#brooksday

[dgevansclhof]

Honoring #brooksday and #birthdayforbreonna

We are sharing the powerful memorial created by John Caleb Pendleton, which will be on display through June 8th. Please read his explanation of the symbolism behind his choice of flowers and plants. https://www.instagram.com/p/CBGrjBnn5LD/

[beblk]

Happy birthday Mama Brooks

[guildliterarycomplex-blog]

http://guildcomplex.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/BrooksdayProgramDigitalVersion.pdf

[guildliterarycomplex-blog]

Mike Puican on Guild Complex

For those who aren't familiar with the Guild Complex, we’re an organization that grew out of the very independent and much beloved bookstore on Lincoln Ave called Guild Books. Guild Books was a real hotbed of ideas about culture and literature. At the Guild Literary Complex, we work very hard to continue that tradition.

I am very proud to say that the Guild Complex has been enriching and enlivening Chicago’s literary landscape and we have been doing it continuously for the past 24 years.

Typically, the experience one has with literature is a private one. It is something that’s between person and their book or Kindle or smartphone. But at the Guild Complex, we make it a public experience. We make literature something that is performed on stage and shared with audiences.

There’s a certain feel to a Guild Complex event. Our events are curated. The entire evening has a point of view, an idea to explore. John Rich and Anthony Romero along with everyone on our board work very hard to make sure that these are events that you’re not going to find elsewhere.

The event we just had on May 21 in which we honored the lifetime achievements of an amazing poet, Sterling Plumpp, in an evening that brings together poetry, blues and story, at a neighborhood blues club, is a perfect example of this.

Another one is an idea that will be launching on June 7 –the first annual daylong reading of the works of Gwendolyn Brooks on her birthday. We call it Brooksday. It will feature over 50 people who will come in during the day and read short sections of her work. It’ll be held at the Cultural Center and it’s free to the public. So please plan to stop in and join us.

We’re also working with Facets Multimedia and the Aljazeera Network to bring in poets who were very involved with the Arab Spring movement. We’ll show films of them, have them read their work and take questions from the audience.

These events are along with our Prose Awards, Palabra Pura, the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards, and Applied Words. No one is offering this kind of programming and putting it on where we do—that is in the neighborhoods and communities in Chicago. Our events are in Wicker Park, Hyde Park, Humboldt Park, Pilsen, the South Loop, Ukrainian Village, and elsewhere. Our events are held in neighborhoods where our artists and their audiences live.

It is a real pleasure to work with the smart, interesting and fun people connected to this organization—that includes the board of directors, our staff, our volunteers, those of you who come to our events and those of you who support us. I look forward to continuing this relationship with people who love literature, art and ideas long into the future.

Mike Puican  has been a board member since 2005 and has been board president since 2009. His work has been published in Journals such as: Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Malahat Review and The Bloomsbury Review, among others. He regularly writes book reviews for Another Chicago Magazine and TriQuarterly.