Wit Rabbit Reading Series

DON'TERIUS is a poet and is currently working on his first project. He believes in acknowledging and poetically reflecting on defining moments, and using wordplay to do so. Don is inspired by his surroundings, cultures, the past, the possible future and the affects it has on the present.

Ling Ma is the author of the novel Severance, forthcoming in August from FSG. She received her MFA from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school she worked as a journalist and editor. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Vice, Playboy,Chicago Reader, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. A chapter of Severance received the 2015 Graywolf SLS Prize.

mica woods used to live with a family of raccoons in Missouri, but currently they edit the Columbia Poetry Review and teach undergrads how to (de)form sentences. In 2015 she received the Merrill Moore Prize for Poetry from Vanderbilt University. Her recent and forthcoming works can be found in DIAGRAM, Juked, The Wanderer, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Heavy Feather Review.

J. K. Chukwu is an experimental writer and visual artist based in Chicago. Her work has appeared in LunaLunaMagazine,   RedWedgeMagazine, Mosaic Art and Literary Journal, and the Cleveland Review of Books. This fall, she will be attending Brown University for her MFA in Fiction writing.

Christine Kanownik is the author of KING OF PAIN (Monk Books 2016). Her poetry is can be found at FENCE, Diagram, Cosmonaut Avenue, jubilat, among others. Her chapbook We Are Now Beginning to Act Wildly was published in 2012 by Diez Press. She lives Chicago. 

Julian A. Johnson-Marshall is a poet, essayist and educator hailing from Kansas City, Mo. He is a graduate of the Rockhurst High School and Loyola University Chicago. He has been writing for nearly 12 years.He believes the creation of art requires a determination to speak truth, to uplift and to inspire. As a poet and educator in the age of Hip Hop, Marshall is inspired by the powerful resistance and dedication of Black Culture. He is empowered by an intersectional worldview that draws links between Hip- Hop and Humanity.   Black Culture is precious and MUST be protected by any means necessary. 

Stephen Byrne is an Irish chef and writer currently living in Illinois. His first collection ‘Somewhere but not Here’ won the RL Poetry Award, 2016 International category in India. He has been published worldwide in places such as Warscapes, Apricity Magazine, The Blue Hour, Rise Up Review, Poets Reading The News, Indian Review, Tuck Magazine, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology and many others.  He is the food writer for ‘This is Galway’ website and writes at his site http://stephenbyrne.org

m. forajter is a MFA graduate from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been published in several magazines, including Tarpaulin Sky, Court Green, Queen Mob's Tea House, The Journal Petra, and Witch Craft Magazine. Her chapbooks, WHITE DEER and Marmalade Girl, are available from dancing girl press. She really likes Nirvana, werewolves, and medieval art.

Elizabeth Willis’s books of poetry include Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015), Address (2011), Meteoric Flowers (2006), Turneresque (2003), The Human Abstract (1995). Willis joined the Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty in 2015.

Philip Sorenson is the author of two full length collections, Of Embodies (Rescue Press, 2012) and Solar Trauma (Rescue Press, 2018), and a shorter work, New Recordings (Another New Calligraphy, 2018). He is the co-editor, with Olivia Cronk, of The Journal Petra. He lives and teaches in Chicago.  

Elizabeth Savage is the author of two poetry books, Idylliad and Grammar, from Furniture Press, and several chapbooks, including Parallax from Chicago's own Dancing Girl Press, and the new Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers, also from Furniture. She is a professor of English at Fairmont State University where she also serves as poetry editor of Kestrel. 

Jan-Henry Gray was born in the Philippines and grew up in San Francisco where he cooked in kitchens for twelve years. A recipient of the 2014 Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Arts Award and the inaugural Undocupoets Fellowship, Jan received his MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago. He is published in Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus, NewCity, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Fourteen Hills, Puerto del Sol, and Southern Humanities Review. He is the co-founder of The Bruise and is the co-host of Meanwhile, two different performance/reading events here in Chicago. Jan is currently working on his first book.

Audie Shushan is a writer, teacher, and bookseller in Chicago.  She holds an MFA from the University of Washington, where she won the 2014 Eugene Van Buren Prize for Fiction.  Her work has appeared in MAKE magazine, Gingerbread House, Sun Star Review, and Luna Station Quarterly, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  She is a Creative Writing Fellow with the Chicago Luminarts Cultural Foundation.

Daniel Story lives in Chicago, and that is his real name. He earned his MFA from PennState, and now works in cancer research fundraising. His poetry and nonfiction have been published in DIAGRAM, Boxcar Poetry Review, and Ninth Letter. He was once, for poetic reasons, granted temporary military clearance.

Eileen Favorite’s first novel, The Heroines (Scribner, 2008), was named a best debut novel by the Rocky Mountain News. Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in many publications, including, Triquarterly, The Chicago Reader, Poetry East, The Toast, Belt, The Rumpus, and are forthcoming in Hypertext . She’s received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council for poetry and for prose and she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Louis Bardales is a bilingual poet, musician, and illustrator from Chicago where he's been his whole life. He went to Columbia College Chicago as an undergrad poet and did his first readings there. His work in English has appeared in a few journals such as Columbia Poetry Review, Pinwheel, Phantom, and Otis Nebula, and his work in Spanish can also be found online at Te Prometo Anarquia, Resonancias.org, and Revista Cronopio. Bardales has been working on a poetry comic book of his own poems and illustrations, titled Orb Mutter, and another in Spanish titled, Eje. Both of these poetry comics can be previewed on his Instagram feed, and will be debuted at the Wit Rabbit.

T Nowacki is a writer who can’t seem to escape Chicago or their pervasive anxiety. They get money and health insurance from their position as technical writer for a software company, but they truly enjoy teaching students about composition and rhetoric on the weekends and writing fragments in their 17 journals. Their published work includes the zine There is No Magnificent Creature and numerous articles of a devotional nature.