Chicago Deep Dish November 2023
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 Thursday November 16, 2023 at 6:30 pm in the Wicker Park location of Volumes Book Cafe in Chicago, IL.
Featured Readers
David D. Levine is the multi-award-winning author of the Regency interplanetary airship adventure novel Arabella of Mars (Tor 2016) and more than fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, his story “Nucleon” won the James White Award, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, Sturgeon, and Locus. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, Tor.com, numerous anthologies and websites, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies, as well as his collection Space Magic from Wheatland Press, which won the Endeavour Award for the best SF or Fantasy book by a Pacific Northwest writer. David is a contributor to George R. R. Martin’s bestselling shared-world series Wild Cards. He is also a member of Book View Cafe, a writer-owned publishing cooperative, and Oregon Science Fiction Conventions Inc., a non-profit organization which produces OryCon and other SF conventions. He has narrated podcasts for Escape Pod, PodCastle, and StarShipSofa and the audiobook of Space Magic, and his video production “Dr. Talon’s Letter to the Editor” was a finalist for the Parsec Award. In 2010 he spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station, a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. David lives in a hundred-year-old bungalow in Portland, Oregon. His web site can be found at www.daviddlevine.com.
Eden Robins loves novels best, but they take forever so she also writes short stories and self-absorbed essays at places like Catapult, USA Today, LA Review of Books, Apex magazine, Shimmer, Kaleidotrope, and others. Her debut novel When Franny Stands Up was named a best book of 2022 by the Chicago Reader, a best queer book of 2022 by Autostraddle, and Best Book of the Month by Bustle and Buzzfeed. She co-hosts a science podcast called No Such Thing As Boring with an actual scientist and produces a monthly live lit show in Chicago called Tuesday Funk. Previously, she sold sex toys, wrote jokes for Big Pharma, and once did a stand-up comedy set to an audience who didn’t boo. She lives in Chicago, has been to the bottom of the ocean, and will never go to space.
Rapid Fire Readers
Michael Ryan Chandler writes across multiple genres including fantasy and supernatural thrillers. His work has appeared in Necrology Shorts, Danse Macabre Magazine, and The Central Review. He is currently shopping around a pandemic train memoir he wrote on the red line, as an essential worker during the COVID-19 pandemic. The memoir records a deeply personal inner journey of Michael’s. This journey is set against the backdrop of his eyewitness accounts of violent crime, racial strife, and pandemic chaos during this turbulent period of Chicago’s history. Michael Ryan Chandler has lived in Korea, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia. He has worked as an actor, voice 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!
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 at the edge of a great megalopolis. Currently, he’s the “utility player” in the English/Creative Writing department at Columbia College Chicago. Like most science fiction writers, he is to be considered unarmed but dangerous.
James Kennedy is the author of Bride of the Tornado, which The Guardian picked as one of their “Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror novels” of September 2023, and Dare To Know, named by the Times Saturday Review as their Best Sci-Fi Book of 2021. He also wrote the YA fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish. James founded the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, an annual video contest in which kid filmmakers create movies that tell the stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds and co-hosts the Secrets of Story podcast.
Brian Pastor is a Chicago-based writer whose short plays have been performed on three continents. Their play, Capacity for Curiosity, based on an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, won Best of Festival at the 2018 Art of Adaptation Festival. Chicago’s City Lit Theater commissioned their critically acclaimed adaptation of RFK’s memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days. Brian’s short fiction has been featured in the Gateways podcast series and the upcoming 42 Stories Anthology. Brian’s first collection of short fiction, The Uncanny Adventures of Monkey McGehee was published in 2023.
Alexis Silas aka Julie Danvers writes tales of fantasy and horror, often involving mother-daughter relationships. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writing workshop, and the author of several short category romance novels. Her most recent book, Key to the Single Dad’s Heart, is available through Harlequin Medical Romance. She enjoys cheese.
Steven H Silver is a twenty-time Hugo Award finalist and was the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for 8 years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB Books. He began publishing short fiction in 2008. His most recently published story is “Initial Engagement,” his most recent anthology is Alternate Peace. His debut novel, After Hastings, was published in 2020.
