Edward McClelland is the author of How to Speak Midwestern. A past Tuesday Funk reader and Gapers Block contributor, he has also written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Reader, where he was a staff...  read

Tori Szekeres is a writer living somewhere in Chicago's northwest suburbs. She previously read with storytelling shows such as Miss Spoken, Serving the Sentence, The Stoop and That's All She Wrote. You can see her writing on sites like Consequence...  read

Lori Barrett moved to Chicago ten years ago, and found a friend in Andrew and Gapers Block. She has also freelanced for the Wall Street Journal on hard-hitting topics like custom-stuffed pillows, dog-food delivery services, and luxury horse ranches, and...  read

Steve Bellinger was born and raised on the West Side of Chicago by a single mom who worked nights for a printing company. She would bring home books and magazines to encourage her kids to read. This is how Steve...  read

Naomi Buck Palagi was raised in the woods of central Kentucky, and lives in Northwest Indiana now after several years in Chicago. She's published a variety of experimental and more traditional poetry in journals such as Moria, Spoon River Review,...  read

Jenn Sodini grew up in Pittsburgh, went to school in Amherst, and then moved to Chicago and never looked back. She passionately hosts and co-produces CHIRP Radio's The First Time, a live-music-and-storytelling series held quarterly at Martyrs', and Psychotic Break,...  read

Keidra Chaney is a writer, editor, blogger and digital strategist, though she's not sure what that actually means these days. She has been published in Chicago Sun-Times, Time Out Chicago, Bitch Media, Paste, and a bunch of publications that no...  read

Deborah Siegel is the author of two books and a pair of boy/girl twins, and the founder of the public voice consultancy, Girl Meets Voice Inc. She's also co-founder of SheWrites.com, Senior Facilitator with The OpEd Project, and creator of...  read

Molia Dumbleton's fiction and poetry have been featured in The Kenyon Review Online, New England Review, Great Jones Street, Witness, Hobart, and others. She has been awarded the Seán Ó Faoláin Story Prize and the Dromineer Literary Festival Flash Fiction...  read

Leonard Zawadski is a poet, and he lives in Rogers Park, IL. He works as a receiving clerk for an independent bookstore in the North Shore of Chicago. Poetry of his appears or is forth-coming in The Literary Nest, Into...  read