Skip to main content
Exhibit B event image
PastAuthor EventBook SigningReadingPoetryFree

This event has passed

Exhibit B presents brian bean, Noel Quiñones, Nina Sudhakar and Keli Stewart

About This Event

Join Exhibit B as they welcome brian bean, Noel Quiñones, Nina Sudhakar and Keli Stewart for the latest installment of the Exhibit B reading series.

Featured Author

Keli Stewart

Keli Stewart (she/her) is an author, educator, and arts activist whose writing has been published in Rhino, Meridians, and WarpLand: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, among others. Her published works include the full-length collection Small Altars (Bronzeville Books, 2021). She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, an Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Award, and an Augusta Savage Gallery Arts International Residency. Stewart was a 2021-2022 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Nichols Tower Artist-in-Residence. An alum of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and Callaloo summer writing workshops, her writing won first place for a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award from the Illinois Center for the Book. She earned a BA in fiction writing from Columbia College in 2002 and an MFA in poetry from Chicago State University. She is proud to be the founder and executive director of Front Porch Arts Center and founder of WestSide Arts House, for which she opens her historic Victorian home to her community on Chicago’s West Side.

Presenters

Nina Sudhakar

Nina Sudhakar is a writer, poet, and lawyer based in Chicago. She is the author of Where to Carry the Sound (winner of the 2024 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and a 2024 Foreword INDIES Award) and two poetry chapbooks, Matriarchetypes and Embodiments. She serves as Dispatches Editor & Book Reviews Editor for The Common and as Vice President of the Board of the Chicago Poetry Center. For more, please see www.ninasudhakar.com.

Noel Quiñones

Noel Quiñones is an Emmy award-winning poet, performer, and screenwriter from the Bronx. Noel is the author of Orange (CavanKerry Press, 2026) and their work has been published in Poetry, Boston Review, Poem-a-day, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT anthology, as well as the Michigan Quarterly Review, for which they won the 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. Their short story, "This Time and the Next" will be included in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners. They have written for, narrated, and acted in several films, including the Emmy nominated documentary Takeover, about the Young Lords, the NYC based revolutionary group who took over Lincoln Hospital in 1970 to fight for better healthcare. A graduate of the University of Mississippi's MFA program and ELVTR’s Video Game Writer Course, Noel is currently a Justice for My Sister BIPOC Sci-Fi Screenwriting Lab Fellow working on their first TV show. Follow Noel at www.noelpquinones.com.

brian bean

brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist organizer, writer, and agitator originally from North Carolina. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine. Their work has been published in Truthout, Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Red Flag, New Politics, Socialist Worker, International Viewpoint, and more. They coedited and contributed to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, and wrote Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition, both from Haymarket Books.

About the Venue

Pilsen Community Books

Pilsen Community Books

Pilsen Community Books is a worker owned and operated independent bookstore that specializes in new and used literary fiction, radical history and politics, and literature in translation. The staff's goal is to unite their bookselling experience with their belief that labor is entitled to all it produces.​

Visit store page