Chicago Stories: Author Panel, Book Signings, and Pop Up Shop at Une Annee Brewery/Niles

Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar® Award-nominated and Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of Wreck Your Heart, The Death of Us, Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. She lives in Chicago, where she is co-chair of the mystery readers’ festival Midwest Mystery Conference and served as 2019-2020 national president of Sisters in Crime. She teaches creative writing for Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies.

Renée Rosen is a USA Today bestselling author. Her novels include Let's Call Her Barbie, Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl, The Social Graces, Park Avenue Summer, Windy City Blues, White Collar Girl, What the Lady Wants and Dollface as well as the young adult novel, Every Crooked Pot. She is a native of Akron, Ohio, and a graduate of American University in Washington, D.C. She now lives in Chicago and is at work on a new novel.

Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of the award-winning novel, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him, an Essence Magazine Bestseller in Hardcover Fiction. She also coedited the anthology Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works are widely published and produced in Adi Magazine, Midnight & Indigo, Aunt Chloe, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, New Daughters of Africa, Obsidian, Another Chicago Magazine, storySouth, Lifeline Theatre, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and others. Professional recognition includes a Plentitudes Journal Prize, the Hearst Foundation James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, an American Library Association Black Caucus Award, a City of Chicago Esteemed Artist Award, the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, a Globe Soup Story Award, the Joan Perry Barnes Fellow in Crime Writing at Storyknife Writers Retreat and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

Maggie Andersen has published fiction and nonfiction in magazines such as Salt Hill, Blood Orange, the Los Angeles Review, Creative Nonfiction, Grain, Cutbank, and DIAGRAM, among others. She has been a finalist for the Montana Prize for Nonfiction, and nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Maggie is Associate Professor of English at Dominican University and a proud ensemble member at the Gift Theatre. Her debut memoir, No Stars in Jefferson Park, was published by Northwestern University Press in October 2025. She lives in Chicago with her husband, John, and her son, Archie, in the apartment where she was raised. You can find her on Instagram @maggieemlynandersen.