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SUMMARY:Les Portes by Meredith Nnoka
DESCRIPTION:Please join us to celebrate the poetry collection Les Portes by Meredith Nnoka\, with Ashley Keyser and Crissonna Tennison. \nWinner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize\, selected by Cameron Awkward-Rich\, and named a “Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026” by Ms. Magazine\, Les Portes traces how harm against women and femmes takes root\, recurs\, and reshapes itself across generations. \nUnfolding in three movements–Le D but\, Le Pass \, and Le Pr sent–all of which rupture conventional domestic abuse narratives\, and drawing heavily from zuihitsu\, ekphrasis\, erasure\, and found forms to mirror the fractured experience of living through and after harm\, these poems serve as radical meditations on the power to reflect as resistance. A queer woman caught in an abusive marriage begins to reimagine justice not as punishment but as something restorative\, collective\, and deeply non-carceral. \nIn her debut book\, Nnoka poses the question that propels the collection: “Where is the path forward / that ensures no recurrence?” Rather than gesture toward resolution\, Les Portes dwells inside this question\, and what emerges is not consolation but an immense reckoning.
URL:https://chicagosocialbutterflies.com/wp-events/les-portes-by-meredith-nnoka/
LOCATION:Women & Children First\, 5233 N. Clark St.\, Chicago\, IL\, United States
CATEGORIES:literary-poetry-podcast
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20260911T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20260911T203000
DTSTAMP:20260910T182044Z
CREATED:20260910T182044Z
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SUMMARY:Cultural Capital Doesn't Pay the Rent: A Queer Memoir by Jessica Lawless
DESCRIPTION:Join us for an event with Jessica Lawless in conversation with Shira Hassan to celebrate the release of Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent: A Queer Memoir. \nThis is a mask-required event. \nCultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent is a story about loss\, economic survival\, and three decades of organizing against the interlocking hellscapes of neoliberalism. Jessica Lawless’s memoir is a queer\, anarcho-punk history of community care and healing justice. \nAn original member of Home Alive\, the Seattle-based\, feminist self-defense collective founded as a response to the unsolved rape and murder of a beloved friend\, Lawless takes the reader into subcultural spaces of the 1980s and ’90s where anticapitalist concepts of race\, gender\, and sexuality were developing against the backdrop of the Christian right’s early culture wars. \nDigging into their personal archive of pre-internet flyers\, meeting notes\, zines\, photos\, newsletters\, exhibition announcements\, journals\, and funeral programs\, Lawless explores the somatic impacts of remembering and forgetting. Her attempts to leave violence in the past lead her to the institutional violence of academia\, the absurdity of the Los Angeles art world\, the crushing poverty of cyclical subemployment as an adjunct professor\, and the heartbreak of working in the labor movement. \nReflecting on the past while entering menopause\, Lawless crafts a narrative that twists and turns along a winding path\, continually rejecting normative conclusions. Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent is a moving account of abolitionist feminist resistance that will inspire anyone who’s experienced the hopes and hypocrisies of leftist activism.
URL:https://chicagosocialbutterflies.com/wp-events/cultural-capital-doesnt-pay-the-rent-a-queer-memoir-by-jessica-lawless/
LOCATION:Women & Children First\, 5233 N. Clark St.\, Chicago\, IL\, United States
CATEGORIES:panel-conversation
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20251201T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20251201T200000
DTSTAMP:20251126T190510Z
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SUMMARY:World Aids Day Panel: Raising Our Voices
DESCRIPTION:This World AIDS Day\, join us for a panel discussion featuring Tracy Baim\, Rebecca Makkai\, Victoria Noe & Rosa E. Martínez Colón.\n\n\n\nFunding for direct service and research for HIV has been decimated\, AIDS denialists have a champion leading the Department of Health and Human Services\, and international programs like PEPFAR have been destroyed. How can allies use their voices to convince the general public that these developments don’t only affect people living with HIV\, but everyone? \nThis World AIDS Day\, join us for a panel discussion featuring Tracy Baim\, Rebecca Makkai\, and Victoria Noe and moderated by Rosa E. Martínez Colón. \nTracy Baim is executive director of Press Forward Chicago\, a pooled fund for community journalism based at The Chicago Community Trust. Baim is co-founder and owner of Windy City Times. She is former publisher of the Chicago Reader newspaper. Baim has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Chicago Headline Club and the Chicago Journalists Association. In 2014\, she was inducted into the NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame. She is also in the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. She has won numerous LGBTQ community and journalism honors\, including the Community Media Workshop’s Studs Terkel Award in 2005 and the Lambda Legal Bon Foster Award in 2023. Baim has written and/or edited 14 books\, her newest is Liberating Healthcare\, a biography of Howard Brown Health. \nRosa E. Martínez Colón is a dedicated public health advocate and a founding member of CALOR\, which supports Latinos affected by HIV in Chicago. She is currently the Vice President of Housing Strategy at the Center for Housing and Health at AIDS Foundation Chicago. With over 30 years of experience\, she has led various local and national initiatives\, including serving on the Chicago Board of Health and co-chairing the Latinx Institute at the U.S. Conference on HIV/AIDS. She earned degrees from DePaul and North Park University. \nRebecca Makkai is the author of five books\, including New York Times bestselling I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU and THE GREAT BELIEVERS\, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. \nDeep into her fourth career\, Victoria Noe is a Chicago-based award-winning author\, speaker and activist with two degrees in theater. Her Friend Grief series – the result of a promise she made to a dying friend – recognizes the importance of friendships in shaping our lives and illuminates an often disrespected form of grief. Noe’s long-time HIV/AIDS activism then led her to write F*g Hags\, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community\, the groundbreaking book that honors the women who changed the course of the epidemic. Her 2023 book\, What Our Friends Left Behind: Grief and Laughter in a Pandemic\, shares the challenges faced by people who grieved a friend during COVID. With Unstoppable: Straight Women on the AIDS Frontlines\, Noe shares more stories of women in the HIV/AIDS community\, and how they’re responding to the shock and awe of 2025.
URL:https://chicagosocialbutterflies.com/wp-events/world-aids-day-panel-raising-our-voices/
LOCATION:Women & Children First\, 5233 N. Clark St.\, Chicago\, IL\, United States
CATEGORIES:culture,education-history,panel-conversation
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250926T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250926T203000
DTSTAMP:20250821T034313Z
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SUMMARY:The Boy Kingdom / El reino de los varones by Achy Obejas
DESCRIPTION:Please join us to celebrate Achy Obejas and her new book The Boy Kingdom / El reino de los varones. Joining her for this reading and conversation is journalist Natalie Moore. \nPlease note: Masks are required for our in-person events. This event is free to attend\, but registration is required. \nJust in time for Hispanic Heritage Month comes another brilliant bilingual poetry collection by Achy Obejas–a meditation on being a queer mom to two sons. \nThese 44 prose poems\, artful yet accessible\, presented in both Spanish and English versions\, immerse us in the boy kingdom that Achy Obejas inhabits with her two sons. They move from the wild and divine spirit of boyhood to the everyday rhythms of family life—mac’n’cheese\, television\, sick days home from school. \nAchy carries multiple identities: she is Cuban American\, lesbian\, and Jewish. She captures the universality of motherhood while also illuminating the uniqueness of her queer\, multilingual\, multicultural family: the way her elder son looks as her as if she’s “dancing with the dead” when she speaks Spanish; the way her boys prefer mac’n’cheese to tostones; the day her elder son comes home from school disquieted\, then finally spills it: “A couple of boys yelled at him: Your moms are queer!” \nThe collection is divided into four parts. The first part focuses primarily on Achy’s sons\, and subsequent parts branch out into stories of her parents\, her roots in Cuba\, and her divorce.
URL:https://chicagosocialbutterflies.com/wp-events/the-boy-kingdom-el-reino-de-los-varones-by-achy-obejas/
LOCATION:Women & Children First\, 5233 N. Clark St.\, Chicago\, IL\, United States
CATEGORIES:literary-poetry-podcast
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