Author Kathleen Rooney To Visit Orland Park Library Thursday

ORLAND PARK, IL — Kathleen Rooney, author of the celebrated novel, "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk," will be giving a talk Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Orland Park Public Library, 14921 S. Ravinia Avenue.

According to the library, Rooney will discuss the real-life pigeon and soldier who inspired her most recent book, "Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey," set during World War I. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand, the library said. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University.

According to the library, Rooney is the winner of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine. She is the author of nine books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction — including the novel O, Democracy! (Fifth Star Press, 2014); the novel in poems Robinson Alone (Gold Wake Press, 2012), based on the life and work of Weldon Kees; the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010); and the art modeling memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (University of Arkansas Press, 2009).

The library said her first book is Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (University of Arkansas Press, 2005), and her first poetry collection, Oneiromance (an epithalamion) won the 2007 Gatewood Prize from the feminist publisher Switchback Books.

Her reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The New York Times Book Review, BITCH, Allure, The Chicago Review of Books, The Chicago Tribune, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation and elsewhere, according to the library.

The library said that due to the Cook County mask mandate for all individuals in public buildings, all patrons, regardless of vaccination status, must wear a mask while in the library at this time. This includes all indoor programs.