Luminarts Cultural Foundation

Luminarts Cultural Foundation Luminarts awards young artists, writers, musicians, dancers, designers, and architects.

The Luminarts Cultural Foundation supports young Chicago artists by selecting Luminarts Fellows annually. Fellows receive recognition and financial support, and are cultivated by the Foundation as they continue their artistic practice to the betterment of Chicago's cultural landscape.

Kira Tucker (2026 Poetry Honorable Mention) has a new book coming out this December on Akashic Books! You can preorder i...
06/05/2026

Kira Tucker (2026 Poetry Honorable Mention) has a new book coming out this December on Akashic Books! You can preorder it now!

Winner of the National Poetry Series, Kira Tucker’s WILDEST rethinks the American Dream as a series of ecological nightmares and the untold stories buried within. These unflinching lyrics bear witness to the raging wildfires, literal and figurative, of social injustice—from the haunting origins of Lake Lanier to the human rights crisis converging at this nation’s borders and beyond.

Now available for preorder. All preorders will ship on or before December 1, 2026.

⭐️ Luminarts Cultural Foundation is a proud sponsor of MCA’s Tuesdays on the Terrace!* ⭐️ Tuesdays on the Terrace conti...
06/04/2026

⭐️ Luminarts Cultural Foundation is a proud sponsor of MCA’s Tuesdays on the Terrace!*

⭐️ Tuesdays on the Terrace continues to offer an expansive and contemporary look at jazz in Chicago while embracing the city’s diverse musical traditions. This year’s series highlights a range of Chicago artists working in genres like pop, soul, R&B, and more, alongside a strong foundation of jazz performances.

⭐️ Performance Spotlight: Alejandro Salazar (Jazz Fellow) on June 23rd, 2026. Gates open at 4:30PM. Live music from 5:30PM to 8PM. .salazar__

*made possible by Luminarts Board Member Cherilyn G. Murer

🗞️ Subscribe to Luminarts News to hear about where to see Luminarts Fellows this summer, including at the MCA's Tusdays ...
05/28/2026

🗞️ Subscribe to Luminarts News to hear about where to see Luminarts Fellows this summer, including at the MCA's Tusdays on the Terrace - for which we are proud sponsors!

➕ Stay in touch using the link in our bio

Congratulations to the newly awarded 2026 Luminarts Fellows Cohort!🎨 Visual Arts: Pegah Bahador, Josué Esaú, and Cherin ...
05/27/2026

Congratulations to the newly awarded 2026 Luminarts Fellows Cohort!

🎨 Visual Arts: Pegah Bahador, Josué Esaú, and Cherin Kim
🎼 Classical Music: Sean Hsi (Strings)*, Robert Levinger (Piano), Emily Margevich (Voice)*, Destina Sarussi (Winds), and Benjamin Sokol (Voice)
📚 Creative Writing: Drue Denmon (Prose)* and Yunkyo Moon-Kim (Poetry)
🎷 Jazz Improvisation: Arman Sangalang**, Kevin King^, and Lizzi Trumbore
📐 Architecture, in Partnership with ICAA - Midwest Chapter: Anna Cross
🪡 Fashion, in Partnership with SAIC Fashion Program: Jen LaMastra
🩰 Dance, in Partnership with the Grainger Academy of the Joffrey Ballet: TBA

*sponsored by Sally Metzler, PhD & George Dunea, MD, **Sponsored by Becky and Rich Beem,
^In Memory of Stephen J. Schlegel

📝 Don't miss the Creative Writing Showcase tomorrow, May 21st, at 6:00 PM at the Union League Club of Chicago! 💫 RSVP us...
05/20/2026

📝 Don't miss the Creative Writing Showcase tomorrow, May 21st, at 6:00 PM at the Union League Club of Chicago! 💫 RSVP using the link in our bio.

Learn more about our Final Prose Judges for the Luminarts Fellowship in Creative Writing:

✒️ Naeem Murr is the author of three previous novels: The Boy, a New York Times Notable Book, The Genius of the Sea, and The Perfect Man, which was awarded The Commonwealth Writersʼ Prize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His new novel, Every Exit Brings You Home, was published by W.W. Norton in February 2026. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, among his awards are a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.

✒️ Ploi Pirapokin is a Thai-born, Hong Kong raised, speculative fiction writer and lyric essayist, whose writing explores the personal impact of postcolonial poetics, imperialism in Asia, and our relationship with biology. She sits on the board for Khōréō magazine, Hivemind: Global Speculative Fiction Magazine, Kearny Street Workshop, the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, and the Ragdale Foundation. Her work is featured in https://zurl.co/vdFgL, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, The Art and Craft of Stories from Asia: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, and Speculative Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology both from Bloomsbury Academic, and more. She has received grants and fellowships from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Creative Capacity Fund, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, Kundiman and others. A graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and the MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, she is currently the writing coordinator at the James Welch Native Lit Festival, and teaches at the Writers Program at UCLA Extension, https://zurl.co/V4dIJ, and as part of the Core Faculty at Story Studio Chicago.

📚 Join us on Thursday, May 21st for our Creative Writing Showcase at the Union League Club of Chicago! 💫 RSVP using the ...
05/20/2026

📚 Join us on Thursday, May 21st for our Creative Writing Showcase at the Union League Club of Chicago! 💫 RSVP using the link in our bio.

Learn more about our Preliminary Prose Judges for the Luminarts Fellowship in Creative Writing:

✒️ Ellen Litman is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the author of two novels, Mannequin Girl (W.W. Norton, 2014) and The Last Chicken in America (W.W. Norton, 2007), which was a finalist for the 2007 LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the 2008 New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her fiction, nonfiction, and translations have appeared in American Odysseys: Writing by New Americans, East European Jewish Affairs, Guernica, The Forward, the New Yorker online, and elsewhere.

✒️ Frances de Pontes Peebles is the author of the novels "The Seamstress" and "The Air You Breathe." Her books have been translated into ten languages. Born in Pernambuco, Brazil and raised in Miami, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a 2020 NEA Creative Writing Fellow in Literature, and has received a Fulbright grant and Brazil’s Sacatar Fellowship. In 2019, she served as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, and Guernica. Her novel, "The Seamstress," was adapted for film and mini-series on Brazil’s Globo Network. She is proud to serve as Board Chair of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.

Congratulations to our newly awarded 2026 Luminarts Architecture Fellow: Anna Cross Anna Cross is a recent graduate work...
05/19/2026

Congratulations to our newly awarded 2026 Luminarts Architecture Fellow: Anna Cross

Anna Cross is a recent graduate working in residential architecture in Chicago and pursuing research in the Arts & Crafts movement. She studied architecture, historic preservation, and energy studies at the University of Notre Dame, and is always seeking opportunities to continue learning. She is an advocate for responsible, purposeful design in the public and private spheres, with an emphasis on the re-integration of craft and tradition into today's building culture. Now part of the team at Liederbach & Graham Architects in Chicago, she is excited to grow in her professional and academic life through the Luminarts Fellowship.

This Fellowship is awarded in partnership with the Chicago-Midwest Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art . Anna will be honored with a public presentation at the ICAA’s Acanthus Awards ceremony on October 22nd - visit to learn more.

📝 Don't miss the Creative Writing Showcase this Thursday, May 21st, at 6:00 PM at the Union League Club of Chicago! 💫 RS...
05/18/2026

📝 Don't miss the Creative Writing Showcase this Thursday, May 21st, at 6:00 PM at the Union League Club of Chicago! 💫 RSVP using the link in our bio.

Learn more about our Final Poetry Judges for the Luminarts Fellowship in Creative Writing:

✒️ Lisa Low is the author of Replica (University of Wisconsin Press, 2026) and the chapbook Crown for the Girl Inside (YesYes Books, 2023). She is the recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize and the 2020 Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Maryland, she lives in Chicago.

✒️ Averill Curdy is the author of Song & Error (FSG, 2014). Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Criterion, and The Gettysburg Review, among others. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, she was a senior research fellow in Istanbul for the Fulbright Foundation. She lives in Chicago and is a professor of creative writing at Northwestern University.

📚 Join us for the Creative Writing Showcase this Thursday, May 21st, at 6:00 PM at the Union League Club of Chicago! 💫 R...
05/18/2026

📚 Join us for the Creative Writing Showcase this Thursday, May 21st, at 6:00 PM at the Union League Club of Chicago! 💫 RSVP using the link in our bio.

Learn more about our Preliminary Poetry Judges for the Luminarts Fellowship in Creative Writing:

✒️ Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a q***r Afro-Latinx interdisciplinary artist, writer, and spiritual practitioner whose work examines the intersections of carcerality, social justice, ancestral knowledge, and digital ritual. They are the author of A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), winner of the 2025 Midwest Book Award, and HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Their debut memoir A Body of Wild Light will be published in 2027. Hicks’ multimodal work—including poetry, digital photography, performance, text-based collage, and sound—has been featured in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, and others. They are the 2026 Artist-in-Residence with Worth Rises, a 2025 Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow, a 2024 Gwendolyn Brooks Legacy Writer, and have received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, Illinois Humanities, Civil Rights Corps, Tin House, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, and others. Hicks currently serves as Board Chair of The Guild Literary Complex, Core Faculty at StoryStudio Chicago, Adjunct MFA Faculty with the University of Nevada-Reno, and a Voting Member of the Recording Academy.

✒️ Ruben Quesada is a poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of Revelations (2018) and Next Extinct Mammal (2011), and editor of the award-winning, landmark anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (2023). His early translations of Luis Cernuda in Exiled from the Throne of Night (2008) was published as a limited-edition print. His writing appears in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Orion Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere in print and online. His poetry collection, Brutal Companion (2024), won the Barrow Street Editors Prize and was recognized as A Notable Book of 2024 by the University of California.

Don't miss the Creative Writing Showcase next week, May 21st, at 6:00 PM at the Union League Club of Chicago! RSVP using...
05/15/2026

Don't miss the Creative Writing Showcase next week, May 21st, at 6:00 PM at the Union League Club of Chicago! RSVP using the link in our bio.

Join ULCC Distinguished Artist and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Rebecca Makkai in celebrating the talent of Chicago's emerging creative writers.

The event will feature readings from the 2026 Luminarts Creative Writing Fellows, 2014 Luminarts Fellow Julia Fine .r.fine (author of The Upstairs House, winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction) and Rebecca Makkai (author of Great Believers, winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, LA Times Book Prize, and Stonewall Award).

Book signing to follow. This event is presented in partnership with the Union League Club of Chicago's Library Committee.

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65 W Jackson Boulevard
Chicago, IL
60604

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