The Frunchroom, the original live storytelling series about the South Side of Chicago that has entered its 10th year, returns with its first show of 2025 with two returning storytellers and two first-time performers.

Host and co-producer Scott Smith welcomes attorney Karen Clanton, historian Larry McClelland, fiction writer Sahar Mustafah and journalist Jessi Roti this Thursday, July 24th, at 730pm at the Beverly Arts Center (2407 W. 111th St., Chicago).

Produced in partnership with the Beverly Area Arts Alliance, The Frunchroom began in 2015 within the bars and banquet halls of the Morgan Park neighborhood; the show has called the Beverly Arts Center (BAC) its home since 2017. A $5 donation is requested at The Frunchroom which funds programming for both the Arts Alliance and BAC.

Enjoy cocktails served in the lobby and settle into the seats at the BAC’s Baffes Theatre for great South Side storytelling.

In the Frunchroom for this show:

Karen Clanton is an attorney and writer.  She has led corporate communications and internal communications in the legal and financial sectors.  Originally from Western New York, Karen has been a south side (and now south suburban) resident for 20 years.

Larry A. McClellan is the author of Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois, published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2023. After graduate work at the University of Chicago, Larry was a founding faculty member of Governors State University in 1970 and served there for 30 years. He remains Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Community Studies. In the mid-70s, he was also mayor of University Park (then Park Forest South). His consulting, research and writing focus on freedom seekers and the Underground Railroad, and on African American and regional history south of Chicago. For ten years, he wrote a monthly regional history column for The Southtown/Star newspapers. He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Chicago and co-author of To the River, The Remarkable Journey of Caroline Quarlls, a Freedom Seeker on the Underground Railroad in 2019. His book Onward to Chicago received the national 2023 Memorial Prize for the Advancement of Knowledge from the Underground Railroad Free Press. In 2022, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society for his contributions to Illinois history. In 2024, he served on the Illinois Underground Railroad Task Force reporting to the state legislature and he is currently the President of the Midwest Underground Railroad Network (MURN). Some of his work can be found at illinoisundergroundrailroad.info.

Sahar Mustafah is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, an inheritance she explores in her fiction. Her debut novel The Beauty of Your Face was named a 2020 Notable Book and Editor’s Choice by New York Times Book Review and one of Marie Claire Magazine’s 2020 Best Fiction by Women. It was long-listed for the Center for Fiction 2020 First Novel Prize, and was a finalist for the Palestine Book Awards. Her short story “Star of Bethlehem” was awarded the Lawrence Prize for Best Fiction in 2022, and “Tree of Life” won the 2023 Robert J. DeMott Prize. Her recent fiction is featured in Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction and “The View from Gaza,” published in The Massachusetts Review. She was awarded a 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship from New Literary Project and an Illinois Arts Council Grant. Her second novel, The Slightest Green, is forthcoming from Interlink Books in 2025. Born on the South Side of Chicago, Mustafah now writes and teaches outside of the city.

Jessi Roti is a culture journalist exploring music and food in Chicago and the Midwest at-large. In 2021, Roti was named a fellow of the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Center and has been published in Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, Thrillist, Eater and Bon Appetit, amongst others. Recently, she launched a newsletter called ‘It’s a Little Bit Funny,’ commenting on the absurd, wild, “omg is that true?!” bits at the intersection of popular culture and this thing called life. She has also begun working on her first book. When not writing, she manages “the Cheers of pet supply shops” in Bridgeport and hangs out with her pup Rasco.