Authors Electric

Latinx Chicago poet, author, professor Sánchez It's not easy being an American metropolis, forever hassled, baited and struggling to live up to the sometimes conflicting ideals of opportunity, freedom, enterprise, and cosmopolitanism. Urban dwellers like myself like to dream of their hometown being a center of creative arts, education, science, architecture, and enterprise. On days when the sunlight glistens off the lake and the splendid downtown towers, when festivals and budding trees announce early spring, and when the trains run on time, we glimpse the shining promise of our urban work-in-progress. Just as often we watch it fail miserably. We note its corruption, squalor, and violence on sorrowful, embarrassing display. Then, with little fanfare, we've also watched it rise - with little credit given - stubbornly from all manner of adversity, storm, strife, blunders, chicanery, and disease. In so doing we confound the naysayers who fear and loathe our urban ways as...

UT ponders process at AWM Six years in Chicago and I no longer feel like a tourist. Still, I like it when visitors come and give me an excuse to rubberneck the Windy City's attractions. I doubt this will wear off. I lived in San Francisco for 30 years and never tired of taking friends and family around, always discovering something new. I was ready for another round this July when my eldest daughter, Alicia and her husband Brian paid my inamorata Eleanor and I a visit, as they do from time to time. They were on their way home to Mexico City, where they run American and English literature programs at an international school, having done that sort of thing on four continents. They had just spent fortnight in Ireland visiting Brian's mother. Right off, Brian, an author and musician as well, announced in his lyrical Irish brogue: "I must see your Writers' Museum." "Writers' museum?" I hesitated. "I didn't know we had one." In fac...