“My neighborhood was the world to me.”
Donnell Furlow, Rockwell Gardens
IPRH is giving away 50 free copies of Audrey Petty’s High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing, which documents the experiences of residents of Cabrini Green, the Robert Taylor Homes and other iconic housing projects in late 20th-century Chicago.
This book giveaway is in connection with an “IPRH Reads” book discussion on February 1. If you would like a free copy of the book, they are available for pick up at IPRH (Suite 400, Levis 919 W. Illinois, Urbana) Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. If you wish to call ahead, the number is 244-3344. Due to the limited number of books, we ask that only those intending to take part in the February 1 discussion pick up a book.
The book is based in oral histories that testify to the combination of neighborhood violence and community vitality that marked these building and the people who lived in them. We hear the pain and the laughter, the joy, the sorrow and the struggle of those who inhabited these towering monuments to an ideal of fair housing in postwar America that was never realized.
On February 1 at 7:30 p.m., we will be joined in our discussion by the book’s editor, Audrey Petty, a writer and educator whose fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared in many prestigious journals and anthologies. She is currently the Simon Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Fiction at Northwestern University.
This event is a “Public Square@Illinois” event as well as part of IPRH’s 2016–17 theme, “Publics,” which explores the changing nature of public spaces, ideas about the public, the future of public access, the importance of public histories and the variety of competing ideals that surround the very notion of the public as a commonplace or collective ideal.