This April, we're celebrating Independent Bookstore Day, National Poetry Month & more!

April 2024

Dear Friends of Women & Children First,

Mark your calendars! Start planning your route! The annual Chicagoland Bookstore Crawl returns on Saturday, April 27! This wildly popular event coincides with our favorite day of the year: Independent Bookstore Day! With exclusive swag, giveaways, treats, special programming, and more, it's a great day to show your favorite indie some love and discover new stores that you've been meaning to check out. Read all the way to the end of the newsletter for all the details on this year's crawl.

Our April events calendar is blooming with brilliant programming, including several readings in celebration of National Poetry Month! We can't wait to see you in the store.

With love & books,

W&CF

We love Libro.fm, the audiobook company that shares its profits with independent bookstores! They're having an Indie Bookstore Day sale from April 22-28, with markdowns on bestselling audiobooks. That week, new members can also get a free audiobook credit when they start a monthly membership using the code READLOCAL! It's time to #maketheswitch and ditch Amazon-owned Audible and support your favorite indie instead!

COMING SOON! Your local feminist bookstore will be back open 7 days a week!

Starting April 15th, we'll be open for in-store browsing on Mondays from Noon to 6 p.m.

Women & Children First on WBEZ!

In honor of Women's History Month, we were invited to join WBEZ's Reset podcast to talk about our roots and evolution. Our co-founder Linda Bubon along with our co-owners Lynn and Sarah had such a wonderful time at the Navy Pier studios, chatting with Sasha-Ann Simons. In case you missed it, listen now!

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April Events

Thursday, April 4 at 7 p.m. CT

In-person Poetry Reading: Butt Stuff Flower Bush by Sam Herschel Wein

Women & Children First

Please join us for an in-person event to celebrate the poetry chapbook Butt Stuff Flower Bush by Sam Herschel Wein! For this event, Wein will read with Kemi Alabi, RE Katz, and Kabel Mishka Ligot.

Wein’s Butt Stuff Flower Bush is a joyous, vulnerable, fantastically gay chapbook of poems that dance through sex, relationships, trauma, healing, and hunger. It has its share of tears, and there’s joy too. Eat, want, sing, survive, flirt.

Friday, April 5 at 7 p.m. CT

In-person Event: The Break-up Lists by Adib Khorram

in conversation with Caleb Roehrig

Women & Children First

Join us in welcoming bestselling author Adib Khorram to celebrate the release of The Break Up Lists! For this event, Adib will be joined in conversation by Caleb Roehrig.

Jackson Ghasnavi is a lot of things—a techie, a smoothie afficionado, a totally not obsessive list-maker—but one thing he’s not is a romantic. And why would he be? He’s already had a front row seat to his parents’ divorce and picked up the pieces of his sister Jasmine’s broken heart one too many times.

No, Jackson is perfectly happy living life behind the scenes—he is a stage manager, after all—and keeping his romantic exploits limited to the breakup lists he makes for Jasmine, which chronicle every flaw (real or imagined) of her various and sundry exes.

Wednesday, April 10 at 7 p.m. CT

In-person Event: dear elia by Mimi Khúc

in conversation with Sandie Yi

Women & Children First

Please join us in welcoming Mimi Khúc to celebrate the release of dear elia: Letters from Asian American Abyss. For this event, Mimi will be joined in conversation by Sandie Yi.

In dear elia Mimi Khúc revolutionizes how we understand mental health. Khúc traces the contemporary Asian American mental health crisis from the university into the maw of the COVID-19 pandemic, reenvisioning mental health through a pedagogy of unwellness--the recognition that we are all differentially unwell. In an intimate series of letters, she bears witness to Asian American unwellness up close and invites readers to recognize in it the shapes and sources of their own unwellness. Khúc draws linkages between student experience, the Asian immigrant family, the adjunctification of the university, and teaching methods pre- and post-COVID-19 to illuminate hidden roots of our collective unwellness: shared investments in compulsory wellness and meritocracy. She reveals the university as a central node and engine of unwellness and argues that we can no longer do Asian American studies without Asian American mental health--and vice versa. Interspersed throughout the book are reflective activities, including original tarot cards, that enact the very pedagogy Khúc advances, offering readers alternative ways of being that divest from structures of unwellness and open new possibilities for collective care.

Thursday, March 11 at 7 p.m. CT

In-person Event: The Stone Home by Crystal Hana Kim

in conversation with Julia Fine

Women & Children First

Join us in welcoming Crystal Hana Kim back to the bookstore to celebrate the release of The Stone Home. For this event, Crystal will be joined in conversation by Julia Fine.

A hauntingly poetic family drama and coming-of-age story that reveals a dark corner of South Korean history through the eyes of a small community living in a reformatory center—a stunning work of great emotional power from the critically acclaimed author of If You Leave Me.

In 2011, Eunju Oh opens her door to greet a stranger: a young Korean American woman holding a familiar-looking knife—a knife Eunju hasn’t seen in thirty years, and that connects her to a place she’d desperately hoped to leave behind forever.

Friday April 12 at 7 p.m. CT

In-person Poetry Reading: Glass Jaw by Raisa Tolchinsky

in conversation with Rachel Dewoskin

Women & Children First

Please join us for an in-person poetry reading celebrating Glass Jaw by Raisa Tolchinsky! The author will be in conversation with Rachel DeWoskin.

Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Glass Jaw is a gripping, Dantaen rendering of a young woman's physical and spiritual trials in the boxing ring.

Striking and big-hearted, Glass Jaw depicts the grit and glamor of women’s boxing based on the poet's time training as a fighter in New York City. Beginning on the ropes, fighting back against the limitations of gender, Raisa Tolchinsky situates us within the dynamic context of the boxing gym, through both a chorus of named women boxers and a single fighter battling for her selfhood. In a Dantean reimagining, we follow the boxer as she descends into the hellish “rings” of an abusive relationship with her coach. In a count-down from 34 to 1, sputtering at times, the fighter gets closer and closer to the heart of her brutal, solitary metamorphosis. Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Glass Jaw explores a quest as spiritual as it is physical through poems that are muscular, musical, ecstatic.

Thursday, April 18 at 7 p.m. CT

Book Launch Event: Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlon

in conversation with Lauren Michele Jackson

Women & Children First

Women & Children First is excited to welcome Suzanne Scanlon and celebrate the release of Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen. For this event, Suzanne will be joined in conversation by Lauren Michele Jackson.

A raw and masterful memoir about becoming a woman and going mad—and doing both at once.

When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

After nearly three years and countless experimental treatments, Suzanne left the ward on shaky legs. In the decades it took her to recover from the experience, Suzanne came to understand her suffering as part of something larger: a long tradition of women whose complicated and compromised stories of self-actualization are reduced to “crazy chick” and “madwoman” narratives. It was a thrilling discovery, and she searched for more books, more woman writers, as the journey of her life converged with her journey through the literature that shaped her.

Friday, April 19 at 7 p.m. CT

In-Person Book Launch: Reader, I by Corey Van Landingham

in conversation with Richie Hoffman

Women & Children First

Please join us for a poetry reading celebrating Reader, I by Corey Van Landingham! The author will be reading with Richie Hofmann!

Reader, I draws its title from the conclusion to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "Reader, I married him." Spanning the first years of a marriage, the speaker in Reader, I both courts and eschews nuptial myths, as its speaker--tender and callous, skeptical and hopeful, daughter and lover--finds a role for herself in marriage, in history, in something beyond the self. While these poems burn with a Plathian fire, they also address and invite in a reader who is, as in Jane Eyre, a confidant. Steeped in a world of husbands and fathers, patriarchal nations and power structures, Reader, I traverses bowling alleys and hospital rooms, ancient Troy and public swimming pools, to envision domestic life as a metaphor for civic life, and vice versa.

Sunday, April 21 at 10:30 a.m. CT

In-person Story time: Drag Story Hour!

Women & Children First

Join us for our monthly Drag Story Hour with our beloved hostess Amanda Lynn!

Story time is designed for ages 2 & up, but everyone is welcome! All children must be accompanied by at least one caregiver.
Preregistration is required and masks are required for everyone age 3 & up. Please register for everyone in your party, including kids.

Drag Story Hour celebrates reading through the glamorous art of drag. Each chapter network creates diverse, accessible, and culturally inclusive family programming where kids can express their authentic selves and become bright lights of change in their communities.

Monday, April 22 at 7 p.m. CT

In-person Event: We Are the Culture: Black Chicago's Influence on Everything by Arionne Nettles

in conversation with Atavia Reed

Women & Children First

Please join us in welcoming Arionne Nettles to celebrate the release of We Are the Culture: Black Chicago's Influence on Everything. For this event, Arionne will be joined in conversation by journalist Atavia Reed.

During the Great Migration, more than a half-million Black Americans moved from the South to Chicago, and with them, they brought the blues, amplifying what would be one of the city’s greatest musical artforms. In 1958, the iconic Johnson Publishing Company, the voice of Black America, launched the Ebony Fashion Fair show, leading to the creation of the first makeup brand for Black skin. For three decades starting in the 1970s, households across the country were transported to a stage birthed in Chicago as they moved their hips in front of TV screens airing Soul Train.

Wednesday, April 24 at 7 p.m. CT

In-person Event: Evil Eyes Sea by Özge Samanci

Women & Children First

Please join us in celebrating the release of Evil Eyes Sea by Özge Samanci!

This fictional graphic novel narrates a mystery story set in Istanbul before the 1995-96 elections. The story takes place against a background of political propaganda; a conservative party is rising to power using religion to appeal to voters cynically.

The main protagonists, Ece and Meltem, are engineering students at Bosphorus University and in financial distress. Ece and Meltem fantasize about having the powerful gaze of Medusa and amuse themselves with efforts to move objects with their eyes. They also share a passion for scuba diving as members of the Student Diving Club.

Thursday, April 25 at 7 p.m. CT

In-person Event: Punk Rock Karaoke by Bianca Xunise

in conversation with Sage Coffey

Women & Children First

We are excited to welcome Bianca Xunise to celebrate the release of PUNK ROCK KARAOKE! For this event, Bianca will be joined in conversation by Sage Coffey.

A debut graphic novel from Ignatz Award–winning and nationally syndicated cartoonist, Bianca Xunise.

When life gives you guitars, smash them!

School is out for summer and Ariel Grace Jones is determined to make it one for the books! Together with their bestie bandmates, Michele and Gael, Ariel believes they’re destined to break into the music industry and out of Chicago’s Southside by singing lead in their garage punk band, Baby Hares.

ALL DAY

Independent Bookstore Day!

Chicagoland

Yet again, Chicagoland proves itself to be the dream destination for book lovers and readers of all ages! More than 40 independent bookstores in the greater Chicago area—from Lake Forest to Beverly, and Naperville to the Loop—are collaborating on our annual Chicagoland Bookstore Crawl, which encourages book lovers to indulge in bookstore tourism by visiting 10 or more stores in a single day. Check out the map to plan your day

The annual challenge is being held again on Independent Bookstore Day (IBD), which is a one-day national party celebrating indie book stores on the last Saturday in April. Each store creates its own unique events—including special kids’ story times, exclusive swag, contests, giveaways, and special sales.

Need a lift? Join the crawl in stylish ease, by buying IBD Bus Crawl tickets HERE!