Poetry Course with Faisal Mohyuddin
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FAISAL MOHYUDDIN is a writer, artist, and educator. The child of immigrants from Pakistan, he is the author of Elsewhere: An Elegy (forthcoming spring 2024 from Next Page Press) and of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, (Eyewear, 2018), which won the 2017 Sexton Prize in Poetry, and was selected as a 2018 Summer Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society and named a "highly commended" collection of the year by the Forward Arts Foundation; it went on to receive an Honorable Mention in the Association of Asian American Studies 2020 Book Award for Poetry. Faisal is also the author of the chapbook The Riddle of Longing (Backbone Press, 2017). His work has received Prairie Schooner's Edward Stanley Award, a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize from the Illinois State Library, and an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. His recent work appears in Poetry Magazine, Poet Lore, Kweli, The Margins, Pleiades, Chicago Quarterly Review, and RHINO. An alumnus of the U.S. Department of State's Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms program, Faisal is a graduate of Carleton College, Northwestern University, and Columbia College Chicago. An educator adviser and master practitioner for the global-not-for-profit Narrative 4, he teaches high school English in suburban Chicago and creative writing at the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University. (Author photo by Wendy Alas / @wendyalasphotography)
Fiction Course with Meg Cass
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Meg Cass (they/them) is a queer, trans fiction writer and teacher who lives in St. Louis. ActivAmerica, their first book, was selected by Claire Vaye Watkins for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and was published in 2017. Recent stories have appeared in Ecotone, Foglifter, and Passages North. Their flash fiction has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 and in the SmokeLong Quarterly Best of the First 10 Years Anthology. They co-founded Changeling, a queer reading series focused on works-in-progress, and teach in the English Department at the University of Illinois Springfield.
Friday Night Keynote with M. Rae Henry
Henry will read from her newest books and speak about why she finds writing to be imperative.
M. Rae Henry’s credentials are too long to list here, but this Latina writer has lived an amazing life! Here’s just a snippet from her website: In 2025 her fiction collection was chosen as a finalist by Kaveh Akbar in The George Garrett Fiction Prize contest. Her poetry was included in the Best New Poets of 2023, University of Virginia Press' anthology published in cooperation with Meridian. In March 2023 the body is where it all begins made the shortlist for Steel Toe Books' 2022 Chapbook Award. In April 2022 her poetry was a finalist in River Styx's International Poetry Contest. In October 2021 her Spanglish novel, Cumbia Therapy, won 1st place in Suburbia's Novel Excerpt Contest and, years earlier, received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. In January 2021 her fiction manuscript 'Southwest Stories: A Mexican Wedding and The Magnetic Poles' was chosen as a finalist in Black Lawrence Press' Black River Chapbook Competition and her nonfiction manuscript, 'Eternal September,' based on her motorcycle travels through the Middle East, was chosen as a semi-finalist.
Sunday Morning Generative (both genres)
Before the participant open mic on Sunday, we'll have an hour of generative writing lead by a local author
Kristin LaTour, director
Kristin is the founder of the Aurora Writers Workshop and has lived in Aurora since 2004. Her poetry has been published in several chapbooks, anotholigies, and in journals such as the Massachusetts Review, Tinderbox, Museum of Americana, Escape into Life, and others. Her full-length collection of poems, What Will Keep Us Alive, came out with Sundress Publications in 2015. She teaches writing at Joliet Jr. College and gives writing workshops at libraries in the far-western Chicago suburbs. She is currently working on a novel set during the 1800s whaling industry in New Bedford, and a collection of poems centered around Gen X.
