In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990, CWHC is proud to present five Writing Fellows extending that record from 1990 to today — through poetry, narrative history, and speculative fiction. Join us virtually as each fellow shares a first look at the woman and the story behind their work, ahead of the full publication's debut at our 55th Anniversary celebration.
Meet the 2026 Writing Fellows
and the Chicago women whose stories they're telling
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Meghan Malachi is a poet and writer from The Bronx, New York. She is the first-place winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review 2022 Editor's Prize Contest and runner-up to the 2024 Princemere Poetry Prize. Her debut collection No Lace Fronts in Iowa City was selected by Allison Joseph as runner-up to Madville Publishing’s 2024 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in June 2026. Meghan has been a finalist for the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, the Trio Book Award, the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, and the Gasher Press Book Award. She holds an MS in Mathematics from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing from DePaul University. She is an associate editor at RHINO, and she lives in Chicago, Illinois.
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Elisa Shoenberger is a freelance writer, researcher, and journalist in Chicago. She has a B.A. in Latin American History from the University of Chicago, M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an M.B.A. in Marketing and Operations Management from Loyola University Chicago. She has spent her professional career as a fundraising researcher. She regularly writes profiles and reports on people, foundations, corporations for her fundraising work, which complements her work as a freelance journalist. She has written everything from Q&As, profiles, lists, reported articles, and even four handbooks on special topics in fundraising. She also co-founded a literary journal called the Antelope and wrote a master’s thesis on Cuban poster propaganda. Elisa is passionate about women’s history. She began her career as a freelance writer when she started an oral history project about women artists in Chicago. From that oral history, she began writing essays and later articles on a variety of topics including the arts, history, the law, food, fundraising, and science. She has written for the Huffington Post, Slate, WIRED Magazine, Boston Globe, and over other publications. She writes regularly for Book Riot, Murder & Mayhem, Library Journal, the Parlor Magazine, FF2Media, and Cheese Professor. Her interest in women in art and history remains a key part of her writing practice today.
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Desiree McCray is a poet-scholar-theologian-artist whose work explores Blackness as origin, prophetic imagination, and the spiritual dimensions of creative practice. She is the author of four books of poetry—Black Girl, Brown Soul (2025), My Sisters Look Like God (2024), Send a Refreshing (2022), and Hope Among Other Foods (2021). McCray is an award-winning researcher, archivist, and womanist scholar who garnered institutional support from Emory University to spend time in the Black Panther Party Collections to study Black woman activist and first Black woman ever to lead the Black Panther Party—Elaine Brown. A Doctor of Ministry candidate in Creative Writing and Public Theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, McCray has taught various writing workshops virtually online and in-person at several colleges throughout the Chicagoland area. Her scholarship and creative work investigate how faith, slow care, and art-making can redeem and reimagine collective futures, particularly for Black women. McCray's work has been recognized nationally. She is a 2026 Center for Afrofuturist Studies artist-in-residence (Iowa City) and has received fellowships from Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, Roots.Wounds.Words. Inc., and The Black Theology and Leadership Institute at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her creative and critical writing has appeared in Foglifter Press, Seventh Wave, Presbyterian Outlook, Arkana, Black Feminist Collective, RAGE Zine, and Untenured. Her book review of “Up Against a Crooked Gospel” appeared as a 2025 Standout Review in Reading Religion (American Academy of Religion), and she has presented her creative-scholarship at Princeton University. As a multidisciplinary artist, McCray's visual art has been exhibited in Chicago and published in literary magazines. Her forthcoming poetry collection, Love Underway, emerges from her doctoral work and explores becoming, healing, and divine love as forms of justice. Through teaching, residencies, and publications, McCray continues to carve sacred space where Black futures, prophetic art, and spiritual truth converge.
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Ruth Lopez is a writer and researcher based in Chicago. She is a contributing writer for The Art Newspaper and as a cultural journalist has written numerous articles and reviews for a range of media including Sotheby’s The Museum Network, American Theatre, The New York Times, Art & Antiques, Raw Vision, Interior Design, Art News, Art in America, Chicago Tribune, Chicago magazine, Chicago Reader, New City, University of Chicago Alumni Magazine, and Eater.com. Lopez is the author of the cultural history and exhibition catalogue Chocolate: The Nature of Indulgence (Abrams/Field Museum, 2002), and the primary contributor to Elevated: Art and Architecture of the Chicago Transit Authority (2018)– an authoritative guide that includes more than 80 short essays on the public art commissioned for the city’s mass-transit system as well as the historic and newly-commissioned architecture of the stations. She has served as a consultant for cultural projects including the public art program of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the literature and arts program of the Lannan Foundation, and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. A graduate of Goddard College, Lopez is a former fellow of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, New York.
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Susan Klonsky is a longtime (i.e., old) Chicago activist and writer. She has written extensively on public education. Her work includes a study of the impact of and ultimate abandonment of the movement for smaller and more personalized public schools. Susan co-authored the oral history/memoir of civil rights leader Timuel D. Black (Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black, Northwestern University Press, 2019). She is most proud to be the mother of 3 creative young women who are all politically and socially engaged.