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Motoworks Chicago Motorcycle Mania Finalists: Federal Moto, Dainese

A list of new and recently released books from Chicago authors or publishers, plus some books you might have missed when they first came out. Her Word is Bond: Navigating Hip-Hop and Relationships in a Culture of Misogyny by Cristalle “Psalm One” Bowen (August 2021, Haymarket Books) NONFICTION CHILDREN/YOUNG ADULT ICYMI (some titles you may have missed on their initial release) How Did We Get Here? by Sterling Bartlett (February 2021, First to Knock)

Say what you will about 2020, but it was a year for people in Chicago to make their own agendas and to control their own destinies. Chicago organizers took action not just for themselves, but for young people growing up in the city, especially in Black and Brown neighborhoods. In the face of adversity, these folks who call the Windy City home got to work in times of crisis, and their work hasn’t gone unnoticed....

Michelle and Barack Obama Derry Queen and Lily Reed Finalists: Kitty Kurth & Kevin Lampe

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, May 12, 2016. Newly elected London mayor Sadiq Khan wants to meet with Rahm Mayor Rahm Emanuel may not be popular locally, but the new mayor of London told Time magazine that he wants to meet with him to discuss the “interesting stuff” he’s doing with the Chicago Infrastructure Trust. Emanuel launched the bank in 2012 to attract private money to public projects, but it’s so far been less active and less productive than the mayor had hoped....

In the the nearly two weeks since Chicago musician Alejandro Morales died at age 46 on Sunday, January 3, remembrances and testimonials have flooded social media. He was not only a pillar of the city’s underground rock scene (most famously, he drummed for noise punks Running and experimental duo Piss Piss Piss Moan Moan Moan) but also the kind of boundlessly generous sweetheart that absolutely no one has a bad word to say about....

Steppenwolf spills a lot of program ink trying to prepare an audience for 25-year-old poet Aziza Barnes’s first play, BLKS, which chronicles 24 hours in the clutching, haphazard lives of four unsettled twentysomething African-American women in New York. In addition to a full-page welcoming statement from artistic director Anna D. Shapiro, the program includes a three-page as-told-to-style feature in which Barnes muses over the play’s genesis, themes, and images in alternately playful and mystifying prose....

Matt Ciarleglio (at the Empty Bottle) Katie DeGroote (at Gman) Finalists: Kate Byrne, Carla (at Liberty Lounge)

WeWork The Wing Finalists: Ampersand, Second Shift

Band of Bohemia 4710 N. Ravenswood 773-271-4710 bandofbohemia.com Runner-Up: Distilled Chicago

“It’s not for everyone,” Fat Rice chef and owner Abraham Conlon says of feni. The Indian spirit is made from cashew fruit, which resembles an apple; the cashew itself grows from the end of the pseudofruit, also called a cashew apple. Conlon compares feni’s aroma to gasoline; Julia Momose, head bartender at GreenRiver, thinks it smells a bit like acetone. But despite—and in some ways, because of—the spirit’s off-putting scent, both have put feni on their drink menus....

Chay Yew to Marcus Gardley

Bow and Hammer bowandhammer.com Runner-Up: Eighth Blackbird

Sector 2337, the bookstore, gallery, and performing arts venue, closed its doors December 14, marking the end of what its founder and executive director, Caroline Picard, says was intended as a five-year experiment at 2337 N. Milwaukee. Before it became a staple of the Logan Square arts community, it spent nine years in Wicker Park, where it began as the Green Lantern Gallery and Press. In 2007, two years after Picard’s first exhibition, she followed in the footsteps of Threewalls and decided to register Green Lantern as a nonprofit....

When longtime Chicago bartender Annemarie Sagoi, a veteran of the Dawson and the Drifter, went to Cambodia last year with her business partner, David Chhay, to consult on a hotel bar opening in the city of Phnom Penh, she only expected to stay for a few months. But while plans for that bar fell through, both Sagoi and Chhay became enamored of the city. At the beginning of 2016 they opened Le Boutier, a craft cocktail bar that celebrates Cambodia’s “golden age” of rock in the 1960s and ’70s....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Chase soon became an in-demand soloist, and made several appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. In the late 60s, while freelancing in Las Vegas, he developed an itch to start his own ensemble, and in 1969 he began to assemble players....

Rick Bayless rickbayless.com Runner-Up: Grant Achatz

Amuse 126 Runner-Up: Mosher