Presenter Round-Up: November 11-14, 2019

Fall fest may be over, but our presenters still have more to say! From Thanksgiving dinner recipes, to restaurant and book recommendations, to Frederick Douglass’s how-to guide for forming a democracy; Alison Roman, Kwame Onwuachi, Patti Smith, Ibram X. Kendi, and David Blight extend their wisdom beyond the festival. Check out below articles and accompanying CHF archival video to stay up-to-date with conversations that begin at CHF and extend outside of Chicago!

Do you need permission to be imperfect this holiday season? Chef Alison Roman is here to assuage your pre-Thanksgiving culinary anxieties with step-by-step instructions on what she’ll be cooking for Thanksgiving dinner and how she’ll pull it off. Searching for the perfect recipe for dry-brined turkey with sheet-pan gravy or validation for your plans to eat stuffing in bed? Alison has you covered. And for all you city dwellers, virtually teleport to Alison’s Brooklyn kitchen for a timely reminder you too can be a great chef, even if you have a very small kitchen that necessitates storing the turkey in the bathtub.

Planning on traveling to DC soon? CHF has a restaurant recommendation for you: Kwame Onwuachi’s Kith/Kin! “Nowhere else in America are you going to find a menu that so confidently and autobiographically nods to Nigeria, New Orleans, and the Caribbean,” writes Esquire Magazine, which just named Kith/Kin one of the best new restaurants in America.

"I’m singing in one of the great halls of Chicago," Patti Smith told CHF at Symphony Center this fall before performing an a capella, sing-along rendition of “Because the Night.” We don’t know about you, but here at CHF we’ve been hoping to hum some more Smith tunes since then: cue the album Mummer Love by Soundwalk Collective, featuring Patti Smith. Pitchfork assures us that in the music you’ll hear the same Smith that sang in Chicago. It is “the exact Smith whose eccentricities are always controlled, whose metaphors remain clipped and brutish, whose voice still sounds like the tumbling of stone and soil.” And if Smith’s music isn’t enough, check out a list of the singer’s reading recommendations from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl to Virginia Woolf's The Waves.

On the first anniversary of Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming, Atlantic columnist Ibram X. Kendi has compiled a list of powerful books written by equally powerful Black women writers, including festival friend Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons: “We should all be reading [Black women writers] to better compose our stories in our minds, on our pages,” Kendi wrote, adding “I, for one, am striving to overcome my ignorance about what it means to be an American by reading the stories of black women.”

“In the late 1860s, Frederick Douglass, the fugitive slave turned prose poet of American democracy, toured the country spreading his most sanguine vision of a pluralist future of human equality in the recently re-United States. It is a vision worth revisiting,” writes historian David Blight in his Atlantic article, "Frederick Douglass’s Vision for a Reborn America." Blight discusses the fleeting Reconstruction-era hope of equality and unity in a multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious country, suggesting that, especially in divided times, we must return to Douglass’s dreams for America.