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Pilsen Community Books welcomes Exhibit B for their latest variety show featuring Julie Iromuanya, Erica Stern, Kenyatta Rogers and Sam Heaps.

Julie Iromuanya is the author of A Season of Light (Algonquin Books 2025) and Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press 2015), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. Her scholarly-critical work most recently appears in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters; Afropolitan Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury Publishing), and the Georgia Review. She is a 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation fellow, and she was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. Iromuanya earned her Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an assistant professor for the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago and affiliate faculty of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. http://julieiromuanya.com

Erica Stern is the author of Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story (Barrelhouse). Her work has been published in The Iowa Review, The Sun, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has received support for her writing from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A New Orleans native, she lives with her family in Evanston, Illinois.

Kenyatta Rogers is a Cave Canem Fellow and has been twice awarded scholarships from the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. He has also been nominated twice for both Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, his work has been published in Jubilat, Vinyl, Bat City Review, The Volta and PANK, among others. He teaches at The Chicago High School for the Arts and is the co-host of the Sunday Reading Series with Simone Muench. He lives in Chicago.

Sam Heaps is a labor organizer based in Philadelphia, where they teach writing at Temple University. Their first book, Proximity, a memoir about sex and power, was released through Clash Books in 2023. Sarah Gerard wrote that it “pulses with pain and desire, requires total abandonment, and demands that we take pleasure in the way it wounds us.” Juliet Escoria called it a “dizzying, heartbreaking punch to the gut masterwork.” Heaps has received support from Tin House, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Gullkistan Residency. Heaps has lived and worked all over the world including in Tokyo, Hanoi, Kathmandu, and Istanbul, but was raised poor and Mormon in North Idaho. The Living god draws from that lived experience.