An Evening with Writer & Poet Bob Katzman

Writer, poet, and Chicago storyteller Bob Katzman brings true stories, hard-earned wisdom, poetry, and grit to White Lilac.
About this Event

Robert M. “Bob” Katzman has lived the kind of life most writers would have to invent.

Born on Chicago’s South Side in 1950, Katzman is a writer, poet, storyteller, former newsstand owner, bookseller, magazine maven, and lifelong observer of the strange, tender, brutal, funny, and beautiful corners of human life. As a teenager, he ran away from home, built a tiny wooden newsstand in Hyde Park, and began a journey that would take him through Chicago’s old political machine, the rise and fall of independent print culture, hard-fought battles for principle, love, loss, survival, reinvention, and more than two dozen books of true stories and poems.

His work is not polished nostalgia. It is lived-in, direct, humane, and deeply personal — the voice of someone who has been knocked down repeatedly and still kept getting up, still kept noticing, still kept writing. Katzman writes about ordinary people, corrupt systems, childhood, friendship, Jewish life, queer rights, vanished Chicago, family, memory, endurance, and the stubborn belief that a life — even a battered one — still has meaning.

At The White Lilac, Katzman will join us for an intimate reading and talk: part poetry, part memoir, part Chicago history, part hard-earned wisdom. This is exactly the kind of evening our room was built for — no distance, no distraction, just a storyteller in front of a listening room, sharing the true things that only a long, complicated, fully lived life can teach.

Come hear Robert M. Katzman — writer, poet, survivor, and witness — for a night of stories that refuse to go quietly.