EXHIBIT B: A Literary Variety Show

Join us on Thursday, May 25th, as Exhibit B brings the show to Pilsen Community Books featuring performances from Chad Morgan, Crystal Vance Guerra, Parker Young, and Christie Valentin-Bati.

Artist Bios:

Christie Valentin-Bati is a hybrid poet and photographer interested in the beauty and horrors of everyday life. Unofficially, she's just a suburban kid from Florida, now transplanted to Chicago with too many plants to water. Her work has twice received an honorable mention in the Academy of American Poets Eileen Lannan Poetry Contest, has been commissioned by the ACLU of IL, won runner-up in Columbia University's Black History Month Special Issue Contest, and exhibited in Davis Street Drawing Room and Porous Gallery. She is a Poet-in-Residence at Chicago Poetry Center and Teaching Artist at Young Chicago Authors, Hugo House, and 826Chi.

Crystal Vance Guerra is a chicana poet, historian, and educator based in and between Chicago and Mexico City. Her art is latinamericanist in root, often Spanglish in expression, and written to be read aloud. Vance Guerra is also the founder of Chicago’s only poetry slam in Spanish, Slam Diáspora, which brings together Latinx poets in the U.S. and Latinamerican poets across South America and the Caribbean, to foster unity between our poetic communities. Her writing has been honored with several prizes in poetry festivals both in Mexico and the U.S. and she continues to lead poetry workshops on both sides of the border. Her work has been published in Acentos Review, Contratiempo, and Mono Ediciones.

Chad Morgan is the author of the full-length collection, "Chad Morgan & Other Poems" and the chapbook "What Slaughter in the Garden of Beauty—!" They live in Chicago.

Parker Young's debut short story collection, Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane, is due out on May 24 from Future Tense Books. His fiction has appeared in No Contact, X-R-A-Y, HAD, Always Crashing, Bluestem, Juked, and elsewhere.