** NEW ** Sara Paretsky

Sara Paretsky is the author of a groundbreaking, enormously popular (make that beloved), Chicago-based mystery series featuring V. I. Warshawski, one of the world's first and enduringly favorite women private eyes. Paretsky introduced her intrepid and independent hero in 1982 in Indemnity Only and has written more than a dozen Warshawski novels, each, according to critics and readers alike, better than the last. The list includes Bitter Medicine, Guardian Angel, Windy City Blues, Total Recall, Blacklist, and Fire Sale. Not only does Paretsky brilliantly empower a tough and uncompromising woman sleuth, she also creates psychologically rich and socially significant stories that address such urgent matters as corrupt politicians, domestic violence, homelessness, industrial pollution, organized and corporate crime, the plight of illegal immigrants, racism, genocide, and assaults on free speech.

Sara Paretsky has been designated "Woman of the Year" by Ms magazine. She has received the Mark Twain Award and the British Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award, and Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement Award. Paretsky founded Sisters in Crime, the thriving advocacy organization for women mystery writers, and she is a dedicated social activist in Chicago.

In this unusually revealing conversation, Paretsky talks about her complex and dramatic novel (right, it's not a mystery), Bleeding Kansas, which is loosely based on her Kansan girlhood, and her exquisite and thought-provoking memoir-in-essays, Writing in an Age of Silence.

** NEW ** Gioia Diliberto

Chicago writer Gioia Diliberto began her writing life as a journalist, then transformed herself into a biographer. Focusing on women's lives, she has written books about the trailblazing reformer, Jane Addams, the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; Hadley Richardson Hemingway, who is fascinating in her own right as well as one of Ernest Hemingway's stoic wives, and Brenda Frazier, a woman famous for being famous (the Paris Hilton of her day), a celebrated beauty and New York high-society debutante.

Diliberto then brought her insights into women's lives -- how women navigate our male-dominated society, how beauty is both a boon and a bane -- to her novels, along with her passionate for fashion and art. The result is supple fiction elegantly laced with fact and social commentary. A mysterious painting by John Singer Sargent inspired Diliberto's first profoundly pleasurable and illuminating historical novel, the critically acclaimed I Am Madame X. The struggles and genius of Coco Chanel propelled Diliberto's second smart and entrancing novel, The Collection. Diliberto is now exploring the world of the flapper.

It's worth quoting a line from The Collection, that perfectly encapsulates Diliberto's point of view. Chanel tells her protégé Isabelle, "A woman's mind is the sexiest thing about her."

** NEW ** Billy Lombardo

Billy Lombardo began his literary adventures on the Chicago slam poetry scene. To support his writing habit, and to spread the word about the importance of literature, Lombardo teaches writing at the Latin School, where he oversees production of Polyphony H.S., an innovative literary magazine for high-school writers.

Billy Lombardo's first book is the much-hailed The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize. Here's what Booklist has to say:

"Every male writer writing about growing up in Chicago, from John McNally to Adam Langer, does so in the shadow of Stuart Dybek, the celebrated author of I Sailed with Magellan (2003). Happily, first-time author Lombardo manages to be inspired by Dybek while refining his own voice in this sweetly soulful coming-of-age short story collection. Preternaturally observant, young Petey lives in an Italian enclave in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood in the early 1970s. This is a working-class world, and Lombardo lovingly describes everything from how to mop a floor to how to fill a cannoli, but he is also aware of nature's power, the source of his stories' vivid metaphors and exaltation. As Petey's family struggles to survive and he heads into adolescence and learns how to navigate his home turf, Lombardo gets everything right, from a sensitive boy's struggle to say and do the right thing in delicate situations to Chicago's impossible weather, as he celebrates the marvels of boyhood and everyday life."

Lombardo is a distinctly compassionate, candid, and questioning writer, generous and hard-driving. Soon to appear is a poetry collection, Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns, coming out from EM Press, and a novel-in-stories, How to Hold a Woman, from OV Books.

** NEW ** Elizabeth Berg

Elizabeth Berg is the author of 16 novels, most of which have been bestsellers. Here's a short list: Durable Goods, Talk Before Sleep, Joy School, Open House, The Art of Mending, The Year of Pleasure, We Are All Welcome Here, and Dream When You're Feeling Blue. These are novels lush with tenderness, humor, curiosity, wonder, and clear thinking about the amazing power of kindness and patience. Berg is a deceptively direct storyteller; her charm and affection conceal great literary and conceptual sophistication. A nurse before she became a writer, Berg loves life, and insists on having a good time, even when she's writing about very tough and despairing subjects. Readers recognize empathy and authenticity when they find it, and Berg is the genuine article.

Now and then the ebullient, generous, and gracious Elizabeth Berg brightens our lives with short stories. Her new book is a story collection titled The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation. It is saucily designed, and I'm delighted that an excerpt from my Booklist review appears on the back cover.

Alas, this is a field recording, and the quality is poor. We sound as though we're on a plane. But it's worth putting up with the hum. Honestly. Elizabeth Berg would be worth listening to in a torrential downpour, at a NASCAR race, in a trading pit at the stock exchange. And really, the recording is way better than all that. Listen.

** NEW ** Laura Lippman

The daughter of a reporter and a librarian, Laura Lippman came by her passion for story and truth naturally. Raised in Baltimore, Maryland, she followed her highly respected journalist father, Theo Lippman, Jr., to the Baltimore Sun. Deeply affected by the suffering she witnessed, and seeking an outlet for murderous rage, she began to write mystery novels set in Baltimore and starring a reporter turned private detective, the down-to-earth, acid-tongued, womanly wise, and blessedly human Tess Monaghan.

Lippman's first Tess Monaghan mystery was Baltimore Blues (1997), and as the Monaghan chronicles roared on (In a Strange City By a Spider's Thread No Good Deeds), Lippman gathered up the mystery genre's coveted awards, namely the Agatha, the Anthony, the Edgar, the Wolfe, and the Shamus. Lippman also writes stand-alone novels, including What the Dead Know, To the Power of Three and Every Secret Thing, which has been optioned for the movies by Academy Award-winner France McDormand. Further proof of Lippman's creative energy and versatility and complex sensibility and compassion is found in her superb and shivery forthcoming short story collection, which is enthusiastically introduced by George Pelecanos, Hardly Knew Her.

Laura Lippman and I got together in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at a Public Library Association conference, and talked intently about her then current Tess Monaghan novel, Another Thing to Fall, reading, writing, and justice.

** NEW ** Dika Lam (with Stacy Bierlein and Gina Frangello)

Canadian-born and Brooklyn-based, Dika Lam is has received a New York Times Fellowship from New York University, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers Conference, and is a winner of the Bronx Writers' Center Chapter One Contest. Her work has appeared in Story, One Story, and the Cincinnati Review, and her stories have been anthologized in Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops, 1999 and This Is Not Chick Lit.

Lam is also a contributor to the anthology A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cultural Collision and Connection; her story is titled "Fresh Off the Boat." She joined the book's editor, Stacy Bierlein and contributor and publisher Gina Frangello on a field edition of Open Books to talk about A Stranger Among Us at the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago in June 2008.

** NEW ** Stacy Bierlein (with Dika Lam and Gina Frangello)

Stacy Bierlein is a writer, a founding editor of OV Books, and a well-traveled literary activist. In creating the anthology, A Stranger among Us: Stories of Cultural Collision and Connection, Bierlein "hoped to collect stories that told me something I could not have imagined." She also "aimed to collect stories where issues of identity emerged in active dialogues between members of different cultures. Bierlein continues, ". . . culture was open to a wide variety of interpretations by writers of divergent histories and passions. We set out to examine the universal desire to connect, as well as the frustrating difficulties of those connections."

BOOKLIST had this to say about A Stranger Among Us:

"Us versus them" is the human equation, even though all designations, whether based on race, ethnicity, religion, geography, language, or class, are in constant flux. Our family trees all share roots, and now more than ever, people live in culturally jumbled places other than their familial home ground. Displacement, exile, the quest for a better life, bridging cultures, the ripples sent out by the question "What are you?"-all are ripe fruit for fiction writers. With an eye to short stories stemming from diverse cultures and exploring the state of outsiderness, editor Bierlein has selected 30 vibrant, unpredictable, and magnetic works that together span the spectrum from funny to tragic, earthy to rarefied. Stories of sharp revelation and resonance are triggered by moments small or wrenching, such as the swimming lesson in Shubha Venugopal's "Bhakthi in the Water," a meal in Carolyn Alessio's "Currency," or prayer in Luis Alfaro's "Border Crossings." Wanda Coleman, Nathan Englander, Laila Lalami, Samrat Upadhyay, Josip Novakovich, and many new or underrecognized writers reconfigure the human experience in this richly kaleidoscopic anthology. - Donna Seaman

Stacy Bierlein and contributors Gina Frangello and Dika Lam spoke with Open Books at the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago in June 2008.

** NEW ** Gina Frangello (with Dika Lam and Stacy Bierlein)

Gina Frangello's short stories have been published in many venues, including Clackamas Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Swink, and the anthology Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader. Frangello was the editor for Other Voices; she co-founded OV Books, and guest-edited the fiction anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters. Her first novel, My Sister's Continent, was one of the ten best books of the year selected by Las Vegas City Life. Her second novel, London Calling, is due out soon.

Frangello has a story, "Attila the There," in A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cultural Collision and Connection, and she joined the book's editor Stacy Bierlein and contributor Dika Lam on a field edition of Open Books to talk about A Stranger Among Us at the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago in June 2008.

** NEW ** Connie Brockway

Smart and funny romance writer Connie Brockway published her first book, Promise Me Heaven, in 1994, and she's been busy inventing tricky predicaments and appealing characters ever since. Her list of novels is nearing 20, and she'll soon have nearly 2 million books in print in more than a dozen countries.

Readers love Brockway, and the critics concur with starred reviews in the prepubs, particularly Booklist, which placed Brockway's novel My Seduction on a Top 10 romance list. Brockway has won the prestigious Romance Writers of America RITA Award twice, her books regularly appear on national and regional bestseller lists and are frequent Doubleday/Literary Guild selections.

Adept at both contemporary (Hot Dish) and historical romances (My Dearest Enemy), Brockway reports that her next book, So Enchanting, is of the latter persuasion. This conversation, which took place at the 2008 Public Library Association conference in Minneapolis, not far from Brockway's Minnesota home, revolves around the contemporary romance, Skinny Dipping, and reveals much about the often misunderstood romance genre.

Yannick Murphy is a remarkably original and lyrical fiction writer. The author of two powerful short story collections -- her first book, Stories in Another Language and her newest, In a Bear's Eye -- Murphy has written three stunning novels: The Sea of Trees, Here They Come, and her current triumph, the hauntingly beautiful Signed, Mata Hari. Recognized with an O'Henry Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Yannick Murphy also writes children's books.

Jonathan Messinger

Jonathan Messinger is the books editor for Time Out Chicago; a cofounder of Featherproof Books, a gutsy Chicago small press, and creator of the popular reading and performance series, The Dollar Store. Messinger is also the author of the short story collection Hiding Out, an impressive debut. Each story begins with a line drawing by Rob Funderburk of a disheveled male wedged in a corner or lying bent around a couch or a refrigerator, or prone under a coffee table or crammed under a desk. Hunched, slumped, defeated guys hiding in plain sight, seeking camouflage and comfort from large inanimate objects. Messinger's prose is the literary equivalent of the line drawings -- deceptively simple and direct, covertly hard-hitting. And his smartly plotted, unpredictable, and penetrating stories convey a rich spectrum of emotions from sly humor to quiet desperation.

Seth Kantner

A native Alaskan, Seth Kantner is a photographer and writer whose work expresses his love for the land and its animals, and his belief in wildness and the importance of keeping wilderness wild. A recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award, he has been published in Outside magazine, Alaska magazine, Reader's Digest, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. Kantner is also the author of Ordinary Wolves, an impressively fluent, many-faceted tragicomedy of Alaskan life, and winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, which is awarded to works of high literary quality that embody humane values and contribute to cultural understanding.

Elizabeth Gaffney (with Rene Steinke)

Elizabeth Gaffney was a staff editor for the Paris Review under George Plimpton's watch from 1989 to 2005, and she is now editor-at-large for the literary magazine A Public Space. Gaffney's debut novel, Metropolis, is a remarkably rich and ambitious work set in New York City just after the end of the Civil War. A capacious and frenetic novel about work, crime, immigration, race, and the evolution of a city, it is anchored to two of the grandest and most innovative structures of the time, New York's vast and elaborate sewer system and the Brooklyn Bridge, two engineering marvels that can be read as symbols of the two worlds Gaffney dramatizes, the underworld of the city's gangs, and the rarefied realm of art.

Rene Steinke (with Elizabeth Gaffney)

Rene Steinke is editor-in-chief for The Literary Review, and the author of two novels, The Fires and Holy Skirts. A finalist for the National Book Award, Holy Skirts is a fictionalized account of the life of a remarkable artist and audacious woman, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, an ultra avant-garde, German-born artist, poet, daring performance artist, and agent provocateur. An enigmatic, androgynous, and eccentric figure with a shaved, sometimes shellacked head, teaspoons for earrings, and a cancelled postage stamp on her cheek, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) challenged every convention known to gender and art over the course of her relentlessly adventurous, inventive, and theatrical life, greatly influencing better known artists, especially Marcel Duchamp. Steinke's empathic, gorgeously written, and dramatic novel reclaims and interprets a rare spirit.

Faith Sullivan

Faith Sullivan, who describes herself as a "demon gardener, flea marketer, and feeder of birds," has been writing novels since 1975, and is best-known and most cherished for her stories of women and families living in Harvester, Minnesota, during the cruel years of the Great Depression and the two world wars. Sullivan's novel The Cape Ann launched her heartland series, which includes The Empress of One, What a Woman Must Do, and Gardenias. Sullivan's novels are quietly powerful in their social and psychological insights and tremendous empathy for women forever caught in the double-bind of sexism. And Sullivan is incisive, uncommonly commonsensical, generous, and funny in person.

Junot Diaz

Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Junot Diaz wowed readers and critics alike with the potent short story collection Drown in 1996. Newsweek and the New Yorker named Diaz one of the hottest writers going, and since then he has received a phenomenal number of major awards, including the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship, and fellowships from the NEA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Junot Diaz's intrepid and radiant first novel is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a family saga that confronts the horrific brutality at loose during the reign of the dictator Trujillo. Díaz's besieged characters look to the supernatural for explanations and hope, from fukú, the curse "unleashed" when Europeans arrived on Hispaniola, to the forces dramatized in the works of science fiction and fantasy so beloved by the chubby "ghetto nerd" Oscar Wao, the brilliantly realized boy of conscience at the center of this whirlwind tale. Writing in a combustible mix of slang and lyricism, Díaz loops back and forth in time and place, generating sly and lascivious humor in counterpoint to tyranny and sorrow.

Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett has the magic touch. Laser-smart and remarkably adept, she has created an entirely new universe in each of her resplendent novels. The Patron Saint of Liars was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. With The Magician's Assistant, Patchett received a Guggenheim. Bel Canto, a huge success with readers, won the PEN/Faulkner Award, England's Orange Prize, and the Book Sense Book of the Year Award. So appealing is Bel Canto, it has been translated into 30 languages. Patchett's powerful memoir about her close friend, Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face), Truth & Beauty, won an Books for a Better Life Award. Patchett's work appears in Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, Gourmet, Vogue, and the Washington Post. Patchett's new novel is Run.

George Saunders

The most unnerving fiction boldly envisions the dire consequences of our most hubristic tendencies: our bottomless greed, maniacal competitiveness, hyper-materialism, environmental obliviousness, spiritual callousness, and fear of being different. This is George Saunders' territory. A writer of mordant wit and stinging insights following in the footsteps of Orwell, Bradbury, and Vonnegut, Saunders is a master of the surreal, or it is the ultra-real, short story. Saunders' droll, inventive, and compassionate fiction is collected in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastorlia, and In Persuasion Nation.

Saunders has also written a live-wire satirical novel or fable, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which is acquiring new power and relevance during this interminable presidential campaign, and a collection of fresh, hilarious, and profound essays, The Braindead Megaphone, in which Saunders' predilection for acrobatic parody and attunement to language's moral dimension are working in full force. A recipient of both Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships and a number of National Magazine Awards, Saunders writes for the New Yorker, Harper's, and GQ. But it's not all smooth sailing, Saunders was subjected to an appearance on The Colbert Report.

John Green entered the book world as an editorial assistant in the books for youth section at Booklist. Now he is a wildly popular young adult novelist. His first book, Looking for Alaska, a suspenseful tale set at a boarding school in Alabama, won the Michael L. Printz Award, and thrilled a great many readers from tweens to oldsters. Green's zanily mathematical and anagram-filled second novel, An Abundance of Katherines, is a funny and clever tale about a prodigy who keeps getting involved with and dumped by girls named Katherine. Both novels were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. John Green writes for Mental Floss Magazine, and, thanks to his friendship with mathematician Daniel Bliss, a consultant for An Abundance of Katherines and a candidate for the Illinois state legislature, John Green has been featured in the Wall Street Journal for his innovation support (it involves a liquefied Happy Meal) of Biss's campaign on the video blog he shares with his brother, Hank Green (www.ecogeek.org) Brotherhood 2.0.

Valerie Wilson Wesley

Former executive editor of Essence magazine, and now a best-selling fiction writer, Valerie Wilson Wesley has channeled her insights into women's lives, how children learn, race and ethnicity, community, and moral dilemmas into several genres, from her marvelously smart and funny children's series, Willimena Rules, which includes How to Fish for Trouble and How to Lose Your Cookie Money, to her acclaimed and wildly popular mystery series starring Tamara Hayle. Hayle is an African American woman raising her son on her own, and story is told in Dying in the Dark and the forthcoming Of Blood and Sorrow. Valerie Wilson Wesley also writes straight-ahead novels, among them Always True to You in My Fashion, Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do, which received an award for excellence from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and Playing My Mother's Blues. Valerie Wilson Wesley is a writer of deep emotional resonance, and of sharp humor.

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is a phenomenally imaginative, compassionate, funny, and soulful fiction writer who delights in bringing his exceptional literary gifts to genre fiction to create new and vital hybrids. He became instantly famous at age 25 with the publication of his first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and went on to write the compelling and many-faceted Wonder Boys; the exquisite and tender short story collections A Model World and Werewolves in their Youth; a homage to Sherlock Holmes, The Final Solution, and a fantasy novel for young adults, Summerland. Every transporting book is a surprise, but Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a tale of two Jewish cousins who help create the golden years of comic book superheroes, is an extraordinarily generous and encompassing work about the legacy of the Holocaust and the liberating power of the imagination. Chabon has also written a wily mystery/speculative novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, set in a fictional Jewish community in Alaska, and a swashbuckling adventure, first serialized in the New York Times, then released in book form, Gentlemen of the Road. Michael Chabon appeared on Open Books in May 2007.

Donald Evans

Chicago writer Donald G. Evans is a former sports writer for the Chicago Sun-Times. He has also been an editor, photojournalist, reporter, teacher, and columnist. Evans short stories have earned him a citation in Best American Short Stories' "100 Most Distinguished" and two Pushcart Prize nominations. A former serious gambler and part-time bookie, he is now is a stay- at-home dad and a writer. His roguishly witty first novel, Good Money After Bad, revolves around a Chicago gambler named Chance living within earshot of Wrigley Field, and dangerously addicted to sports betting. Evans is a terrifically atmospheric writer, deftly evoking the world of bookies and compulsive gamblers, the tensions of in a big city undergoing lots of changes, a surreally severe heat wave, and the consequences of secret desperation. Combining the blue-collar, neighborhood-anchored aesthetic Chicago writers are known for with a touch of suavely boozy noir, a sliver of medical-thriller action, and loads of charm, Evans tells a rascally and edgy cautionary tale. Donald G. Evans took a chance on Open Books in June 2007.

Keir Graff

Keir Graff is a novelist from Montana living in Chicago where he is also editor for Booklist Online, and keeper of the blog, Likely Stories. Don’t be confused by the appearance of Michael McCulloch, author of the noir novel Cold Lessons, at the start of the interview, all will become clear as we discuss the book’s protagonist, Gil Strickland, a hard-drinking high school English teacher, and the cold cruel world in which he runs amok. My Fellow Americans, by Keir Graff, is a speculative novel in which the president of the U.S. declares martial law in the face of terrorist attacks, and stays in power for a third term. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Jason Walker, amateur photographer and architecture enthusiast, runs afoul of Homeland Security, who find it awfully interesting that he’s half-Lebanese. Keir Graff spoke to Open Books in March 2007.

Alexis Pride

Chicago writer Alexis J. Pride is a playwright, producer, founder of the AJ Ensemble Theater Company, a professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago, and a fiction writer. Her first novel, Where the River Ends, is a fiery fictionalization of the life of a revolutionary and controversial Chicago educator, Corla Hawkins, known far and wide as Momma Hawk. Pride's protagonist, Emma Rivers, battles her way through a rough girlhood on the South Side during the 1950s. She found refuge in books, but suffered betrayal and violence at the hands of those she loved best. Emma struggles mightily against great odds to get control of her life, becoming a teacher and a principal renowned for her unorthodox style and profound dedication to inner-city children. Pride's intense and insightful novel dramatizes the trauma engendered by the cruel matrix of poverty, racism, and sexism in an indelible portrait of a courageous teacher able to transform the lives of neglected teens because she needs them as much as they need her. Alexis Pride appeared on Open Books in May 2007.

Mark Swartz is nervy, inventive, and very funny writer, a satirist intrigued with individuals and societies run amok. His first novel, Instant Karma, is about a brooding loner who feeds his mania in Chicago’s main library, thus challenging our belief in the library as a temple of learning, the wellspring of humanitarian enlightenment, a pleasure palace for those who live ecstatic lives of the mind. Swartz suggests that reading can become a perilously isolating and alienating obsession, and that the library can be an overwhelming and bewildering labyrinth, an oppressive manifestation of the mind's complexity and humanity's folly.

In H2O, Swartz zaps forward in time to depict Chicago as a chaotic and decrepit city-state. Clean tap water is but a cherished memory, so toxic is Lake Michigan. In fact, the earth's entire freshwater supply is imperiled. Enter Hayden Shivers, a hapless filter and drain engineer who discovers a miracle. Swartz's shrewd, jittery, and noirishly atmospheric speculative tale about a bumbling antihero and dire environmental trauma brings an irreverent and parrying voice to ecofiction and casts a fractured light on follies petty and catastrophic. Mark Swartz appeared on Open Books in January 2007.

** NEW ** Hillary Carlip

Hillary Carlip brings high energy, high standards, unbridled creativity, an effervescent sense of humor, and deep insight into everything she does. A performer, writer, and master of multiple identities, Carlip recounts her formative, or warping, girlhood experiences in her funny and liberating memoir, Queen of the Oddballs: And Other True Stories from a Life Unaccording to Plan, an American Booksellers Association "Book Sense Pick" and a Borders "Top Literary Memoir of the Year." Carlip is also the creator, host, and editor of an esteemed literary website, FRESH YARN, www.freshyarn.com, an online magazine devoted to personal essays.

A performer as well as a writer, Hillary's penchant for alternative personalities finds extraordinary expression in A la Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers, a book of stories and photographs in which Carlip transforms herself into 26 diverse and compelling characters based on her extensive collection of lost-and-found shopping lists. According to Booklist (that would be me):

"Carlip draws on her love of story, passion for performance and transformation, eye for found art, and gift for comedic and empathic improvisation in a unique portrait gallery. A populist Cindy Sherman, an American Tracey Ullman, a female Eddie Murphy, and a disciple of Lily Tomlin, Carlip used her quirky collection of discarded shopping lists as inspiration for 26 characters, assuming the identity of men and women shoppers of various ages, backgrounds, and preoccupations. . . Each of Carlip's ingeniously composed, funny, and insightful vignettes is a microcosm of struggle and hope."

Hillary Carlip is also a fabulously talented web designer. In fact, you're experiencing one of her online creations this very moment.

Hillary appeared on Open Books when she was in Chicago for Columbia College's annual literary festival, Story Week.

** NEW ** Joel Greenberg

Chicagoan Joel Greenberg is a birder, a naturalist, a lawyer, an environmental activist, a tireless researcher, and a passionately observant, insightful, involving, and witty writer. His first book is a magnum opus, the unprecedented, avidly detailed, entertaining and illuminating A Natural History of the Chicago Region. In this beautifully made book rich in historical photographs, Joel teaches us about prairies and marshes, ravines and rivers, the shore of the great lake Michigan, oak savannas and grasses, butterflies and mussels and orchids and turtles and coyotes and hawks and geese. He also writes incisively about a burgeoning, incessantly busy, and shortsighted human population and the rapid and transforming changes Chicagoans have brought to what was for so long an incredibly fertile wilderness.

In his second book, the nature writing anthology Of Prairie, Woods, & Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing, Joel Greenberg gathers together a revelatory array of forgotten works about an overlooked yet essential American place. Growing out of his extensive research for A Natural History of the Chicago Region, this unique anthology begins with the diary of Father Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix, a Jesuit who explored the area in 1721, and moves forward to 1960. In between are many surprises. Listen to Greenberg tell the intriguing stories behind this eye-opening collection.

** NEW ** Nancy Goldstein (with Tim Jackson)

The moment I saw Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist, I knew I was in the presence of something fresh, exciting, and important. Nancy Goldstein is the first to create a book devoted to the life and work of pioneering cartoonist Jackie Ormes (1911-1985), a "tireless" artist of conscience and prominent activist. Glamorous and audacious, Ormes created seductive, technically exceptional, and slyly hard-hitting newspaper cartoons that entertained, inspired, and provoked readers with indelible female characters: precocious and sharp-tongued five-year-old Patty-Jo and her forbearing fashion-plate older sister Ginger; and Torchy, a beautiful "campaigner for environmental justice and racial equality."

Goldstein recounts with enthusiasm and insight the trailblazing cartoonist's remarkable story from her birth in Pittsburgh to her celebrity-filled life in Chicago, and keenly analyzes Ormes' influential cartoons and the role black newspapers played in the struggle for racial equality. With a generous selection of Ormes' "forward-looking" cartoons resurrected for the first time, and sharp insights into the adversity Ormes faced as a woman of color and an artist, Goldstein's Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist is a rare and affecting reading experience.

Also on the show is Tim Jackson, who contributed precious artwork to the book. He talks about Jackie Ormes from his perspective as a Chicago-based, nationally syndicated cartoonist, and a cartoon historian working on a book titled Pioneering Cartoonists of Color.

Tim Jackson has been cartooning since he was a kid in Dayton, Ohio, hoping to use the art of cartooning for good. Currently living and working in Chicago, his vibrant and socially conscious cartoons have appeared in the Chicago Defender and diverse newspapers across the country. Jackson's work can be seen at http://web.mac.com/tim_jackson/iWeb/Tim%20Jackson%20Cartoonist/Welcome.html and http://www.clstoons.com/welcome/home.htm.

Jackson's passionate interest in the work of earlier generations of African American cartoonists inspired his "Pioneering Cartoonists of Color" project, soon to be published in book form.

Tim Jackson joined Nancy Goldstein to talk with Open Books host Donna Seaman about the truly pioneering cartoonist Jackie Ormes. An expert on Ormes, Jackson contributed invaluable artworks to Goldstein's pioneering book, Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist.

** NEW ** Miles Harvey

Chicago writer Miles Harvey is the author of two unusual and involving works of investigative history, the best-selling The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, and the dramatic and far-ranging Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America. A journalist with a keen sense of story, the literary chops of a novelist, and an intrepid approach to research, Harvey takes readers on wild rides.

In Painter in a Savage Land, the itinerary includes a doomed sixteenth-century French fort on what became the site for Jacksonville, Florida; the streets of Paris and London where Huguenots and Lutherans were burned at the stake, and the high-tension auction rooms of Sotheby's. The riveting story of the long-lost artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues is a veritable tale of nine lives. Harvey marvels at the "epic strangeness" of his subject's elusive life story and its embrace of radically different, if equally tumultuous worlds. With a vivid cast of real-life characters, gorgeous illustrations, unforeseen and hugely entertaining side journeys, and a diabolical surprise ending, Harvey's groundbreaking biography blows the dust off significant chapters in European and American history and makes for a rousing read. Happily, Harvey proves to be an equally entrancing conversationalist.

Open Books, as I say at the beginning of every show, is about outstanding books, remarkable writers, and the fine art of reading. It's a celebration of the communion between reader and book, reader and writer. When I speak with writers, our conversation roams easily back and forth between the real world and the world of ideas and the imagination, a realm we share by virtue of our ability to read, and the boundless pleasure and knowledge we acquire through books, magazines, newspapers, and web sites. But I often wonder what life would be like without this key to the workings of other minds, this portal onto other places and other times. Millions of Americans do not read well enough to enjoy books, or even read instructions, menus, street signs, or medical prescriptions. If you cannot read and you cannot write, you cannot participate in our society. You are silenced. You feel invisible.

I wanted to listen to the stories of people who refused to remain without a voice, without a presence. And I wanted to talk to people who are dedicated to helping others learn to read, to write, and to work with confidence, dignity, and pleasure. Thanks to friends, I made my way to an amazing place, a dynamic and loving community, Literacy Chicago, a not-for-profit organization located at 17 N. State Street in Chicago's Loop (www.literacychicago.org). A school that, to quote its mission statement, "empowers individuals through words." A haven for adult learners with free classes for students who want to increase their reading skills, earn their GEDs, take English as a Second Language courses, start their own business, and unchain their creativity. Here are some of the voices of Literacy Chicago.

Thanks to (in order of appearance): Joan Green, Zaundra Boyd, Charles Barnett, Ellen Meyers, Phyllis Robinson, Anthony Stoll, Ella Brantley, Andrea Kelton, Marilyn Murchison, Eric Boyd, Susan Fox-Larkin, Andre Holmes, Larry Martin, and Cheri Hubbard. And thank you Barry Benson, Craig Kois, and Neese Aguilar.

David Rothenberg is a uniquely gifted, multifaceted, and intrepid thinker and artist. A writer, philosopher, musician, and ecologist, Rothenberg is the author of Sudden Music, Hand's End, Always the Mountains, and Why Birds Sing, a remarkable and unique mix of science, history, literature, art, and music that has been published in six languages and turned into a BBC documentary. His articles have appeared in Parabola, Orion, The Nation, Wired, and Sierra. Professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rothenberg is the founding editor of the Terra Nova journal and book series, which includes Writing on Air, Writing on Water, and Writing the World: On Globalization. Rothenberg is also a composer and jazz clarinetist, who plays music with birds and other animals as well as with other people. His seven CDs include Bangalore Wild and On the Cliffs of the Heart. His forthcoming book, Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound, is due out soon.

Chicago writer Sam Weller is the author of The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, the first comprehensive and authorized biography of the great and prescient Ray Bradbury, author of such indelible works as The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Formerly the Midwest correspondent for Publishers Weekly, Sam is a journalist and book reviewer who writes for a variety of Chicago venues and appears on WBEZ, Chicago's NPR station. Weller is also a writing professor at Columbia College Chicago.

Barry Silesky

Chicago writer Barry Silesky is a poet, the author of a book of "short shorts," One Thing That Can Save Us; the editor and publisher for Another Chicago Magazine, a literary journal, and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also the author of two groundbreaking biographies, Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time and John Gardner: The Life and Death of a Literary Outlaw, a portrait of the mercurial and brilliant writer exceptional in its insight, momentum, and empathy.

Ilene Cooper

Chicago writer Ilene Cooper is Booklist's children's book editor, a superb reviewer, and the author of more than 30 and counting books for young people, ranging in age from preschoolers to high schoolers, and in genres from fiction to biography. Cooper's novels include the Kids from Kennedy Middle School series, Sam I Am, and I'll See You in My Dreams. Cooper's Jewish Holidays All Year Round won the National Jewish Book Award, her exceptional biography, Jack: The Early Years of John F. Kennedy won the Society for Midland Authors award, among others. Ilene has also written The Dead Sea Scrolls, a young adult biography, Up Close: Oprah Winfrey, and an altogether beautiful children's book, The Golden Rule. The Illinois Reading Council designated Ilene Cooper as the Prairie State Award winner for Excellence in Writing for Children. Ilene Cooper spoke to Open Books in May 2007.

A.M. Homes

Homes is a writer of verve and originality. Awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, she is the author of the unforgettable short story collections Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, a travel memoir about Los Angeles, and five powerful novels: Jack, In a Country of Mothers, The End of Alice, and Music for Torching. This Book will Save Your Life is a novel of rocketing energy, wildly careening ups and downs, finely calibrated humor, and spiky characters. Making clever use of the extremes of L.A., both natural (tar pits, mud slides, fires, earthquakes) and man-made (the list is endless), Homes orchestrates a midlife crisis that transforms a money-counting neurotic into an unlikely superhero in a novel of cinematic pizzazz that revitalizes our understanding of love and goodness. Homes has also written a memoir of distinctive power and resonance, The Mistress's Daughter, which is as remarkable for its crystalline prose, flinty wit, and agile candor as for its arresting revelations regarding her irregular adoption. As Homes chronicles her unnerving relationships, as a well-established author, with her biological parents, she distills angst and discovery into a riveting tale of nature and nurture that encompasses America's great patchwork of immigrants and secrets, and the evolution of women's lives. A. M. Homes appeared on Open Books in May 2007.

Brad Hooper

Brad Hooper is the Adult Books editor for Booklist, a position that demands both creativity and stamina (so many books, so little space and time), and a versatile writer and critic. He has published a number of short stories, essays, and reviews in various publications, and written The Short Story Readers’ Advisory: A Guide to the Best. Hooper is also the author of a groundbreaking study of an immensely popular living writer, The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist: An Appreciation, and he is at work on a similarly revealing and enjoyable interpretation of the work of Alice Munro, considered by many to be one of the world’s very finest short story writers. Brad Hooper appeared on Open Books in March 2005.

Mitch Myers

Writer and music critic Mitch Myers has written for Downbeat, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and High Times, and contributed pop commentaries to National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Myers also maintains the Shel Silverstein Archive in Chicago. The nephew of author, poet, songwriter, cartoonist, and artist Silverstein -- who is renowned for the cherished children's books Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, and Falling Up -- Myers introduces a new collection of Silverstein's work for adults, a travel journal titled Playboy's Silverstein Around the World. Mitch Myers's inventive first book, The Boy Who Cried Freebird: Rock and Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling, is a dynamic blend of rock-and-roll lore, blues and jazz musings, and spellbinding tales that take readers on some devilishly smart forays into the realms of myth and magic, and on some intriguing time-travel adventures. Mitch Myers spoke to Open Books in April 2007.

Elise Paschen

Chicago poet Elise Paschen is the author of the collections Home: Coasts and Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, and Ploughshares, among other publications, and in numerous anthologies, including Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America, A Formal Feeling Comes, and The Poetry Anthology. Former executive director of the Poetry Society of America, Paschen was a cofounder of "Poetry in Motion," a nationwide program that places poetry posters in subways and buses. Paschen is also editor of Poetry Speaks to Children, and coeditor of the best-selling Poetry Speaks and Poetry Speaks Expanded, a big book of superb poems accompanied by CDs of major poets reading their work.

Dan Beachy-Quick ( A double interview with Chicu Reddy)

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet of artifacts, early American history, and the culture of nature. In North True, South Bright he illuminates our intricate connections to nature. Spell is a complex and enthralling poetic response to Moby Dick, and in Mulberry Beachy-Quick's finely spun and intricately woven lyrics mesh consciousness with sensuousness. Trees are spokes in the wheels of traveling meditations on the transformations and cycles of life. As birds build nests, humans alter the living world: "Sap: syrup. Pine: plank." Beachy-Quick's incantatory poems create a palimpsest of water, blood, and ink; veins in leaves, wings, and hands; spider webs, a silk scarf, a swaddling cloth, and a shroud. Tree rings hold time, pages are a book's leaves, people of the past have left their marks, and the poet is steeped in "the transparent ever."

Poet Chicu Reddy, an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Chicago, is the author of Facts for Visitors, a collection of iridescent beauty and wistful mystery. Reddy's poems conjure haunted landscapes -- places in transition, collapse, and decay -- but the canny narrator marvels rather than laments. A profoundly visual poet, Reddy creates mise-en-scenes reminiscent of the boxes of Joseph Cornell, Indian miniatures, and Hieronymus Bosch's surreal cosmos. Lush and magical, Reddy's poems are also evocative of such human trespasses as war, prejudice, and oppression, as well as the transcendence of language, love, and awe.

The best-known and most important woman writer in the Beat movement, poet di Prima has written many books of poetry, including Loba, and a famously explicit fictionalized tale of her reign of queen of the beats, Memoir of a Beatnik. In her actual memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, she presents an equally frank self-portrait but on a far grander scale. Delving deeply into her past, from her brutal New York childhood to her artistic and bohemian life, a great swirl of Eros and creativity, she transcends the personal to illuminate the primal cultural and psychological issues of twentieth-century America. Di Prima's electrifying perceptions into the nature of sex and love, men and women, race and identity, art and beauty, drugs and spirituality, and freedom and commitment keep readers glued to the page.

Kevin Young

Kevin Young is a poet who looks back as he moves forward, who writes of place and of displacement, of the order and grace art bestows and of the randomness and sorrow life delivers. Young attended Harvard University, held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and received an MFA from Brown. He is a Guggenheim fellow and is currently a professor of English and creative writing at Emory University. As an editor, Young has created a fresh and powerful anthology titled Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, The Everyman's Anthology of Blues Poems, and John Berryman: Selected Poems.

As for his own work, Lucille Clifton selected Young's first book, Most Way Home for the National Poetry Series and it won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Young's collection To Repel Ghosts is a jazzy epic tribute to painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Jelly Roll: A Blues, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. In Black Maria and A. K. A. Jones, Young celebrates improvisation in art and life as he toys with every convention known to noir and pulls off some of the wittiest, sexiest, and most barbed put-downs, come-ons, and linguistic sleights of hand found in contemporary poetry. And in his most overtly beautiful book to date, For the Confederate Dead, he pays arresting tribute to various mentors and considers African American history, pairing humor and deep feeling in tonic poems of mischief and power.

Marc Smith (with Mark Eleveld)

Chicago poet Marc Smith created a new art form and launched a movement in Chicago in 1987 when he staged a competitive poetry performance that became the prototype for what is now known all around the world as the poetry slam. Smith's conviction that poetry is part of life and not a rarefied form reserved for the elite has had a profound influence on poets and poetry, as has his emphasis on the oral aspect of poetry, and on poetry "live." Nicknamed "Slampapi," Smith is the author of Crowdpleasers and coeditor with Mark Eleveld of The Spoken Word Revolution, a dynamic anthology that traces the evolution of modern spoken-word poetry from the Beats to rap to hip-hop and beyond.

A high school English teacher in Joilet, Illinois, Mark Eleveld is also co-founder and director of EM Press, a small house devoted to poetry. And he edited the groundbreaking poetry anthologies, The Spoken Word Revolution and The Spoken Word Revolution Redux. In each, Eleveld matches insightful commentary by such established poets as Billy Collins and Marvin Bell with poems of high energy and deep feeling, vivid imagery and mischievous wit by a slew of performance poets. Eleveld, coeditor Marc Smith, and their diverse contributors celebrate the verve, artistry, and significance of today's performance poetry, explore spoken word poetry's connection to music, and trace its roots back to the old-as-song tradition of life-sustaining poetry.