Celebrating its eighth year, the Guild Complex Women Writers Series continues to draw women, and men alike, from throughout the city. This year promises a wide range of talented women, culminating in October with the annual Women Writers Conference.
At the age of ten, ruth weiss and her family escaped the Nazi regime, fleeing from Berlin to Vienna, where she began her schooling and began to write poetry. Eventually the family fled to the states, first to New York, eventually settling in Chicago. The following years found ruth in school in Switzerland, hanging out with Kerouac in Greenwich Village, and scaling the Pyramid of the Sun outside Mexico City. She is the author of the journal COMPASS, and the poetry collection Gallery of Women. Her 1961 film, The Brink, was included in the Whitney Museum?s Beat Culture exhibit & Venice Biennale Film Festival in 1996. Big Smith is a percussion ensemble rooted in a deep love of women?s drumming and feminist political activism. They perform original and traditional drum compositions that mix African, Afro-Cuban, Latin, and Native American hand-drumming and mallet-drumming traditions with the group?s own energy and rhythms. The Women Writers Series is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.