Wednesday, February 8 at 7 p.m.

 

Here's a chance to use your favorite hat, scarf, mitten, and glove patterns! 

 

After a phenomenal response to the launch of our Feminist Craft Circle in January,  we are returning for another month of "craftivism" and camaraderie benefitting  Care for Real, a local organization that distributes 100,000 lbs. of food and 11,000 articles of clothing to its clients every month. A significant percentage of Care for Real's clients are immigrants and refugees, who often arrive in Chicago unprepared for our long, and sometimes brutal, winters. 

 

This event is BYOB and BYO crafting materials for making winter gear for this wonderful organization!

 

We plan to meet again in March, when we can finish up and collect the scarves, hats, etc., that we begin making tonight. Also, we will be collecting food donations. See Care for Real's food donation guidelines HERE. 

Wednesday, February 15 at 7 p.m.

   

Emily Robbins has lived and worked across the Middle East and North Africa. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Syria, where she studied religion and language with a women's mosque movement and lived with the family of a leading intellectual. Robbins holds a BA from Swarthmore College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and in 2016 she received a second Fulbright, to study in Jordan. She lives in Chicago and Brownsville, Texas. 

For this event, Emily will be in conversation with Rebecca Makkai. Makkai is the author of two novels, The Hundred-Year House and The Borrower, and the story collection Music for Wartime. Her work has appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's, Iowa Review, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and numerous volumes of Best American Short Stories, among others and has aired on This American Life. She lives outside Chicago  with her husband and two daughters.

Vita E. Cleveland and Kayla Weeden will share poems consecutively, creating a single timeline of their two very separate lives. The poems cover childhood and high school years, working toward the present where their paths have, finally, converged. 

V ita E. Cleveland (she/they), a Black trans poet and percussionist from Cleveland, Ohio, writes and performs poetry with an emphasis on activism as "disruptive narrative."  She is currently based in Chicago and works with the Chicago BTGNC Collective and Black Lives Matter Chicago. She is one half of the administrative team for awQward, the first talent agency to exclusively uplift the work of trans and queer artists of color. She has recently joined the Chicago Latinx punk band, Cabrona, as the drummer and percussionist. 

 

Kayla Weeden (she/her) is a passionate, goofy, and lovable queer poet in her junior year at DePaul University. Her love of poetry was kickstarted in 8th grade when her English teacher assigned a poetry project to her class. Since then, she has become the president of DePaul's Presenters of Enlightenment Through Spoken-Word Club and the president of Spectrum DePaul, which is dedicated to providing queer students at DePaul a safe and fun place to make friends that grow into family. 

In this biography, the life and work of Dorothy Day--the iconic, celebrated, and controversial Catholic--is told with illuminating detail by her granddaughter, Kate Hennessy. Day was a prominent writer, social activist, and co-founder of a movement dedicated to serving the poor. Her life has been revealed through her own writings as well as the work of historians, theologians, and academics. What has been missing until now is a more personal account. This book challenges ideas of plaster saints, detailing Day's life before her conversion--having an abortion and a child out of wedlock--and after her conversion, when she was both a servant and a rigorous  challenger of the Church. While tenderly rendered, Hennessy's account will show her as driven to do good but dogmatic, loving but judgmental, in particular toward her only daughter, Tamar. An undisputed radical heroine, called a saint for the Occupy era by the New Yorker, Day's story unfolds against a backdrop of New York City from the 1910s to the 1980s. 

Kate Hennessy is a writer whose recent work includes a collaboration with the photographer Vivian Cherry called Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: The Miracle of Our Continuance and pieces included in Best American Travel Writing. After calling both Vermont and New York City home, Kate now lives in the west of Ireland with her husband.

"occasional feminist" who talks a lot about

intersectionality, policing, gender, sexual assault, and other current events. Her nonfiction can be found at the Guardian , the Washington Post , Ebony , xoJane , Bustle , Islamic Monthly , and a host of other sites. Her media appearances include BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera , WBEZ, and Showtime.