The Reading Warehouse

"The Zora Neale Hurston of her generation." --Studio 360

"A truly rare cultural phenomenon: an artist who not only holds up a mirror to society, but makes herself a catalyst to change it." --Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the "Red Summer" of violence across the nation's cities, is an event that has shaped the last century but is widely unknown. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event--which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries--through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

Eve L. Ewing is a writer and an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. She is the author of Electric Arches and Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side.