Growing Up Chicago is a collection of coming-of-age stories that reflects the diversity of the city and its metropolitan area. Primarily memoir, the book collects work by writers who spent their formative years in the region to ask: What characterizes a Chicago author? Is it a certain feel to the writer’s language? A narrative sensibility? The mention of certain neighborhoods or locales? Contributors to the volume include renowned writers Ana Castillo, Stuart Dybek, Emil Ferris, Charles Johnson, Rebecca Makkai, Erika L. Sánchez, and George Saunders, as well as emerging talents. While the authors represented here write from distinct local experiences, some universals emerge, including the abiding influence of family and friends and the self-realizations earned against the background of a place sparkling with promise and riven by inequality, a place in constant flux.
The stories evoke childhood trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, nighttime games of ringolevio, and the giant neon Magikist lips that once perched over the expressway, sharing perspectives that range from a young man who dreams of becoming an artist to a single mother revisiting her Mexican roots, from a woman’s experience with sexual assault to a child’s foray into white supremacy. This book memorably explores culture, social identity, and personal growth through the eyes of Chicagoans, affirming that we each hold the ability to shape the places in which we live and write and read as much as those places shape us.
About the Author
DAVID SCHAAFSMA is a professor of English and director of the Program in English Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The author of several books on teaching and learning in high school and college English classrooms, he is the editor of Jane Addams in the Classroom and coeditor of Literacy and Democracy: Composition Studies and Literacy in Pursuit of Habitable Spaces; Further Conversations from the Students of Jay Robinson.
ROXANNE PILAT holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MA in writing from DePaul University. Previously a secondary school instructor, journalist, and corporate communications consultant, she teaches at North Central College and Dominican University. Her work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Hummingbird Review, Windows, and in the anthology Italian Women in Chicago: Madonna mia! QUI debbo vivere? She is a founding editor of the literary journal Packingtown Review.
LAUREN DEJULIO BELL teaches in the Honors College at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She previously taught in the UIC English Department and the Chicago Public Schools district. She serves on the associate board of StoryStudio Chicago and leads a local project (We Are All Chicago), where she engages with the people of Chicago to foster civic engagement, community writing, and artistic endeavors. A paper she coauthored, “Turning Schools Inside Out: Connecting Schools and Communities through Public Arts and Literacies,” was published in the Journal of Language and Literacy Education.
Praise For…
“A literary guide to the soul of this great, burly place.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, from the foreword
“An entertaining and touching tumble of sexual awakenings, identity quests, dangerous liaisons, early sorrows, boundary crossings, and 16-inch softball. There’s a different Chicago in each piece—the city serves as witness, backdrop, companion, solace. This ethnically, racially, and geographically diverse collection takes us to a snowy Chicago alley, a suburban living room, Catholic school, playgrounds and fields, buses and subways, the Art Institute, and a gas station in its explorations of the private and dramatic world of childhood and adolescence. This accomplished collection reminds us that childhood is never safe, but it is also wondrous and raw.” —S.L. Wisenberg, author of The Adventures of Cancer Bitch
