Andrea Change is a graduate of Northwestern University with a master’s degree from Roosevelt University. She has worked on the corporate side of the non-profit world her entire career as a manager and administrator. A hometown girl, born and raised in Chicago. She is a writer, storyteller, cultural organizer, interlocuter and currently the Executive Director for the Guild Literary Complex, a 30-year-old literary arts organization, here in Chicago. She has been an active member of Chicago’s literary community for than 20 years. Her work has been published in the past in Hammers among other literary journals and poetry anthologies from Tia Chucha Press as Powerlines and Stray Bullets. Her poetry was also included in the Steppenwolf Theatre production, Words on Fire. She is currently working on a book of memoir poetry and prose inspired by her childhood experiences growing up on the city’s west side.
Rita Dragonette is a writer who, after a career telling the stories of others as an award-winning public relations executive, returned to her original creative path with her debut novel, The Fourteenth of September which is based upon her personal experiences on campus during the Vietnam War. It has won more than 11 awards, in the areas of historical, literary, women’s and new fiction. Her second novel, Last Sunset in San Miguel, an homage to The Sun Also Rises about expats chasing their last dreams in San Miguel de Allende, is out on submission. She is currently working on Violating the Prime Directive, a memoir in essays about roads not taken and a new Substack Talkin’ Bout My Generation. She lives and writes in Chicago, where she also hosts literary salons to showcase authors and their new books to avid readers.
Mary Hawley is a poet, fiction writer, and literary translator (Spanish to English). Her poems have been published in Mudlark, Notre Dame Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and other journals, and she is the author of the poetry collection Double Tongues (Tía Chucha Press). Her stories have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Hypertext, Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines, and she has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award in fiction. Her translations have appeared in Triquarterly, The Common, and other journals, and she is currently translating a trilogy of novels by Uruguayan writer Sergio Altesor Licandro.
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