Young Chicago Authors

YCA’s Annual Open House. Come visit us and find out everything you need to know about YCA’s programs for the upcoming school year. Are you or your students interested in songwriting programs, poetry writing workshops, open mics, or participating in our upcoming Rooted + Radical poetry festival? Get all the information you need at our Open House.

You can expect special performances of poetry, rap, live art, live beats, and more by our Youth Ambassador Cohort. We’ll also be hosting an alumni Q&A panel with artists who have graduated from our space and have made a positive impact through their artistic professions. This is a chance for youth, parents, educators, and community members to see the ways YCA can impact career trajectories of our youth. Our entire staff will be there with info tables. We’ll be doing giveaways of t-shirts, bookmarks, buttons, books, and more! Lunch and snacks will be provided.

**Please note that we do not have a parking lot. Free residential parking on certain side streets and certain parts of Division are available. Paid parking on Milwaukee can be found in front of our space. Please make sure to read the street signs.”

Reminder: Writing Teachers Collective is tomorrow 8/10!
WTC Picnic in the Park
Hosted & Facilitated by
Chima "Naira" Ikoro & Robin Reid Drake
Saturday, August 10
11am - 2pm
Meet in
Ping Tom Memorial Park
1700 W. Wentworth Ave.
WTC Picnic In the Park is an invitation to the entire Writing Teachers Collective community to come together to eat, enjoy the remaining days of summer and engage in a generative writing workshop and reflective conversation about our experiences, needs and aspirations as teachers for the year to come. WTC holds space for writing teachers of all kinds throughout the school year and this relaxing final session to our Summer Series is an opportunity to remind each other of the solidarity we are capable of even when caught in the rush of the school year.
Chima “Naira” Ikoro (she/they) is an interdisciplinary writer and first-generation Nigerian from the South Side of Chicago. Naira is currently a teaching artist at Young Chicago Authors, where she spent many of her formative years as a student. Through programs such as Check The Method, Wordplay, and YCA’s internship formerly known as Bomb Squad, the city’s artist community has always been her home. She created the Community Organizing beat at South Side Weekly, and is currently The Weekly’s Community Builder, where she started The Exchange, The Weekly’s poetry corner. She received her bachelor’s in Film with a minor in Environmental Studies from Columbia College Chicago. Alongside her friends, Naira co-founded a mutual aid abolitionist collective called Blck Rising, and she continues to root all her work in caring for and connecting to the communities she belongs to.
Robin Reid Drake is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary poet, filmmaker, and educator originally from Greensboro, North Carolina. Their writing has been published in Foglifter, DREGINALD, UnderStory Quarterly, and Poetry Magazine, among others. They have received fellowships and residencies from the Ragdale Foundation, the Elsewhere Living Arts Museum, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Drake currently teaches in Chicago Public Schools through Young Chicago Authors. They have taught across the country for organizations such as Hugo House (Seattle, WA) and Pendle Hill (Philadelphia, PA) and also the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they received their MFA.

This summer, WTC invites writing educators to build community by activating three different locations around Chicago with their poetry and pedagogy.

Our July session invites attendees to participate in a generative, interdisciplinary poetry workshop facilitated by the one and only E'mon Lauren .

E'mon's workshop, "Ekphrastics & Portraiture," will have attendees engage and respond to the exhibition "Images on Which to Build," on display at the Cultural Center's Michigan Avenue Galleries. After experiencing & discussing the exhibit, participants will produce their own ekphrastic self-portrait, a poetic self portrait which responds to a work of art in the exhibit.

Register to Attend "Ekphrastics & Portraiture" with the link in Bio!
Meet in the South Lobby of Chicago Cultural Center (Washington St. Entrance)
Pack or plan to pick up a lunch!

E’mon Lauren was named Chicago’s first Youth Poet Laureate. Her work unpacks her coined philosophy of “hood-womanism." She is an artist and educator from the Wes and Souf side of Chicago and has been featured in Vogue Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune. Her work has appeared in the BreakBeat Poets Anthology series, Volumes 1 & 2, Poetry Magazine, The Reader, South Side Weekly and elsewhere. She is host of her hit talk show, “The Real Hoodwives of Chicago’’, produced by her production company, BlkHoneyBun Productions, LLC. Her first chapbook of poems, ”COMMANDO," was published by Haymarket Books.
Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s presents a range of photographic practices that used the medium as a tool for collectivity and empowerment within interconnected le***an, trans, and q***r grassroots organizing. This exhibition reveals the technologies through which influential image cultures were constructed and circulated. The exhibition presents a range of photographic practices to explore the process of learning within alternative schools, workshops, demonstrations, dance clubs, slideshow presentations, correspondences, and community-based archive projects.

Stay tuned for more details about our August workshop with Aricka Foreman coming soon!