Join us for an exciting evening with noted spoken word artist Willie Perdomo. He will perform along with members of Young Chicago Authors and Café Teatro Batey Urbano, followed by a lively conversation with the audience.

Spoken word artist Willie Perdomo is rapidly gaining national recognition as one of the new voices to emerge from the Nuyorican Poets Café. His work has been featured on PBS and HBO, and he is the author of several collections of poetry including his debut, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, which invites the reader to “hang out” in the ‘hood as he bears witness to life in East Harlem. His other collections of poetry include Postcards of El Barrio, Smoking Lovely, and Visiting Langston–a children’s picture book introduction to the legendary Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. Perdomo received the 1996 New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship and the 2001 NYFA Poetry Fellowship.

This event is co-sponsored by Young Chicago Authors, the Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rican Cultural Center, and the Chicago Public Library Humboldt Park Branch.

This event is part of The Public Square at the IHC’s Know More: Conversations That Matter series. The Know More series is designed to bridge the gap between the arts and social issues that are of current concern to Chicago’s Englewood and Humboldt Park communities. It is made possible by a grant from The Joyce Foundation. Programming for Know More has included visits from hip hop scholar Jeff Chang; Africana Studies scholar William Santiago-Valles; journalist Laura Washington; performer Will Power; and poet Elizabeth Alexander.

For more information, please call 312.422.5580.