NPL will be closed Thursday, July 4 for the Independence Day holiday. Our Fell Avenue lot bookdrop and off-site bookdrops will remain available. We will reopen at 9 am on July 5.
Poet Mike Puican and poet and fiction writer Mary Hawley, a married couple from Chicago, will read poems and short fiction in our guest writer series, supported by the Normal Public Library Foundation.
Mike Puican’s debut book of poetry, Central Air, will be released by Northwestern Press in August, 2020. He has had poems in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, and New England Review among others, and he won the 2004 Tia Chucha Press Chapbook Contest for his chapbook, 30 Seconds. Mike was a member of the 1996 Chicago Slam Team, and is a long-time board member of the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. Currently, he teaches poetry to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals at the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center and St. Leonard’s House.
Mary Hawley is a poet, fiction writer, and translator. She is the author of a poetry collection, Double Tongues (Tia Chucha Press), and her poems and short stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Fifth Wednesday, Easy Street, Spoon River Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Mudlark, and The Bloomsbury Review. She translates poetry from Spanish to English, and currently helps coordinate Palabra Pura, the bilingual reading series of the Guild Literary Complex. She is a Goodreads author and received a 2019 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for her short story “Skies of Blue.”