Guild
LITERARY COMPLEX
FOUNDED IN 1989
The Guild Literary Complex is a 30-year-old grassroots literary arts organization creating performance-based events in and around the Chicagoland area.
We partner and collaborate with other community groups on social and restorative justice issues, providing arts and advocacy programming for marginalized voices.
Upcoming Events
FEATURED EVENT: Spirits, Spirituality, & Craft (Reading & Panel)
As writers, celebrating culture through our work is as easy as sitting across the table from grandma. That ancestral influence is undeniable, but for some it is more intentional. It can be the circulatory process that streams through the work that is produced. Whether baptized in holy water or animal sacrifice – Christianity, Voodun, Santeria or Sanctified, these rituals imprint themselves in the work of the writer. The Spirits, Spirituality & Craft reading and panel discussion will bring together three writers whose work demonstrates how ancestral influence and spiritual practice manifests itself in their writing craft. We will discuss the intention behind this effort. Is it a memory purge? Or a necessary part of their work? How do they bring in or welcome these influences into their writing space?
Featuring: Faylita Hicks, Tina Jenkins Bell, Keli Stewart, and Andrea Change
PARTNER SPOTLIGHT: Chicago Literary Hall of Fame
The mission of Chicago Literary Hall of Fame is to honor and preserve Chicago’s great literary heritage through educational programming, awards, exhibits and other special events, particularly our annual induction ceremony.
They are also in the process of creating a repository of detailed information about Chicago’s past, present and future literary life through such projects as the Chicago Literary Map and Chicago Literary Tours.
FEATURED WRITER: Nikki Patin
Featured in The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader, on WBEZ, WTTW, FoxSoul, and on international television and radio, Nikki Patin has been writing, performing, educating, and advocating for over two decades. She has taught workshops on performance poetry, body image, sexual assault prevention and LGBT issues for over 20 years.
Patin has performed, taught and spoken at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Cook County Jail, Rikers Island prison, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin- Madison, EXPO Chicago, Black Artists Retreat, Brooklyn Museum, and the National Black Theater in Harlem and many other spaces throughout the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia.
In 2014, Patin addressed the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on behalf of Black women survivors of sexual violence in the U.S. Nikki Patin holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine and is founder and Executive Producer of Surviving the Mic, a survivor-led organization that uplifts the narratives and artistic excellence of writers and performers impacted by sexual harm and trauma.
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Join us for the release of Nikki Patin’s memoir, Working on Me, with The Honeycomb Network on April 11th at 6:30pm. Learn more about the event here.
