Chicago Quarterly Review at Hemingway Museum Tomorrow

An array of worthwhile literary organizations will participate in tomorrow's Pop-Up Book Fair at the Hemingway Museum, but I want to draw special attention to the Chicago Quarterly Review.

  

For 20 years, the Chicago Quarterly Review has been discovering really good literature, and its recent publication of an all-Chicago issue is perhaps its finest accomplishment yet. The issue features the work of  54 Chicago artists, poets and writers, a potent mixture of new and familiar authors. From cover to cover, the work in this issue is superb.  Each of the contributors lives in Chicago, works in Chicago, or reflects Chicago in their work; for some, it is all of the above. Included in the issue are the three winning entries from the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame's Budding Literary Masters competition, representing a cross-section of our city's best young talent.  

It was through the Budding Literary Masters competition that I became intimately familiar with the journal. I'd bumped into  Lisa MacKenzie at the Hyatt on the first morning of the AWP's annual conference. We knew each other through a mutual friend in Santa Cruz, though not very well, and I had no idea she was involved in a Chicago project. Lisa is a world-class writer: her fiction is powerful and moving and funny. And she's an enormously charming, generous and smart woman. 

She introduced me to Syed Afzal Haider, and I liked him and his fiction immediately. He's the kind of guy who seems pestered, almost despondent, about the human condition and intent on making things better just a small bit at a time.  

Kind people and great writers do not necessarily make the best editors and publishers. But in this case, happily, they do. Syed and Lisa and all the others at CQR judge submissions with tough, critical, effective standards, and then create a book worthy of the top-notch work.  

Rick Kogan wrote of the Chicago Issue in the Chicago Tribune, "The work of some of the city's brightest young talents--Don De Grazia, Gina Frangello, Joe Meno and Christine Sneed among them--is here, full of energy and coltish inventiveness."

CQR would obviously like for all of you writers and readers to become acquainted with the journal, but particularly the Chicago Issue. Stop by and visit the editors tomorrow, and while you're at it buy a copy. The book fair goes from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. at the Hemingway Museum (200 N. Oak Park Ave. in Oak Park). Curbside Splendor, the fair's main sponsor, will then host a reading/after party at the main library (just down the street at Lake Street); it will run from 6 until 9 p.m. 

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Donald G. Evans is the founder and executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. He is the author of the novel Good Money After Bad and short story collectionAn Off-White Christmas, as well as the editor of the anthology Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. He is the Chicago editor of the Great Lakes Cultural Review. He serves on the American Writers Museum's Chicago Literary Council and the committee that selects the Harold Washington Literary Award.

donaldgevans@hotmail.com