Guild Literary Complex

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. 

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Upcoming Events

FEATURED EVENT: FLECHO Book Fair (March 20-24 in Quibdó, Colombia)

We are excited to announce, the Guild Complex will participate in FLECHO in Quibdo, Colombia!

From March 20-24, members of the Guild Complex along with 4 talented and creative Afro-Latin writers will travel and participate in this four-city traveling book fair which will culminate in Quibdo, Columbia. Participating writers include Kianny Antigua (New Hampshire), Alan Pelaz Lopez (California), Tiffanie Clark (Ohio), and Luis Tubens (Chicago) along with Mary Hawley, the long time coordinator for Palabra Pura. Along with these talented writers, a documentary filmmaker will follow along to capture this experience.

FLECHO is a program of MOTETE. A cultural arts organization, based in Colombia, that promotes the development of critical, autonomous and creative thinking for the exercise of active citizenships, through the generation of meetings around culture, reading, and the arts.

The Guild Complex was invited to be a part of FLECHO by a couple of the program organizers, Velia Vidal and Christian Vasquez after the Guild Complex collaborated with Vasquez on several Palabra Pura events in 2021 that included folks from the writing community in Colombia. This opportunity was born out of a mutual desire to extend the Guild’s programming mission of serving marginalized communities through the literary arts by showing up for this modest city whose population is made up of mostly Afro-Colombians. The goal being to bring in more writers who looked like the people of Quibdo and to show the diversity of voices brought forth by Palabra Pura. It is a unique opportunity like no other the Guild Complex has done before. This program is done with partial support from the Poetry Foundation.

There is no Event

IC24Poster.Annabelle_
Poster Design by Annabelle Broeffle

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 GuardianChicago 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.

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. 

Apr 11