Deep Dish is a reading series of Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction and Fantasy! It is a crazy good event, with some incredible authors working in and out of this genre. This event was held on October 3, 2024 at Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago, IL.
Featured Readers
Robert Kloss is the author of The Genocide House, forthcoming from Bridge books in October 2024, and four previous novels, including A Light No More and The Woman Who Lived Amongst the Cannibals, both reprinted by Inside the Castle in 2022. He lives in Chicago with his wife, the writer and musician Meghan Lamb, and their cat, Daniel Day-Lewis.
Dawn Bonanno is a short fiction and novel writer from the Chicago suburbs. She has been storytelling since before she could even write, spinning tales to the family dog and whoever would listen. Her fantasy collection, Sunflowers in The Snow, was published in August. Her stories carry threads of hope and love and explore family and friendship while dealing with unexpected magic in unusual places.
Rapid Fire Readers
Sue Burke’s novel Usurpation will be published at the end of this month. It’s the thrilling conclusion to the trilogy that began with Semiosis and Interference. The launch for Usurpation will be at Volumes on October 30 at 6:30 p.m. It will be a joint launch with Alex Kingsley for their first novel Empress of Dust, and you’re all invited.
Michael Ryan Chandler writes across multiple genres, including fantasy and horror. His work has appeared in Necrology Shorts, Danse Macabre Magazine, and The Central Review. He is currently shopping around a pandemic memoir about his experiences an essential worker during the COVID19 pandemic. Michael Ryan Chandler has lived in Korea, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia and has worked as an actor, warehouse worker, server, landscaper, short order cook, textbook editor, bartender, and teacher. All of this has informed his writing and he’s pretty happy about that.
Meghan Lamb is the author of Mirror Translation (Blamage Books, forthcoming in 2025), COWARD (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2021) All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020) and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). Her work has also appeared in Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and Passages North, among other publications. She served as the 2018 Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, and currently teaches creative writing through the University of Chicago, Story Studio, and GrubStreet. She is the fiction editor for Bridge (a Chicago-based literary arts publication) and the nonfiction editor for Lover’s Eye and Nat. Brut. She creates music, video, and performance art under the name Iron Like Nylon.
Chicago born and bred, Richard Chwedyk won a Nebula Award in 2002 for his novella, Bronte’s Egg, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Rhysling awards. He’s best known for his “saur” stories, about a group of bioengineered dinosaurs, sold as toys but abandoned and living in a sort of shelter home. Currently, he’s a moving target in the ever-changing, ever-shrinking academic environment at Columbia College Chicago, teaching creative writing, fantasy writing, and Tolkien. Like most science fiction writers, he is “mostly harmless,” but approach with caution.
Mary Anne Mohanraj (she/her) is author of Bodies in Motion (HarperCollins), The Stars Change (Circlet Press) and ten other titles. Bodies in Motion was a finalist for the Asian American Book Awards, a USA Today Notable Book, and has been translated into six languages. The Stars Change is a Lambda and Rainbow Award-finalist science fiction novella. Previous titles include Aqua
Erotica and Wet (two anthologies edited for Random House), Kathryn in the City and The Classics Professor (two erotic choose-your-own-adventure novels, Penguin), The Best of Strange Horizons, Without a Map, (Aqueduct Press, a collection co-authored with Nnedi Okorafor), The Poet’s Journey (picture book), and A Taste of Serendib (a Sri Lankan cookbook). Mohanraj founded the Hugo nominated magazine, Strange Horizons, and serves as editor-in-chief of Jaggery, a South Asian literary journal (jaggerylit.com). She received a Breaking Barriers Award from the Chicago Foundation for Women for her work in Asian American arts organizing, won an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Prose, and was Guest of Honor at WisCon and Maneki Neko Con. She serves as Executive Director of both DesiLit (desilit.org) and the Speculative Literature Foundation (speclit.org), and directs the Kriti Festival of South Asian arts and literature (kritifestival.org). Mohanraj has taught at the Clarion SF/F workshop and is Clinical Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mohanraj lives in a creaky old Victorian in Oak Park, just outside Chicago, with her husband, their two small children, and a sweet dog.
Connor Nevitt (he/him) earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a Creative Writing concentration from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Born in Santa Clarita, CA, he seeks to make a name for himself in the speculative fiction world. He is an avid creative writer with a love for all things fantastical. Through his time as a stage electrician, screenwriter, and filmmaker, he has experience bringing his own work to life.
Benjamin K Herrington (bkh) / wears many masks & speaks in many voices / looks for hidden messages _ v e r _ w h e r _ / feels incredibly grateful to have had his poetry, prose & multimedia projects published by Apocalypse Confidential / B O D Y Literature / Drunk Monkeys / Granfalloon / La Piccioletta Barca / Slippery Elm (as part of Irreducibly Collective Pluralities) & The Prairie Review / was recently awarded a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship (Spring 2024) / sculpts stories / paginates poems / runs Lake Michigan shorelines / is working on a novel & seeking gn0s1s.
Christopher Pence continues to pour the foundation for his comic-novel series, 52. Final edits on Dead Man’s Hand are complete, and he plans to finish House Rules by fall. The following is taken from the opening of book three, Four of a Kind, in which a stolen spacesuit tests the reaches of the Enhanced Ability Registry…
Maggie Wagner is a playwright, storyteller, variety performer and theater reviewer. Maggie is also a musical theater librettist for such works as Common Cuckoo and National Treasure 3: the Unofficial Musical. You can catch her spinning yarns for Beast Women and Gumbo Fiction Salon, and catch her furry orange alter ego ‘Nitty Gritty’ at Chicago burlesque venues.
