Chicago Deep Dish September 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 September 14, 2023 at 7pm in the Wicker Park location of Volumes Book Cafe in Chicago, IL.
Featured Readers
Mary Anne Mohanraj is author of A Feast of Serendib, Bodies in Motion, The Stars Change, and twelve other titles. Other recent publications include stories for George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series, Perennial: A Garden Romance (Tincture), stories at Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, and an essay in Roxane Gay’s Unruly Bodies. Mohanraj founded Hugo-nominated and World Fantasy Award-winning speculative literature magazine Strange Horizons and serves as Executive Director of both DesiLit (desilit.org) and the Speculative Literature Foundation (speclit.org). She is Clinical Associate Professor of fiction and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. www.maryannemohanraj.com
Sue Burke was recently hailed as a “Modern SFF Master” by a book reviewer who apparently lives somewhere that has legalized psilocybin mushrooms. He had just read her most recent novel, Dual Memory. Right now, Sue is finishing the final novel in the Semiosis trilogy, which involves talking plants that want to take over the Earth. She also writes short fiction, and some of it is fantasy, and tonight she’s going to read “The Virgin Who Rescues Dragons,” which will be published this fall in The Best of NewMyths Anthology Volume 4: The Cosmic Muse.
Rapid Fire Readers
Reina Hardy is a playwright (mostly). Her plays, which usually contain magic and sometimes contain science, have been produced across the US and in the UK, Australia, and Greece, and her prose has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Electric Literature, and Startrek.com. She holds an MFA with a Michener Fellowship from UT Austin and is a 2023 recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship. Her first movie as a scriptwriter is slated to appear on the Hallmark Channel in 2024. reinahardy.com for more info
Brendan Detzner is a Chicago area horror and fantasy writer. His work is sometimes funny, sometimes scary, and usually very strange. He ran the Bad Grammar reading series for many years and may well do so again soon. You can check out his work in the Pseudopod and Podcastle podcasts, the Book of Dead Things and Exigencies anthologies, and many other places.
Tina Jens: Tina wrote the award-winning novel The Blues Ain’t Nothing, and has published more than a hundred short stories, poems, blog posts, short plays, and even a comic book. She taught the fantasy writing courses at Columbia College Chicago for a decade and ran the Twilight Tales small press and reading series. She recently edited Ludlow Charlington’s Doghouse, a book of happy dog tales that benefits a Chicago animal shelter. She is disabled and neurodivergent. In 2017, she received the 2017 Rubin Family Fellowship artist residency at Ragdale Foundation.
John Weagly’s work has been called “exuberant” – Chicago Tribune, “charming” – Chicago Reader and “appealingly quirky” – Chicago Sun-Times. Locus Magazine once compared his short fiction to the works of Ray Bradbury and Nina Kiriki Hoffman and called him “a new writer worth reading and following.” As a playwright, over one hundred of his plays have received productions by theaters on four continents.
Rory Leahy lives in the Chicago area and writes plays and prose fiction. He thinks he’s pretty funny. Look at that smug, entitled face, you can tell he’s a legend in his own mind. He radiates arrogance but in kind of an attractive way. There’s something about those eyes…
Kitty Lin is a Chicago-based freelance writer published in Adelaide Literary Magazine and children, churches, and daddies. She’s recently published a steamy novel under a nom-de-plume-that-shall-not-be ‘nom’-ed. Currently, she’s slated to publish an article on the nuances of the exploration and crafting of identity through the cyberpunk subgenre and is working on her upcoming novella, The Apocalypse by Night.
