BILL DALEY Interviews
KATHLEEN ROONEY

DEMOCRACY
LILLIAN BOXFISH
& What I learned from
SENATOR
DURBIN

Tuesday, March 21, 2017
The Lounge at Iwan Ries, 19 South Wabash Ave.
Cocktails at 5:30, with the presentation at 6:00 for about thirty minutes,
followed by Q&A and general cocktail conversation. 
Reservations are required.

Kathleen Rooney's debut novel, O, Democracy!, was published in 2014 by Fifth Star Press.
It’s late spring of 2008, and one of Illinois’s two Democratic senators is poised to become the next president of the United States. Colleen Dugan works for the other one—not on Capitol Hill, but in a Chicago skyscraper that overlooks Lake Michigan, among coworkers with little to do but field calls from angry constituents while the future of the nation gets decided elsewhere.  In the coming weeks Colleen will navigate the perils of costumed protesters, thuggish union reps, vacuous interns, trifling bureaucrats, dirty tricks by the Senator’s Republican rival, and the unexpected discovery of a scandalous secret that will give her the power to change the course of the election and shape her own fate—though not necessarily for the better.
The Los Angeles Review said, "O, Democracy! challenges in the best way. Intelligently plotted, self-aware and knowing, it refuses to be enamored of its cleverness or satisfied with pointing out the idiosyncrasies of its subject. Kathleen Rooney, a former Hill staffer, was fired for an autobiographical essay collection, For You, For You, I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2009), that drew upon her experiences in Dick Durbin’s office. Now a professor of creative writing at DePaul University, she is still as merciless in lambasting reader expectations and still is troubled by the bleed between life, art, and work."

Her latest novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, just came out this January. Booklist says, ""Rooney's delectably theatrical fictionalization is laced with strands of tart poetry and emulates the dark sparkle of Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Truman Capote. Effervescent with verve, wit, and heart, Rooney’s nimble novel celebrates insouciance, creativity, chance, and valor."

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand.

A winner of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine, she is the author of six books of poetry and nonfiction including, most recently, the novel in poems Robinson Alone (Gold Wake Press, 2012), based on the life and work of Weldon Kees and winner of the Eric Hoffer Prize for Poetry, the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010), and the art modeling memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (University of Arkansas Press, 2009). Her first book is Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (University of Arkansas Press, 2005), and her first poetry collection, Oneiromance (an epithalamion) won the 2007 Gatewood Prize from the feminist publisher Switchback Books.

Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, BITCH, Coldfront, the Rumpus, Allure, the Chicago Tribune, The Nation, and elsewhere. With Elisa Gabbert, she is the author of That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008) and the chapbook The Kind of Beauty That Has Nowhere to Go (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013).






About the Cigar Society of Chicago

ONE OF THE OLDEST AND greatest traditions of the city clubs of Chicago is the discussion of intellectual, social, legal, artistic, historical, scientific, musical, theatrical, and philosophical issues in the company of educated, bright, and appropriately provocative individuals, all under the beneficent influence of substantial amounts of tobacco and spirits.  The Cigar Society of Chicago embraces this tradition and extends it with its Informal Smokers, University Series lectures, and Cigar Society Dinners, in which cigars, and from time to time pipes and cigarettes, appear as an important component of our version of the classical symposium.  To be included in the Cigar Society's mailing list, write to the secretary at curtis.tuckey@logicophilosophicus.org.