Join Tim Hillegonds on September 26th as he reads and discusses his new memoir at DePaul. Before the reading, also take advantage of the opportunity to talk with the DePaul alum about life after DePaul, publishing your first book, writing tips, and more in the library’s Rosati Room.

The Distance Between chronicles how Hillegonds’s plan to leave his mounting rage and frustration behind with a one-way ticket from Chicago to Colorado goes awry as he jumps headfirst into a turbulent relationship with April, a Denny’s coworker and single parent. More than just a harrowing story of addiction and abuse or a simple mea culpa, The Distance Between is a finely wrought exploration of, and reckoning with, absent fathers, fatherhood, violence, adolescent rage, white male privilege, and Hillegonds’s own toxic masculinity. With nuance and urgency, The Distance Between takes readers through the grit of life on the margins while grappling with the problematic nature of one man’s existence.

Tim Hillegonds is a DePaul MAWP alum and author of the new memoir The Distance Between (Nebraska, 2019). His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Assay, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, River Teeth, Baltimore Review, Brevity, Under the Gum Tree, Hippocampus Magazine, The Fourth River, Midway Journal, RHINO, Bluestem Magazine, r.k.v.r.y. quarterly, and others. He was nominated for a 2015 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. In 2019, Tim was named by the Guild Literary Complex as one of their thirty “Writers to Watch.” He currently serves as a contributing editor for Slag Glass City, a digital journal of the urban essay arts.