Fraser Coffeen is one of the founding editors of and a regular contributor at HeadKickLegend.com. Dedicated to presenting the latest news and analysis on the world of kickboxing, Muay Thai, and Mixed Martial Arts, HeadKickLegend was recently named one of the top 20 worldwide MMA sites by MMAPayout.com. 

Prior to his work with HKL,Fraser was a contributor at K-1Legend and Total MMA. In addition to covering kickboxing and mixed martial arts, Fraser has written a number of screenplays and radio plays with an emphasis on horror. Fraser has also worked in the weird underbelly of the Chicago arts scene as a member of the critically acclaimed and now deceased Defiant Theatre, where he honed his love for visceral, exciting entertainment. This love for the odd side of the road led him to create the two-person sideshow act Numbskull, the Human Blockhead in collaboration with Jennifer Ann Coffeen, which the pair has performed throughout the Midwest.

Today, Fraser also works as a theatrical blood effects artist.  When not writing or doing blood work, Fraser has been a professional wrestling ring announcer, a comic book character for Alex Ross, studied clowning and physical theater, and worked with numerous Chicago theater companies.

Join Tuesday Funk on December 7th at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Fraser and all of our talented readers!

For stories in her collection Pray For Yourself, Anne Calcagno received the San Francisco Foundation Phelan Literary Award, an NEA and two IAC Fellowships. Her fiction has appeared in The North American Review, TriQuarterly, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, and other publications. She won an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for her story "What's Yours?" published in Other Voices.

A dual national, Italian and American, she is also editor of Travelers Tales: Italy, which won Foreward's Silver Medal for Best Travel Book of the Year. Her reviews and travel writing have appeared in the New York Times, the Italian American Historical Society, New City, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Chicago Tribune. She's recently completed a novel about dog fighting in Chicago, titled LOVE LIKE A DOG. Calcagno teaches in the School of the Art Institute's MFA in Writing program.


Join Tuesday Funk on December 7th at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Anne and all of our talented readers!

Naomi Buck Palagi has made her way to Northwest Indiana via many stops, starting with a homesteader childhood in rural Kentucky, complete with goats and lots of bare feet, some years in the Mississippi Delta, an Oberlin College degree, and 5 years in and around the Chicago Theater scene.

She enjoys shaping all sorts of tangible things—wood, fabric, sound, words. She has work published or upcoming in Otoliths, Moria, Spoon River Review, Blue Fifth Review, and Wicked Alice, among others. Her chapbook silver roof tantrum is recently out from dancing girl press.

Join Tuesday Funk on December 7th at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Naomi and all of our talented readers!

Jotham Burrello teaches in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago where he directs the Publishing Lab, a resource for emerging writers. His multimedia company, Elephant Rock Productions has produced two critically acclaimed instructional DVDs for writers and will publish Patricia McNair's story collection "The Temple of Air" in early 2011.

He lives, writes and farms flowers in lovely Ashford, Connecticut, with his wife and three little boys. You can read his essay about moving to New England, "Speed of Life," online at Drunken Boat.

Join Tuesday Funk on December 7th at 7:30 p.m. at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Jotham and all of our talented readers!

Take a well-deserved break from the holiday rat-race with Tuesday Funk and our lineup of readers both naughty and nice—JOHANNA STEIN, ANNE CALCAGNO, JOTHAM BURRELLO, FRASER COFFEEN, NAOMI BUCK PALAGI, and possibly a bonus poem from one of our hosts. No mere stocking-stuffers, these! You'll be glad you spent your money here on beer instead of on presents for those whiny nieces and nephews.

Tuesday Funk convenes Tuesday, December 7, 2010, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark St., Chicago. Arrive early, stake out a table in the upper room, and grab a beer from John at the cash-only bar. We start seating at 7:00 pm and no earlier. Admission is always free. Stay afterward for some great Belgian-style food downstairs!

Please bring your friends and show your support for Tuesday Funk. Help us deliver a record turnout so we can keep staging these readings at Hopleaf, the finest food-and-drink establishment on the north side.

Please also become a fan of Tuesday Funk on Facebook, so you never miss an invitation to our readings. And watch this space over the next dozen days for spotlight posts about our readers.

If you missed our Tuesday Funk reading for November—which you probably didn't, because we had about our best turnout of all time—but if you were among the unfortunate few who missed out, here are some of the amazing things you didn't see:

Sondra Morin knocked our socks off with poems from her new chapbook Inviting the Expanse (which we were able to buy direct from her, but which you can pick up at Quimby's, The Boring Store, or Transistor for a mere five bones).

Kristin Lueke melted our faces with her poetry, some of which you can read here.

Lauryn Allison Lewis froze our blood with her short story "Bear vs. Snake," which only means you should not miss her when she debuts her mixed-media-performance-art-reading this coming Sunday, November 14, at Come Home Chicago at Underground Wonder Bar.

Dave Snyder rattled our bones and our brains with his erudite poems, which you probably won't read in his rooftop farming blog at the Huffington Post.

And Lori Ann Stephens, our special guest from Texas, brought the house down with excerpts from her novel Song of the Orange Moons, excerpts we can't ... er ... really describe to you without saying that you had to be there. But you can lay hands on her novel (which comes out November 16) at Amazon or Barnes & Noble and fill yourself in.

So that's what you missed at the last Tuesday Funk. The good news is that we'll be back at Hopleaf on Tuesday, December 7 with an all-new slate of readers, including Johanna Stein, Fraser Coffeen, Naomi Buck Palagi and more. We'll have further announcements about the December lineup soon, but mark your calendars now. You won't want to be left out in the cold next month!

Chicago Writers Association inducts the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame initial class on November 20, 2010, at the Northeastern Illinois University Auditorium (3701 W. Bryn Mawr Avenue, Chicago IL).

The Hall of Fame's inductees include:

• Nelson Algren (1909-1981)
• Saul Bellow (1915-2005)
• Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
• Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)
• Louis "Studs" Terkel (1912-2008)
• Richard Wright (1908-1960)

Featured guests for the ceremony include emcee Rick Kogan, Stuart Dybek, Audrey Niffenegger and Sara Paretsky. Speak Easy Ensemble and Lori Lippitz are among performers.

The evening begins at 6 p.m. Ticket price includes pre- and post-ceremony reception.
Tickets may be purchased at http://clhofinduction.eventbrite.com/

You voted today—right? right?—so reward yourself this evening. Come out to Hopleaf tonight, Tuesday, November 2nd, for our 28th entry in the theoretically infinite Tuesday Funk reading series. We're bringing you elect poetry and fiction from the likes of Lori Ann Stephens, Lauryn Allison Lewis, Kristin Lueke, Dave Snyder, and Sondra Morin. That's five great readers for the mere price of a beer. Or maybe two. (But if you have one for each reader, please get someone else to drive you home.)

28: it's a perfect number, which makes this the perfect evening to vote a straight Tuesday Funk ticket!

Hopleaf is at 5148 N. Clark St. in Chicago. The reading begins at 7:30 pm in the upstairs lounge. Arrive early for a seat.

As always, the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf is cash-only. Be prepared with cash for your beer, but if don't have cash you can get your beer downstairs with a credit card and bring it up. Please also remember, though, that no food is allowed in the upstairs lounge, so finish eating before you come upstairs.

Sondra Morin lives in Chicago and is a small town New Englander at heart. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and poems have appeared in vis a tergo and Curbside Splendor.

When she was five, she was scolded for drawing lowercase A's with a tail instead of a stick. She has been interested in language innovation and radical snail poetics since. You can read more on her blog at snailsaregood.blogspot.com."

Join Tuesday Funk on November 2nd at 7:30 p.m. to hear Sondra and all of our other talented readers!

Dave Snyder is a poet and gardener. Dave's poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Dave has received fellowships and awards from the Illinois Arts Council, the Iowa Review, Writers @ Work, and the Jentel Artist Residency.

As a grower, he is the director for America's first organically certified rooftop farm at Uncommon Ground, is founder of the Chicago Rarities Orchard Project, and blogs for the Huffington Post.

Join Tuesday Funk on November 2nd at 7:30 p.m. to hear Dave and all of our talented readers!