(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — The American Writers Museum in Chicago will mark its fifth anniversary later this year with a free, one-day event.
The American Writers Festival will be held May 15 at the museum, 180 N. Michigan Ave., and the nearby Chicago Cultural Center. More than 70 contemporary authors will discuss topics ranging from immigration to censorship to racism and equality in literature.
Among the panelists: Joy Harjo, Marie Arana, David W. Blight, Jabari Asim, Rebecca Makkai and John Scalzi. Peter Sagal, host of the NPR program “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me,” will be featured on a comedy writing panel.
“The heart and core of what we’re about has always been celebrating the great writers of the past but also promoting great writing of the present and that’s what the festival is for, but we do all of that with the notion of advancing the idea of inspiring the writers of the future,” museum president Carey Cranston told WBBM Newsradio’s Lisa Fielding on Tuesday.
“And we see it, when kids come in for field trips and they find a manual typewriter that they’ve never touched before and they get so excited,” he added. “The story we always tell is the seventh-grader who was typing on the typewriters and looked up and said, ‘This is amazing. It’s an automatic printer.’”
Admission fees will be waived May 15 and 16.
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