08/05/2026
Join us for a fall faculty and alumni reading, Saturday, October 10, 4 PM CT, at Brothers K Coffeehouse, 500 Main St, Evanston, cohosted by Booked Bookstores - featured readers: Mimi Bhattacharyya, Brett Tyler Brown, Jenn Hipps, Eric Johnson, Lori Rader-Day and Michael Zapata!
Mimi Bhattacharyya is a writer whose work explores migration, belonging, and the stories families inherit across generations. A recent graduate of Northwestern University’s MFA Program in Prose and Poetry, and a recipient of the Distinguished Thesis Award, she blends memoir, braided nonfiction, and literary inquiry to examine the Bengali diasporic experience, the tension between memory and history, and the evolving meaning of home.
Brett Brown is a recent graduate of Northwestern’s Master in Writing program. He received the Distinguished Thesis Award for Master of None, a linked story collection about young men in Cleveland that addresses masculinity, intimacy, and the quiet humiliations of early adulthood. His story “A Picture of Fragility” received an honorable mention in the 2025 Gulf Coast Magazine Prize in Fiction. His first book, Haley’s Comet, was a self-illustrated children’s novel he completed in middle school. He often writes while listening to music and thinks of his stories as having soundtracks.
Jenn Hipps recently earned her MFA in Creative Writing degree from Northwestern University. In her fiction, she’s interested in exploring how, even in an abundance of love and goodwill, people are so very good at messing up what’s most important to them, and the vulnerable work that true repair demands. She’s currently working on a novel her baby-queer self would have loved to read.
E.W.I. (Eric) Johnson (he/him) is a Chicago poet interested in gothic romance, ecological decay, and bumblebees. He has poems appearing in Burning House Press, Sonora Review, Jet Fuel Review, and the climate change anthology "Dear Human at the Edge of Time." Eric is a recent graduate of Northwestern’s MFA program in Prose and Poetry.
USA Today-bestselling author Lori Rader-Day has been nominated for crime fiction’s highest award, the Edgar Award, and has won a few others, including an Indiana Author Award from Indiana Humanities. Lori earned her MFA in creative writing from Roosevelt University in Chicago; she also has an MA in creative nonfiction from Ball State University. Lori chairs a non-profit crime fiction readers’ event called Midwest Mystery Conference. Wreck Your Heart is Lori’s eighth novel.
Michael Zapata is the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is a recipient of a Meier Foundation Artist Achievement Award and the DAG Prize for Literature. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.
