RUI: Reading Under the Influence

When she’s not ordering shots of Jameson, Mandy writes for the Chicago Tribune’s entertainment website metromix.com. In addition to some Best Bets columns, she's also written some pretty swell articles, like the one here. Her work has also appeared on Chicago Public Radio’s 848 program. (The preceding is an audio link, so it may take a bit to load.) You can also find her work in No Touching Magazine's third issue on the theme of OBSESSION. She was tickled pink to be a part of last year's 2nd Story Festival, mostly because she got to sit on a bar and tell a story to a room fulla tipsy folks.

Mandy’s other writerly accomplishments include holding a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, being a finalist in the Union League’s Civic & Arts Foundation Fiction Contest, and being a recipient of both the Getz Graduate Award and the Weisman Memorial Scholarship at Columbia College. She has worked as a journalism instructor for the After School Matters program with Chicago Public Schools, is currently on the staff of Columbia's Story Week Festival of Writers as the Assistant Artistic Director for the fourth year in a row, and is also an instructor in the English Department of Columbia College. In February of 2009, she'll begin a semester of teaching English abroad in southern Brazil.

Mandy graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College in 2006. She's studied French, Japanese and Portuguese (in that order) and thinks that the best job in the world would be "Professional Language Learner." (She also thinks she would be really good at it, despite not being fluent in any of the aforementioned languages.) She lives - for the time being - on the South Side with her turtle Sherman (named after Sherman Alexie), spends more time in airports than she cares to admit, and in all of her spare time, Mandy plays capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art.

Chillin' in a hammock in Brazil.