The lineup of authors and presenters for this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest in September includes recent Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Kraus, the Chicago author Scott Turow and PBS NewsHour co-anchor Geoff Bennett.
A lineup and schedule of events was announced Monday by the Near South Planning Board, which hosts the annual free festival of books and the written word in the Printers Row neighborhood, this year with more than 200 presenters in all.
The 2026 festival also will include author and University of Chicago educator Eve L. Ewing, author Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Egyptian Canadian journalist Omar El Akkad and a team of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists from the Chicago Tribune.
The 41st Annual Printers Row Lit Fest will be 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sept. 12-13 on South Dearborn, on the blocks running from Ida B. Wells Drive to Polk Street, with multiple vendor tents and stages there and in the surrounding area. The festival previously was run by the Tribune until 2019.
Kraus, of Evanston, won this year’s fiction Pulitzer for his novel “Angel Down.” Turrow, first famous for his 1987 legal thriller “Presumed Innocent,” most recently published the 2025 follow-up “Presumed Guilty.” Bennett is the author of “Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy from Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms.” And Ewing (“1919” and “Electric Arches”) has a new book, “Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism.”
The Tribune won this year’s Pulitzer for local reporting for its coverage of Operation Midway Blitz; festival presenters will include Gregory Royal Pratt, Andrew Carter, Laura Rodriguez Presa and Erika Slife.
El Akkad will discuss his book critiquing Western imperialism, “One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This,” the winner of the 2025 National Book Award. Perkins-Valdez is the author of “Take My Hand,” “Wench” and “Happy Land.”
Other presenters on the weekend’s schedule include John West, a Pulitzer-winning journalist who will speak about the relationship between, hunmanity, technology and the internet. The Pulitzer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen has a new book, “Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other.” NPR’s “Weekend Edition” host Scott Simon has a new collection of essays, “Ulysses S. Cat and Other Animals I Have Known.” And Chicago author Cynthia Pelayo will speak about her new anthology “Something Followed Us Home.”
More at www.printersrowlitfest.org.
dgeorge@chicagotribune.com
