I arrived late to my first Chicago Review of Books Awards in 2019. I was a new editor on the team then, nervous and uncertain about how early to arrive for the ceremony and lost between the awfully named N Ravenswood Avenue on the west side of the train tracks and the N Ravenswood Avenue on the east side. Before I knew it, time had slipped away. The guests had arrived, the party had started, and I stepped into a room full of my literary heroes.
In 2019, I was still rediscovering my childhood home and its literary community after two years in graduate school that had left me weary about writing. Although school taught me the structure of the form (and allowed me the time to complete a number of Stuart Dybek short story rip-offs), much of my time was spent fielding snide comments in workshop about how I’d written “another Chicago story” and the pettiness that comes with graduate students fighting for the few secure jobs in academia. As I prepared to return home to Chicago, I found myself wondering what the point of it all was. I spent multiple afternoons in poet Brenda Cárdenas’s office—who herself had spent time in the Chicago literary scene—discussing how I could find a community in a city I felt disconnected to and what kind of writer I wanted to be anyway.
The truth was, I wanted to be a writer like Eve L. Ewing, José Olivarez, and Nate Marshall. In their work, I saw the love and clarity for their home that I aspired to. Their Chicago was magical but not mythical. They wrote intimately about their blocks and corner stores and schools in ways that sang like a melody, while never forgetting the violence that years of disinvestment and corruption and systemic racism caused in their neighborhoods. And if it’s true that our relationship to Chicago is destined to be as Nelson Algren wrote “like loving a woman with a broken nose,” then the work of Ewing, Olivarez, and Marshall inspired me to fit into the tradition of the great Gwendolyn Brooks and Sandra Cisneros—because of course, no depiction of this city will ever hold as true as the view from your own front porch.
But I admired more than just their writing. To me, they were the antithesis of the academic world I was growing tired of. Their art lived as much on the stage as it did on the page, as they all worked extensively with the city’s various spoken word and literary organizations like Young Chicago Authors. Academia had begun to feel like a suffocating and antagonistic closed loop, and in Chicago I could see that writers I admired were working to amplify younger voices and create art that lived in and pressed upon the world.
More than anything, I craved community. I wanted to be a Chicagoan and a writer, but mostly a Chicago writer.
I spent most of my first CHIRBy Awards in awe of the company I was with. 2018 poetry winner José Olivarez presented the award to Eve L. Ewing and fellow nominees avery r. young and Fatimah Asghar cheered along. I saw Michelin star chef and writer Iliana Regan and the influential chronicler of Chicago Alex Kotlowitz. Megan Stielstra accepted the short essay award for “An Axe for the Frozen Sea,” an increasingly timely piece about finding peace in rage during terrifying political times. I don’t even remember speaking to any of the authors, as I worried I was too young and too new to the community to be anything more than an observer that night. But I left with a soaring in my chest that lingered throughout the night. It’s a feeling that returns to me year after year at this celebration.
Awards are a tricky, fraught exercise. Oftentimes they serve both as historical markers and marketing tools, designed to boost sales and—in theory at least—document the year’s shining examples of the artform by honoring what judges dictate to be the “best” book. I have an optimist’s heart and a skeptic’s mind, and I find myself at times getting swept up in the excitement of the international awards circuit only to be disappointed. Art and competition meet in the most jagged, imprecise ways, while our love for the form is boundless.
But the Chicago Review of Books Awards has always felt unique to me. What I’ve seen from co-hosting the event for five years now—first as the CHIRBy Awards Director and now as the Editor-In-Chief—is a collective joy that escapes the neatness of words. From a crowded Zoom room in 2020 to an intimate bookstore setting to now the historic surroundings of the Fine Arts Building, there is a warmth and familialness that could only exist in Chicago, a city and literary community built on collective action. Authors hug, share drinks, and mean it when they say they’re excited to celebrate alongside one another. Winners walk away with trophies among other trappings of typical award ceremonies, sure, but it often feels larger than that. A joy to be here in this bright moment together, no matter what darkness surrounds us. A joy to recognize that something special is happening in our community. A joy to be Chicagoans and writers; proud Chicago writers.
As we get ready to celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Chicago Review of Books Awards, it’s clear that something special really is happening. The history of the awards tells the story of a growing, flourishing literary community here in Chicago. Ours is a city where words breathe, where authors find inspiration in one another and take their art to the stage, the workshop, the salon, and the writing group that meets on their back porches overlooking the alleyway. Ours is a city where we roll up our sleeves to lift one another up. It’s why in 2019 we created the Adam Morgan Literary Leadership Award to recognize the incredible individuals who continue to build a thriving literary scene here in Chicago—from the independent booksellers and publishers to this year’s winner Samira Ahmed, who is working to defend our right to read widely and freely as a national leader of Authors Against Book Bans.
I think often about Chicago’s literary history and the ways our city and its authors have changed the world. Chicago authors exposed the way mass industrialization poisons our food and abuses our working class, brought modernism to the world and fought literary censorship head on, and documented the virulence of racism in America while also exemplifying the power of solidarity. These explosions of art, ideas, and resistance were not just products of great writers, but also of strong community bonds. From Poetry and the Little Review to Bughouse Square and the Bronzeville salons, the most powerful words uttered out of Chicago breathe, sing, and scream. They exist on the page and in the world.
I hope that the Chicago Review of Books Awards continues to honor that legacy and tell the story of what’s clearly happening here in our city.
A renaissance.
