AUTHOR READING: Kathleen Rooney & Rachel Jamison Webster

Join us for a reading and conversation with the teaching artists leading this week’s fiction and nonfiction intensives: Kathleen Rooney and Rachel Jamison Webster.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary works in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (2017), Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (2020), and From Dust to Stardust (2023), and her latest poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in Fall of 2022 by Texas Review Press. Her debut picture book, Leaf Town Forever, co-written with her sister Beth Rooney, is forthcoming in Fall of 2025 and her fifth novel, Man Overboard!, will be released in Summer of 2026. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay, and teaches English and Creative Writing at DePaul University.

Rachel Jamison Webster is the author of four books of poetry and the nonfiction book, Benjamin Banneker and Us, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker and picked as an editor’s pick by The New York Times. Rachel writes about race, justice, ancestry, mystical women, grief, parenthood, and American history. Rachel has published essays in outlets including The Yale Review, Tin House, and the L.A. Review of Books.  Rachel’s book of poetry, Mary is a River, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2014, and her book of art collage and erasure poems, The Sea Came Up & Drowned, is being put to music and will be performed by the choral ensemble, The Crossing, in 2026. Rachel is a professor of Creative Writing in the English Department at Northwestern University. She lives in Evanston, IL, with her husband, the poet John McCarthy, and their daughter Adele.