Growing Up Chicago

by David Schaafsma (Editor), Lauren DeJulio Bell (Editor), Roxanne Pilat (Editor), Luis Alberto Urrea (Foreword by), Samira Ahmed (Contribution by)

Overview

Growing Up Chicago is a collection of coming-of-age stories that reflects the diversity of the city and its metropolitan area. Primarily memoir, the book collects work by writers who spent their formative years in the region to ask: What characterizes a Chicago author? Is it a certain feel to the writer’s language? A narrative sensibility? The mention of certain neighborhoods or locales? Contributors to the volume include renowned writers Ana Castillo, Stuart Dybek, Emil Ferris, Charles Johnson, Rebecca Makkai, Erika L. Sánchez, and George Saunders, as well as emerging talents. While the authors represented here write from distinct local experiences, some universals emerge, including the abiding influence of family and friends and the self-realizations earned against the background of a place sparkling with promise and riven by inequality, a place in constant flux.

The stories evoke childhood trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, nighttime games of ringolevio, and the giant neon Magikist lips that once perched over the expressway, sharing perspectives that range from a young man who dreams of becoming an artist to a single mother revisiting her Mexican roots, from a woman’s experience with sexual assault to a child’s foray into white supremacy. This book memorably explores culture, social identity, and personal growth through the eyes of Chicagoans, affirming that we each hold the ability to shape the places in which we live and write and read as much as those places shape us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810143685
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	05/15/2022
Series:	Second to None: Chicago Stories
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	667,885
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

DAVID SCHAAFSMA is a professor of English and director of the Program in English Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The author of several books on teaching and learning in high school and college English classrooms, he is the editor of Jane Addams in the Classroom and coeditor of Literacy and Democracy: Composition Studies and Literacy in Pursuit of Habitable Spaces; Further Conversations from the Students of Jay Robinson.

ROXANNE PILAT holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MA in writing from DePaul University. Previously a secondary school instructor, journalist, and corporate communications consultant, she teaches at North Central College and Dominican University. Her work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Hummingbird Review, Windows, and in the anthology Italian Women in Chicago: Madonna mia! QUI debbo vivere? She is a founding editor of the literary journal Packingtown Review.

LAUREN DEJULIO BELL teaches in the Honors College at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She previously taught in the UIC English Department and the Chicago Public Schools district. She serves on the associate board of StoryStudio Chicago and leads a local project (We Are All Chicago), where she engages with the people of Chicago to foster civic engagement, community writing, and artistic endeavors. A paper she coauthored, “Turning Schools Inside Out: Connecting Schools and Communities through Public Arts and Literacies,” was published in the Journal of Language and Literacy Education.

Table of Contents

Foreword                                         
Luis Alberto Urrea

Introduction                            
Roxanne Pilat, David Schaafsma, Lauren DeJulio Bell

1. Chicago                              
Daiva Markelis

2. Between Boys                    
Anne Calcagno
 
3. Running Girl                       
Nnedi Okorafor
 
4. Vigil                                     
Stuart Dybek
 
5. All-American Boy               
David Mura                
           
6. Excerpt from Love, Hate and Other Filters
Samira Ahmed
 
7. Planet Rock                         
Dhana-Marie Branton
 
8. White Power                        
Christian Picciolini     
 
9. Dillinger                             
Jessie Ann Foley
 
10. Mothman                             
Emil Ferris
 
11. Excerpt from I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
Erika Sánchez

12. Detention                            
James McManus
 
13. The Untouchables               
Maxine Chernoff
 
14. Discovering My Femininity in Menswear
M Shelly Conner

15. Death of a Right Fielder     
Stuart Dybek
 
16. My Mother’s Mexico         
Ana Castillo
 
17. My Father’s Pillowtalk       
Charles Johnson
 
18. The Power and Limitations of Victim-Impact Statements
Rebecca Makkai

19. Grave News                        
Saja Elshareif
 
20. During the Reign of Vytautis the Great”                      
Daiva Markelis

21. Children of the Fifty-Sixers: Growing Up in Hungarian Chicago”
Rebecca Makkai

22. Growing Up in Chicago      
Tony Romano
 
23. The View From the South Side, 1970              
George Saunders

Biographies
Acknowledgments
Credits           

Editorial Reviews

A literary guide to the soul of this great, burly place.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, from the foreword

“An entertaining and touching tumble of sexual awakenings, identity quests, dangerous liaisons, early sorrows, boundary crossings, and 16-inch softball. There’s a different Chicago in each piece—the city serves as witness, backdrop, companion, solace. This ethnically, racially, and geographically diverse collection takes us to a snowy Chicago alley, a suburban living room, Catholic school, playgrounds and fields, buses and subways, the Art Institute, and a gas station in its explorations of the private and dramatic world of childhood and adolescence. This accomplished collection reminds us that childhood is never safe, but it is also wondrous and raw.” —S.L. Wisenberg, author of The Adventures of Cancer Bitch 

From the Publisher