Water Street Writers is a curated reading series featuring local authors from the suburbs of Chicago. Events are held quarterly in the Dempsey Family gallery. Doors open at 5pm, event begins at 5:30pm. Suggested donation of $5. All proceeds go to the featured authors, your support is much appreciated! Learn more about this month’s featured authors below. Interested in being a featured author? Visit the Water Street Writers website to learn more, or join us for the open mic after the featured authors!
Sandra Marchetti is the 2023 winner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, DIORAMA, from Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2025), Aisle 228 (SFA Press, 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry and essays appear widely in Mid-American Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine. Sandy earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from George Mason University and now serves as the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in Chicagoland. You can find out more at: https://sandramarchetti.net/
Playwright, author, and history geek Donna Latham’s over the moon to be back at Water Street Writers. Her plays have been produced coast to coast and around the world. AND WE WILL SHARE THE SKY received the Kennedy Center Mark David Cohen Playwriting Award, and ALL THE WAY BACK received the Prize for Climate Justice. Donna grew up in a haunted house in the wilds of Chicagoland and has been obsessed with spooky stuff forever. She’s a proud member of the Dramatists Guild.
Heather Lynn is an interdisciplinary artist who combines writing, dance, visual art, myth, and ritual. She has written and directed the musical Templehead and the play Genesis & Nemesis. She has been self publishing her writing for over 30 years, most recently “Divine Hustle” in 2023 and “Love Letters for Nesting Dolls” in 2024.
Cathy Borders is the author of The Tarot for Writing Project and A Suburb of Monogamy. Her latest, Robin Williams Is My Uncle: And Other Stories We Possess, is a work of autotheory about alienation, the uncanny, and epigenetics told through the lens of Robin Williams’s children’s movies, fairy tales, feminism, and the death of her beloved cat. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School in New York and a Bachelor’s degree in English literature and critical theory from the University of Iowa. Cathy is a book midwife, story therapist, and also the founder of The Republic of Letters and Water Street Writers. You can find out more at CathyBorders.com.