Get Creative (Writing) On Super Bowl Sunday

By Betsy Mikel in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 4, 2011 9:40PM

Trade pizza, beer and the HDTV this Sunday to hang out with some really smart women. WBEZ’s Off-Air Series is bringing writers Anita Chandwaney, Jane Hamilton, Parneshia Joness and Audrey Niffenegger together to discuss their individual creative writing processes. Eight Forty-Eight’s Alison Cuddy will play host to an evening that will include “personal video, real-time artistic creation and discussion about the context from which each of these writers construct their unique voices.” To us, that sounds like the writers will be speaking a lot of their personal experience in creative writing. Here’s some more information about the women who will be present, all of whom have been residents at Ragdale, an artist’s retreat North of Chicago where many writers escape to work:

Anita Chandwaney: A performer and playwright who was a finalist for Chicago Dramatists Many Voices Project with her first full-length play, Gandhi Marg, which won 2nd place in Writers Digest’s 75th Annual Stage Play Competition in 2007. Chandwaney’s monologue Helpline was part of Rasaka’s South-Asian American spin on The Vagina Monologues, titled Yoni ki Baat in 2009 & 2010.

Jane Hamilton: Her short stories have appeared in Harper's magazine. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel and was a selection of the Oprah Book Club. Her second novel, A Map of the World, was an international bestseller.

Parneshia Jones: She’s a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award and the Margaret Walker Short Story Award and is published in several anthologies. Jones is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, a collective of Black voices from Appalachia and has performed her work all over the United States.

Audrey Niffenegger: Trained as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Niffenegger then received her MFA from Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice. In 2003 she published The Time Traveler’s Wife, which has become an international best seller. Niffenegger’s second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, was published in 2009. Recently she made a serialized graphic novel for the London Guardian called The Night Bookmobile, which was published in book form in 2010.

Off-Air Series, Sunday February 6, 6 p.m., Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave., $12 for WBEZ members, $10 for students with valid ID via www.wbez.org/events