Morgan Campbell and My Fighting Family Confirmed For the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago

Yes, you read that headline right.

My Fighting Family: Borders and Bloodlines and The Battles That Made Us is coming back to Chicago in person, on stage, at the biggest literary festival in the midwest. The event runs September 12 and 13, and I’ll update you with the day, time and location of my presentation. But for now, circle both days on your calendar and make plans to come downtown.

It’s not just that the Printers Row Lit Fest takes place in Chicago — on Dearborn, between Wells Dr. and Polk St., if you need a precise-ish location. But after 40 years, Printers Row isn’t just an event. It’s a Chicago Institution, like the Chosen Few Picnic in Jackson Park, and it anchors the fall calendar just as reliably as the opening games of the Bears schedule do.

Except the Bears keep threatening to leave the city, and maybe even the state. But this literary festival? It’ll always come back to Printers Row. It’s right in the title.

If you’re curious about how it feels to bring this book to a flagship publishing party in Chicago, I’ll tell you:

It’s a mixture of relief and excitement. For book industry reasons I might never fully understand, the U.S. market has felt like a fortress for me and my book. I’ve spent the last 30 months probing for openings, and now it feels like I’ve finally found one. And of course it’s in Chicago, the city that literally created my family, that shaped me in more ways than I can count, and where half the action in my memoir unfolds. So if the 2025 NABJ Author Showcase marked My Fighting Family’s U.S. debut, the 2026 Printers Row Lit Fest is the south-of-the border launch.

If you want to know it took 2.5 years, again, I’m still not sure. I just know that 20 percent of my sales have come from the U.S., even though my book has had virtually no presence in stores down there. And I’m confident we can bump that share, along with overall sales, if I can capitalize on this event and its aftermath.

It’s not just that I love Chicago. It’s that my Windy City roots run deep. You’re talking to somebody who can still picture the Magikist Lips, looming over the Dan Ryan like Dr. T.J. Eckleburg’s giant spectacles in The Great Gatsby; who ate barbecue at Lem’s at 59th and State (RIP); who remembers the smell of the Jays Potato Chip factory at 99th and Cottage Grove.

When I’m in town these days you can find me working out on the turf field at Jackson Park, which you newbies can locate by looking just south of the Obamalisk. If I’m not there, I’m at the Sip & Savor in Hyde Park, or The Brew, at 71st and Yates in South Shore. It’s walking distance from my sister’s place, and the spot where I hunched over this exact laptop and launched this very website.

So if you want to know why I’m more thrilled about Printers Row than any other book festival or author talk, those last two paragraphs explain it.

And if you’re an early-career author trying to figure out how to get booked at big festivals… that’s a puzzle I’m still trying to solve. The invited to Word on The Street in Toronto last fall came with my Trillium Book Award nomination, and my appearance at the the 2025 Festival of Literary Diversity sprang from two relationships — one between my publicist and the festival, and the other between me and FOLD founder Jael Richardson, whose family has known mine since our older siblings were day care classmates.

As for this appearance at Printers Row, there’s some background.

Scrolling LinkedIn one day I noticed a comment from a woman named Amy Danzer on a post from a guy named Tavaras Hardy, who used to hoop at Northwestern. Arrived too late to witness my two-year career as a football bench warmer, but knew me as a study hall monitor and Academic Services intern in the athletic department. Since then, via social media, I’ve been able to follow his career as a coach and commentator.

And Amy?

I didn’t know her, but saw that she was the PRLF’s director of programming. When I clicked on her profile I found an extremely specific list of mutual connections. Not just Tavaras but his teammate Julian Bonner and my teammate D’Wayne Bates, plus Mary Beth Hawkinson, the academic advisor who gave me a job when I quit the football team. All those details marked her as a Northwestern sports person from the mid-to-late 1990s, and reminded me of the networking joke the journalism nerds over at Medill used to make.

“It’s not who you know. It’s whom you know.”

So I emailed Amy to introduce myself and My Fighting Family, and mailed her a copy of the hardcover, and now look:

I’m a confirmed Printers Row Lit Fest Author, and a LinkedIn success story, making plans to travel to Chicago, and trying figure out how many friends and relatives I can bring out to a homecoming that’s both long overdue and right on time.

Overdue because, in a perfect publishing world, my book would have hit the Canadian and U.S. markets, full force, one time, in January of 2024, when the hardcover dropped. But right on time because in the flawed world we inhabit, my paperback comes Chicago with two big advantages over the first edition. It’s new and inexpensive, two useful icebreakers when introducing your best work to new audiences.

From here, I’ll spend the next seven weeks posting about, discussing, and promoting my book, myself, and our appearance at Printers Row. If you subscribe here, or follow me on social media, prepare to take one of two actions in response.

You can brace yourself to get sick of me hyping the most important in-person engagement of my short career as an author.

Or you can help me spread the word.

So yes, there’s only one option.

Thanks in advance, and I’ll see you in September.

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