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Alison Kinney and Rachel León
Past event
Featured Book
How We See the Gray
Foster care is a disaster in Rockford, Illinois. Meredith, a social worker and single mom, is stretched beyond thin but determined to protect her kids: not only her son, but those on her caseload too. When the stress of the job has her breaking her sobriety, the foundations of her life begin to tremble. After drinking too much, she makes a mistake that puts her preschooler in jeopardy, and Meredith finds herself in a situation that mirrors her clients’ as she loses custody of her son. In her fight to get him back, Meredith experiences the system from the outside—while still working for the kids inside of it. Set over the course of a year, this riveting documentary-esque novel is told from multiple perspectives, including those of case workers, birth parents, foster parents, and foster children. Written with the working-class humor and heart that defines the Midwest, How We See the Gray is a story about mistakes, second chances, and trying to do better in a system that seems doomed to fail.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
Also Featured
united states of rejection
This is a love-hate story about personal and political relationships in the United States, told through the intimate stories of both the rejectors and the rejected: lovers, families, neighbors, and a nation and its people. Although we’re taught not to care about others’ opinions, rejection always hurts, and it hurts some people a lot more than others. To prove it, this book marshals contemporary neuroscience, the Founding Fathers’ rejection advice, and four centuries of personal narratives, many of them hilarious, many more heartbreaking. These rejection and acceptance stories span loving and disastrous American first encounters, soldiers and dancers rejected on front lines and chorus lines, playground bullies invoked before the Senate, and generations of lovers and patriots battling or swiping right to defend their loved ones and their country.
Abraham Lincoln wrote, ?The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more evil, than of good.? But rejection is often unjust, often deserved, and unusually complicated, depending on who’s rejecting whom and why.
In laboratories, diaries, self-help manuals, auditions, lawsuits, and wars, we find models for ?getting past? rejections, not just through personal resilience, but also through creating accountability and justice.United States of Rejection begins with heartbreak and ends with hope: an urgent self-improvement program for changing our relationships and the future of our messy nation.
About This Event
Alison Kinney and Rachel León
Monday June 15th, 2026 @ 7:00PM - 8:00PM
Join us as we welcome Rachel León and Alison Kinney to the store for an reading and conversation about writing stories of resistance, joy, and hope amidst an ongoing crisis in celebration of their new books How We See the Gray and United States of Rejection.
Featured Author
Rachel Leon
Rachel León (she/they) has worked in child welfare for nearly two decades. She serves as managing director for the Chicago Review of Books and fiction director for Arcturus. Their work has appeared in Catapult, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. León is the editor of The Rockford Anthology and the author of the novel How We See the Gray.
In Conversation With
Alison Kinney
Alison Kinney is the author of three nonfiction books of cultural history, most recently United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, New Inquiry, and other publications. Alison teaches creative nonfiction and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
About the Venue
Pilsen Community Books
Pilsen Community Books is a worker owned and operated independent bookstore that specializes in new and used literary fiction, radical history and politics, and literature in translation. The staff's goal is to unite their bookselling experience with their belief that labor is entitled to all it produces.
Visit store pageMore at Pilsen Community Books
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Signature Event: Running Tour of Brown in the Windy City
Run or bike with author Dr. Lilia Fernández inspired her book, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago. About the event: Join Read & Run Chicago, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights (ICIRR), and Dr. Lilia Fernández at Pilsen Community Books ((1531 W 18th) on Sunday, October 25 at 10:00 AM for a 4-mile running tour or biking tour (s/o BFF Bikes!) of Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago as part of our Fall 2026 Signature Events Season, “Chicago Between the Lines.” After the route, enjoy snacks, social time, and book sales at Pilsen Community Books. A portion of tickets sales will be donated to ICIRR.