The Society of Midland Authors presents a Panel Discussion:
Memoir and Narrative Storytelling During COVID
featuring Michele Weldon, Gerry Plecki, and Rebecca Johns Trissler
Tuesday, March 3, 2026, 6 p.m.
at Sulzer Regional Library, 4455 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago
Free and open to all.
Michele Weldon is an assistant professor emerita at her alma mater, the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, where she taught for 18 years. The author of seven award-winning books, including most recently The Time We Have: Essays on Pandemic Living (2024), she has been a senior leader with The OpEd Project since 2011, a global initiative to increase the diversity of voice in public discourse. Weldon began her editorial career as managing editor at North Shore magazine. She then worked as a market editor for ADWEEK magazine and later Fairchild Publications. She was a columnist and feature writer for the Dallas Times Herald and has been a regular contributor to newspapers, websites, magazines and radio such as CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Time, NBC, MSNBC, Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago magazine, Chicago Parent, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Writer’s Digest, West Suburban Living, and hundreds more, including academic publications such as Harvard’s Nieman Narrative Digest. She has given more than 200 keynotes on issues related to gender, popular culture and media.
Gerry Plecki recently completed his fourth term as SMA’s president, and as current a member of the SMA Board of Directors, this will be the fifth year he has coordinated SMA’s annual Book Awards Competition. Gerry received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1979 and was awarded an NEH postdoctoral fellowship at New York University. He then worked as an associate professor at Clemson University, where he taught English and cinema studies. Later, he taught graduate research methodology at the United States Sports Academy in Daphne, Alabama. He has written many articles on music and film criticism. His previous books were Robert Altman, which was an authoritative analysis of the director’s films, and Singing in the Rain: The Definitive Story of Woodstock at Fifty, which was published in July 2019. His latest book, Test Positive: Surviving COVID-19 in the Reign of Trump, was published in 2020.
Rebecca Johns Trissler is the editor of Virus City: Chicago 2020-2021 and the author of two novels (Icebergs, a PEN/Hemingway Finalist, and The Countess). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, StoryQuarterly, the Mississippi Review, the Harvard Review, Printer’s Row Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, Ladies’ Home Journal, Bride’s, Parents, Parenting, Self, Health, and Seventeen, among others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Missouri School of Journalism, she is an associate professor of creative writing and associate dean in the College of Liberal and Social Sciences at DePaul University.