Friday, October 16, 2026: Haunted Hemingway, Ghost Stories
Haunted Hemingway, Ghost Stories
7:00 - 9:00 PM
F@H's features the Hemingway Birthplace as a backdrop for an evening of literary ghost stories read by Chicago area writers. Featured authors will be announced as they are confirmed:
Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator and Core Faculty at StoryStudio, Chicago. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers University, Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the Story Prize, the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Lima is also a translator and a photographer. Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago and New York.
Juan Martinez is the author of the novel Extended Stay (Camino del Sol/University of Arizona Press, 2023) and the story collection Best Worst American (Small Beer Press, 2017). He lives near Chicago and is an associate professor at Northwestern University. His work has appeared most recently in McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, The Believer, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Sunday Morning Transport, Huizache, Ecotone, NIGHTMARE, McSweeney’s, NPR's Selected Shorts, Small Odysseys, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Sudden Fiction Latino, Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in the Latinx horror anthology Ghosts Where We Are From.
Joe Meno is a writer and cultural journalist who lives in Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize, he is the author of eight novels, Book of Extraordinary Tragedies, Marvel and a Wonder, Office Girl, The Great Perhaps, The Boy Detective Fails, Hairstyles of the Damned, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender as Hellfire. His short story collections are Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir and Demons in the Spring. His short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, One Story, Swink, LIT,TriQuarterly, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR. He is co-creator of Question Mark, OH and the creator of Star Witness, a seven part serial on Electric Literature. He was a contributing editor to Punk Planet, the seminal underground arts and politics magazine. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Toronto Star, Bomb Magazine, The Chicago Reader, New City, and Chicago Magazine.
Wendy Parris grew up in the Midwest loving books and hoping to glimpse a ghost. After graduating from Northwestern University with a bachelor’s degree in radio/television/film, she acted in Chicago storefront theaters, performed improv comedy, and freelanced in public relations. Now she writes spooky novels for kids. She is the author of JLG Gold Standard Selection Field of Screams (Delacorte Press, 2023) and 2025 Illinois Reads pick Stage Fright (Delacorte Press, 2024). Wendy spoke on the benefits of middle grade horror at both the 2025 American Library Association Annual Conference and the 2025 National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention. Visit her online at www.wendyparris.com.
