Lecture
StoryStudio Chicago: 9th Annual Writers Festival - Keynote Address
Friday, August 14 6:30-7:30 pm Register Now Free; Registration Recommended
Kicking off StoryStudio Chicago’s annual StoryBoard Festival, the Driehaus Museum will host a special Friday evening keynote celebrating the craft of writing. Audiences are invited to join this hour-long program featuring award-winning author ’Pemi Aguda in conversation with StoryStudio Artistic Director Rebecca Makkai. Book signing will be available, and this event is free and open to the public! Join StoryStudio Chicago and the Driehaus Museum for an inspiring night of ideas, creativity, and community in the heart of Chicago’s cultural landscape.
StoryStudio is a nonprofit literary arts center whose goal is to build a writing community. Visit https://www.storystudiochicago.org/ for more details on writing classes and events!
About the Speaker
’Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.Her writing has won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, and the Writivism Prize. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship, a Juniper Summer Workshop scholarship, an Aspen Words Emerging Writer fellowship, and her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 Fiction Fellow with the Miami Book Fair, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, and is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine. Ghostroots, her debut story collection, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Awards in Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. W. W. Norton, Virago, and Masobe published Ghostroots in 2024, and will publish her novel in 2026.
