We’re thrilled to host a poetry reading and book signing with Franny Choi, celebrating the publication of her new book Soft Science. Joining her will be Eve L. Ewing, Krista Franklin, and Emily Jungmin Yoon.

Franny Choi is a queer, Korean-American poet, playwright, teacher, organizer, pottymouth, GryffinClaw, & general overachiever. She is the author of two poetry collections, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) & Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has received awards from the Poetry Foundation & the Helen Zell Writers Program, as well as fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center & the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Franny is a Senior News Editor for Hyphen Magazine & hosts the Poetry Foundation podcast VS along with fellow poet Danez Smith.

Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of education and a writer from Chicago. She is the author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. She is also author of Electric Arches, which received awards from the American Library Association and the Poetry Society of America and was named one of the year’s best books by NPR and the Chicago Tribune. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She also writes the Ironheart series for Marvel Comics. Ewing is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues.

Krista Franklin is a writer and visual artist whose work has appeared in Poetry, The Offing, Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, BOMB Magazine, and the anthologies The End of Chiraq, BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Gathering Ground. She is the author of Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books) and the forthcoming Under the Knife (Candor Arts).

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize, and A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco Books, 2018). Her poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, POETRY, The Literary Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, AWP’s WC&C Scholarship Competition, The Home School in Miami, the Aspen Institute, New York University, the University of Chicago, and Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. In 2017, she received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD student in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Chicago.

Our store is wheelchair accessible, however our bathrooms are not–there is a narrow hallway and sharp 90-degree turn on the way to our bathrooms. Seating is first-come, first-served, but we are happy to reserve seats for people with disabilities. Please call the store at 773-769-9299 the day of the event if you need a reserved seat or have additional questions.

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Tags: Chicago, Edgewater, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Eve L. Ewing, Franny Choi, Krista Franklin, Soft Science, Women & Children First Bookstore