September 28, 2014, Sunday - Second Story Reading Series: Julie Schumacher and Molly Backes at The Loft

Time: 2:00pm

Location: The Loft at Open Book (Performance Hall), 1011 Washington Ave S

Second Story Reading Series: Julie Schumacher and Molly Backes 

The Loft’s Second Story Reading Series for young adult and middle grade authors celebrates its sixth season with a bout of girl power.

Julie Schumacher grew up in Wilmington, Delaware and graduated from Oberlin College and Cornell University. Her first published story, “Reunion,” written to fulfill an undergraduate writing assignment (“tell a family tale”) was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1983. Subsequent stories were published in The Atlantic, MS, Minnesota Monthly, and Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards (1990 and 1996). Her first novel, The Body Is Water, was published by Soho Press in 1995 and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Minnesota Book Award. It was published in translation in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Israel, Greece, and Korea. Her other books include a short story collection, An Explanation for Chaos, and five books for younger readers: The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (2012), Black Box (2008), The Book of One Hundred Truths (2006), The Chain Letter (2005), and Grass Angel (2004), all from Delacorte. Ms. Schumacher lives in Saint Paul and is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of Minnesota.

M. Molly Backes is the author of the young adult novel The Princesses of Iowa (Candlewick Press, 2012). She writes the “Writing Tips” column for The Prairie Wind (the newsletter of the Illinois Chapter of SCBWI), and has performed her personal essays at reading series across Chicago including Essay Fiesta, Funny Ha-Ha, Sunday Salon, and Is This a Thing? An accomplished teacher, she runs creative writing workshops for adults and teens in Chicago and across the Midwest. Her teaching career began in rural New Mexico, where she got all 135 of her seventh and eighth grade students to write novels for National Novel Writing Month. She moved to Chicago in 2007 and spent five years as the assistant director of StoryStudio Chicago, a creative writing studio on Chicago’s north side. She now works as an editor by day and writer by night and spends her free time hanging out with her retired racing greyhound, Zia. Follow her on Twitter at @mollybackes.