Tribune's ChicagoNow and Bitch. Her fiction has appeared in the Q Review and CellStories and she has an essay in the upcoming Seal Press anthology Dear John, I Love Jane.

Sat 3/6/2010: Cathy Halley, Erica Adams, and Tim Jones-Yelvington

please join us for our second event, featuring CATHY HALLEY, ERICA ADAMS, and TIM JONES-YELVINGTON.

SATURDAY
march 9, 2010
7 p.m.
las manos gallery
5520 n clark st

byob...!

CATHY HALLEY is the online editor at the Poetry Foundation. She's also a collage artist and writer whose poems have appeared in Pocket Myths, and that's about it, because she doesn't have the stomach to try to publish, and won't expect to before she's dead. Rather than spelling this all out, she was going to make a joke about how her book of poems is forthcoming from Posthumous Press, but then you'd all go scurrying to Google that instead of Pocket Myths, which deserves the attention. She's at work on an episodic memoir, a bunch of filthy stories and an historical novel set in WWII Greece.

ERICA ADAMS is a 500-year-old witch living in a 27-year-old body.

TIM JONES-YELVINGTON is a Program Associate at Crossroads Fund, a foundation that supports community organizations working on issues of social and economic justice in the Chicago area. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Artifice, Sleepingfish, Annalemma, Keyhole, Monkeybicycle, PANK, SmokeLong Quarterly, Storyglossia and others. He blogs at Ejaculations of a Perverse Adult and contributes to Big Other.

pictures from first event

Las Manos Gallery, 1/9/2010
all photos courtesy Mieke Zuiderweg

M. Shelly Conner

Megan Milks

Mecca Sullivan

thank you!