About the Authors Arriel Vinson is a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow and Midwesterner who writes about being young, Black, and in search of freedom. She earned her MFA in…

Are you a local author? Meet up with other writers over a light breakfast of coffee and doughnuts. Share your work, make new friends, and help build literary connections in…

The City Gallery will include a free-to-borrow-and-play library of literary- and word-focused board and card games. Not familiar with these? Lou Harry, game concierge of the weekly Game Night Social at…

Melissa Fraterrigo is the author of the memoir in essays, The Perils of Girlhood (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) and also the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) and…

In this generative workshop, we’ll explore the ways that documentary poetics can be used to crack open, broaden, or crumble official narratives—especially in situations of injustice. When systems and institutions…

Magical Realism—a genre often associated with Latin American literature that combines the magical with the mundane—has been leveraged to write about sociopolitical topics for decades. From authors like Gabriel Garcia…

This panel will feature a conversation about Midwestern literature that travels widely through time and space—beginning with hyperlocal experience and building toward a larger mosaic of the diverse stories we…

Join author Katherine Higgs-Coulthard for this fun writing session for the whole family. Families will collaborate to write a story about a specific experience using guided prompts, including making neighborhood…

Conversations, place details, characteristics, moments we can’t forget: these real-life happenings are all fodder for fiction. Join us to boldly reimagine the real as its own transformed narrative, filling a…

Artists have always pushed boundaries—only to face backlash, bans, or erasure. From books and films to music and visual art, censorship continues to shape what stories get told and who gets…

Booth Tarkington is one of just four authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, putting him in a category with William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. However,…

Mary Ardery is the author of the poetry collection Level Watch (June Road Press, 2025). Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, RHINO,…

Thích Thiên Ân, American teacher and Zen Buddhist Monk, once told us to “let the mind flow like water. Face life with a calm and quiet mind and everything in…

A haiku workshop with David Hoppe In addition to reading from his new collection of contemporary American haiku (Snapshot Lightning), author David Hoppe will also encourage participants to write their…

What is the role of an editor during a time of increasing censorship? This panel will focus squarely on the idea of an editor’s role/responsibility and how editors are meeting…

A full production of playwright Lou Harry’s hit play from the 2025 Indy Fringe Festival (with original cast members Beverly Roche and Michelle Mannweiler) will be followed by an interactive…

About the Author Danez Smith is the author of four collections including Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo:…