Launched in March 2007, Literago.org is intended as a portal to news and information about literary goings-on in and around Chicago. The site features a curated calendar with a corresponding weekly newsletter, news, and post-event reviews.

Literago is meant to show the world that Chicago isn’t an illiterate sinkhole, but a city with a vibrant literary community. It’s intended as a service to Chicagoans interested in literature: to give them a one-stop shop for noteworthy literary events, happenings, and information. Chicago has a vast number of literary projects — everything from small presses and magazines to giant lit organizations —and the Literago editors would like to see more cohesion, promotion, and community evident outside of events like Printer’s Row Book Fair and the Printer’s Ball. The editors hope Literago will be a useful tool for people like them.

About the Contributors

MAIREAD CASE is Managing Editor of Literago. The former editor of Proximity Magazine and JOT, Mairead now writes, edits, and teaches everywhere from university classrooms to juvenile justice centers to a library that used to be a department store. She’s published fiction and criticism in featherproof, Pitchfork, Punk Planet, SQUIDproject, Village Voice Media, Vice, and some other places. Her Literago posts are here.

GRETCHEN KALWINSKI co-founded Literago.org. She has freelanced for Stop Smiling, The Chicago Reader, Venus, UR Chicago, and Punk Planet. She has read her short fiction for the Guild Complex and Dollar Store reading series and her short stories and poems have been published in THE2NDHAND literary broadsheet, Proximity, and Paterson Literary Review. Her Literago posts are here.

EUGENIA WILLIAMSON co-founded Literago.org. She holds an MA from the University of Chicago, where she focused on post-WWII American fiction. She has written for a number of magazines and hopes to write for more. A lifelong Chicagoan, she’s been hiding out in Cambridge, Mass, disguised as a New Englander and programming an author events series. Her Literago posts are here.

KELLY KRESS did a little news reporting, music reviewing and used bookstore managing before settling on a library career.  Since moving to Chicago in 2006, she’s been immersed in the city’s journalistic history as an archivist at the Newberry Library. Her Literago posts are here.

JACOB S. KNABB’s double-life as Fiction editor of Another Chicago Magazine and lecturer of composition at UIC has led him to cast his demons into a herd of swine he saw by a ravine. He is still waiting to hear them hit bottom. His Literago posts are here.

SUSANNAH FELTS is a writer and magazine editor whose first novel, This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record, will be released in March 2008 by Featherproof Books. She has taught English courses and creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in the Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, Another Chicago Magazine, Quarterly West, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Swivel, The Sun, THE2NDHAND, and other magazines. Her Literago posts are here.

KATIE HARTSOCK is from Youngstown, Ohio, and moved to Chicago after earning her MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan. Her poetry and reviews have been published in Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Yalobusha Review, Clementine, Bookslut, and elsewhere. She is the media assistant at the Poetry Foundation. Her Literago posts are here.

LARA WOLFF steeps in the weird waters of academia with fine artists and designers from 9 to 5 and dabbles in the literary arts when time provides. With a Yellow Rose of Texas Award under her belt, she fled Austin in 2006 for Chicago and has quickly learned to adopt the necessary love/hate relationship with her birth city. When she’s not writing or cultivating the bounciest Southern hairdo possible, she’s busy perfecting her bake-off entries. Her Literago posts are here.

KATRINA SOGAARD is a substitute teacher and summer school teacher. She graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in secondary English education. Her teaching experience ranges from frenzied one day stints with first graders to a six month position with British Literature for seniors. During her time in Iowa City she worked for The Daily Iowan, a student newspaper. Fairly new to Chicago, she is still getting to know the city and loving it. Her Literago posts are here.

Press

• Chicago Reader| Spring Books 2007: “Fighting Second City Syndrome One Blog Entry at a Time”
• Bad at Sports Episode 120: Intuit and Literago.org
• Named one of Chicago Magazine’s Best Chicago Websites 2008.
• Called an “ace literary blog” in Lonely Planet Chicago, 2008.

To Submit your Literary Event Listing to the Literago Editors

OPTION #1:

If you regularly program literary events, we strongly recommend that you use the fast-growing Google calendar that we’ve created as a comprehensive listing of Chicago events. Once events are in the All Lit Chicago Calendar (which is on our site and available to the public), the event is on both the public’s and the editors’ radar and thus has a stronger chance of being featured on the Calendar on our main page or reviewed for our Readings, Rated section. Please send an email to editors{at}literago.org for directives on the All Lit Chicago calendar.

OPTION #2:

If you don’t program events regularly or have a high volume of events to promote, email editors{at}literago.org with the following information FORMATTED AS BELOW for consideration. If you’ve got a flier, feel free to send it (in jpeg format, sized at 448 X 336 pixels or less) accompanied by the below information in the below format. Requests not submitted in this format will be frowned upon and possibly ignored.

EXAMPLE

Title: Literago Launch PartyDate: June 22, 2007
Time: 8pm – 12am
Location and Address: The Halfway House (1539 N. Damen)
Participants: George Saunders, Doris Lessing, Ben Greenman, James Spader
Name of Reading Series: (IF APPLICABLE) (Example: “The Danny’s Reading Series”)
*** Please post/send info at least 2 weeks prior to the event.