By The Literacy Volunteers of Illinois

Whether you’re new at volunteer tutoring or have been tutoring for years, whether you tutor teens or adults, there is always something for everyone at the annual On The Road to Literacy Conference.
This year’s event will be held on Saturday, April 12th, beginning at 9 a.m. at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Co-sponsors are the Literacy Volunteers of Illinois and the UIC Center for Literacy.
This year’s daylong session will feature 24 workshops whose speakers will be presenting strategies, techniques, materials and games to use to help tutors build their student’s vocabulary, pronunciation, conversation, comprehension, reading, writing, computer and computational skill.

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Posted on March 27, 2014

Nelson George Does The Deed

“In a publishing marketplace where 700 pages of text are not enough to encompass a movie star’s life or a presidential administration, The Hippest Trip in America manages, semi-miraculously, to compress more than 30 years of rapier-keen social history and street-savvy cultural criticism within 230-odd pages,” Gene Seymour writes for USA Today.
“The ‘trip’ chronicled in those pages by journalist-filmmaker Nelson George is the 1,117-episode run of Soul Train, the syndicated TV dance-and-music series. Its nationwide premiere in 1971 was perhaps the most auspicious signpost of a decade in which African-American culture, freed during the previous decade from the social and legal constraints of racial segregation, leapt to the forefront of mainstream pop as never before and, some might argue, never since.
“Soul Train, which ascended from humble beginnings as a local after-school program in Chicago to a phenomenon of national, if not global proportions, was in retrospect the cornerstone of this transformative era, setting the decade’s agenda for music, dance and fashion.”

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Posted on March 25, 2014

The Most Eloquent Voices In The City

Louder Than A Bomb wrapped up its annual month-long festival this weekend. Here are some of the highlights.
1. Chicago Social Movements.

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Posted on March 19, 2014

Plus: Home Remedies & Modern Masters

“The prostitution debate will get nowhere as long as women who sell sex are seen as victims to be ‘rescued’, their views ignored, argues a former sex worker in this extract from her new book,” the Guardian says.
Here’s the Chicago part (links added):
“Awareness-raising about prostitution is not a value-neutral activity. Sex workers see a straight line between foundation dollars earmarked for advertisements such as those that appeared on Chicago buses – Get Rich. Work In Prostitution. Pimps Keep The Profits, And Prostituted Women Often Pay With Their Lives – and the allocation of resources to the Chicago police to arrest pimps in order to save women whom they call ‘prostituted.’
“Inevitably, all of these women face arrest, no matter what they call them, a demonstration of the harm produced by awareness raising despite any good intentions.
“‘On paper, sex workers are still not as likely to face felony charges as their patrons,’ according to the Chicago Reporter, ‘who can be charged with a felony on their first offense under the Illinois Safe Children’s Act, which was enacted in 2010.’
“But when the paper examined felony arrest statistics they found, [the] data shows that prostitution-related felonies are being levied almost exclusively against sex workers. During the past four years, they made up 97% of the 1,266 prostitution-related felony convictions in Cook County. And the number only grew: felony convictions among sex workers increased by 68% between 2008 and 2011.

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Posted on March 17, 2014

Plus: Lindblom’s Plagiaree & Berwyn’s Mini Comic Con

“[Veronica Roth] penned her first bestselling novel Divergent while a senior at Northwestern University. It’s now premiering as an anticipated blockbuster of a film series, and she’s only 25.”

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Posted on March 14, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

“A 30-year-old webcomics artist who raised more than $50,000 on Kickstarter has burned the books his donors paid for because, he says, he ran out of money to ship them,” DNAinfo Chicago reports.
“In late February, John Campbell, who lives in Wicker Park, told his fans on the online crowdsourcing platform that ‘It’s Over’ and published a video of himself burning 127 copies of his book, Sad Pictures for Children.”
What a dick.

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Posted on March 12, 2014

The Kids Have Spoken

Hide your schools, hide your homes, hide your children, ’cause he’s wrecking it all.

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Posted on March 10, 2014

Plus: Economics For Humans & Literary Rock ‘N’ Roll

1. Split This Rock.
“The March 2014 issue of Poetry, now available online, presents 24 poems from 16 poets addressing history, society and current events, in a portfolio co-edited with Split This Rock, an organization that fosters a national network of socially engaged poets.

“Poetry can tell the true American story,” says Split This Rock executive director Sarah Browning. “We chose these writers from an ever-growing list of poets of provocation and witness whom we wildly admire. Surely we are living in a golden age of American poetry. And at its glittering center, leading the way, are poets of conscience such as those gathered here.”

“Joy Harjo, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dunya Mikhail and Anne Waldman are among the poets included in this special portfolio.”

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Posted on March 4, 2014