Chicago: Wrestling with a Demon-Angel Called Home, Sponsored by Macondo
Saturday, March 19, 2027, 12:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m. CT
Writing is the most difficult task we know. It is wrestling with a being that can’t be defeated without suffering injury.
When one comes from a demonized urban neighborhood, it’s an especially remarkable journey that grants both wounds and wings. Chicago’s Humboldt Park and Englewood neighborhoods are unlikely places to cultivate writers, and yet their stories have led us on an incredible spirit walk. How did we find the route to write coming from such a harsh environment? How did we imagine we even could? How have we managed to be resilient and ultimately defiant? How has home shaped us into the storytellers we are in 2027?
We will discuss the advantage of disadvantage, and how it has served us on our path to becoming artists, how we discovered and accepted being a voice for our community, and why we believe art can and does make change.
Panelist Bios:
Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, and visual artist whose work explores the lives of the working class. Her numerous awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Medal of Arts, a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. Her novel The House on Mango Street, a modern classic, has sold over seven million copies and has been translated into over twenty-five languages. Cisneros currently lives in San Miguel de Allende, México, where she is at work on Infinito, a novel.
Photo Credit: Diana Solís
Jasmon Drain is the author of Stateway’s Garden (2020). He is from the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago and hopes to continue publishing literary fiction about Chicago, its complicated history, and the uniquity of its citizens.
Ellen Placey Wadey joined the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation in 2013 and became senior program director for Chicago Arts & Collections in 2026. She is the board cochair of the Arts Work Fund and on the board of Enrich Chicago. She has consulted for the Chicago Cultural Alliance, the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, and the Dorothy Stang Adult Education High School, and worked for the Guild Literary Complex and Marwen. She has been a jurist or panelist for the Cuyahoga Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, IL Arts Council Agency, KY Foundation for Women, and more. She holds a BA in English from Saint Mary’s College, an MA in writing from UIC, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the recipient of the Scott Turow Fiction Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. For ten years, she coproduced Prosody, a radio show interviewing writers, for Pittsburgh’s NPR outlet.