Meet our Writing Fellows cohort 2026
From left to right: Elisa Shoenberger with Desiree McCray, photo credit Diana Solis
As we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Women Building Chicago 1790 - 1990 we are thrilled to be continuing the work by supporting four Writing Fellows who will focus on Chicago women post-1990 using different forms of creative writing to document and share their stories.
Meghan Malachi is creating poetry inspired by Vivian Maier, Susan Klonsky is writing a narrative historical text on Marilyn Katz, Desiree McCray is writing prose (speculative fiction) inspired by Dr Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, and Elisa Shoenberger is creating a narrative historical text on Lois Willie.
We will be launching a publication in Fall 2026 at our 55th Anniversary celebration at Chicago History Museum on Saturday October 17, 2026 and hope you can join us!
Elisa Shoenberger
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.
Bios of Writing Fellows
Meghan Malachi
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.
Desiree McCray
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.
Susan Klonsky
Coming soon….