Printers Row Lit Fest, the largest outdoor literary showcase in the Midwest, returns with 100% free programming for book lovers on Saturday, September 10 and Sunday, September 11, 2022 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Presented by the Near South Planning Board, the highly anticipated 2022 festival will be headlined by Pulitzer Prize winner and two-term United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, author of New York Times bestseller Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020), Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010), and five collections of poetry including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard (2006).
Trethewey will be awarded the 2022 Harold Washington Literary Award for her body of work at a dinner in her honor on Thursday, September 8 at the Union League Club of Chicago. Marking the 100 year anniversary of the birth of the late Chicago Mayor, Trethewey joins esteemed past recipients including Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, and Susan Sontag. Trethewey will open Printers Row Lit Fest on Saturday, September 10 at 10 a.m. on the main program stage.
Printers Row Lit Fest features new, old, rare, and hard-to-find literary treasures in tents stretching out over five blocks of Dearborn Street from Polk Street north to Ida B. Wells Drive in Chicago’s historic Printers Row neighborhood. More than 100,000 visitors are expected during this year’s festival, which will feature engaging and interactive literary events with local and national bestselling authors and more than 100 diverse booksellers—plus spoken word performances, readings, and writing workshops. This year’s festival features a dedicated poetry tent with programming by The Poetry Foundation working with individual authors and other poetry organizations.
Printers Row Lit Fest presents a multitude of events geared towards children and young adults, offering family-friendly fun and opportunities for writers and book lovers of all ages. This year’s festival also includes a workshop organized with Steppenwolf Theatre designed to inspire teens with exciting new ways to develop their creative writing and storytelling skills.
Wintrust is the premier sponsor for Printers Row Lit Fest. Major sponsors include Robert R. McCormick Foundation, Alphawood Foundation, The Poetry Foundation, Allstate, Chicago Public Library, 4th Ward Alderman Sophia King, Sourcebooks, Grace Episcopal Church, and Hotel Blake.
The 37th Printers Row Lit Fest takes place on Saturday, Sept. 10 and Sunday, Sept. 11 from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. daily. All festival programs are free and open to the public and take place rain or shine. For more information and the most up-to-date programming details, visit printersrowlitfest.org.
HEADLINE AUTHOR BIO
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Near South Planning Board, the founding sponsor of the Printers Row Lit Fest, is a not-for-profit community-based organization serving businesses, institutions, and property owners of the Near South Side of Chicago since 1946.