The Sun-Times is introducing a series of guest columnists, chosen through our Chicago’s Next Voices contest, whose work we’ll be publishing.
We’ll be handing the mic to a wide range of people, including a school crossing guard who gets choked up talking about the job, a woman who had the cops called to her home by someone who thought she was abusing a disabled parking placard, a trans man who is strengthened by Chicago’s embrace and a recent college grad who no longer sees the Loop as a skyline and a dream somewhere down the Orange Line but as the place where she goes to work every day.
“When you think about what makes the city, it’s the different people and lived experiences, and I just love exploring that and getting to hear directly from people who are the experts because they lived it,” Sun-Times executive editor Jennifer Kho said.
To choose our guest columnists, we asked people to write about something we might not already know about the Chicago area that offers a lesson for us all.
From those who applied, we chose 12. One column will appear monthly, with the first column appearing today.
“I loved seeing how much people cared about Chicago and the different thinking people had and wanted to share about its future,” Kho said.
We hope you do, too.
Introducing the winners:
JOHN F. WASIK
John F. Wasik wants to see Chicago lean into its roots as a garden city. He is a member of the Lake County Board, an author, journalist and speaker. He’s working on a book to be titled “The Natural Neighborhood” focusing on climate action on a hyperlocal level.
A key moment in his journey as an environmentalist occurred when a sandhill crane landed in front of him on his driveway 30 years ago. Wasik stood and watched in awe. He learned they were endangered and volunteered to help count them.
“I hardly saw any,” he said.
It got him thinking about preserving habitat, biodiversity and the environment. He drives a hybrid vehicle and hasn’t paid an electric bill in over a year thanks to the solar panels on his Grayslake home.
LASHAUNTA MOORE
Lashaunta Moore, 26, a graduate of Percy L. Julian High School on the South Side, shares life hacks that helped her find a way into the city’s media industry.
She reached a milestone in June — her first face-to-face interview with a big celebrity — Ice Cube. She met him in the Loop but was nervous.
“I actually counted to three and said, ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen?’ ” she said.
The interview went just fine.
She said one key to her success is just reading the news. During part of her time as a student at Richard J. Daley College, Moore didn’t have a home computer. So she headed to the school’s library first thing in the morning and stayed until evening — reading news of all sorts.
“I grew up very coy,” she said. “I didn’t used to speak much, which is how I started writing in the first place.”
She works as a social media coordinator for a Chicago company and as a freelance journalist.
DEREK HELLING
Derek Helling, 42, is managing editor of PLAYUSA.COM, which reports on the gambling industry, and has written about Chicago’s casino drama. He wants more resources, private and public, to reach people with gambling problems — but he isn’t against gambling. He put $100 on the Sky to win the WNBA championship before the season started in 2021 — and won $1,100.
“That will probably be my gambling heyday for the rest of my life, my one shining moment,” said the former Sky season-ticketholder, who lives on Printers Row. “It also just happened to be my wife’s birthday, so I withdrew my winnings and told my wife, ‘We’re doing whatever you want for your birthday today.’ ”
They ordered from Ema, a River North Mediterranean restaurant.
“We basically ordered everything on the menu for delivery from Grubhub,” Helling said. “We had left overs for three or four days. She was happy.”
NANCY OSNESS
Nancy Osness is an emergency medicine nurse from the Southwest Side who framed and kept the front page of a Sun-Times from 1977.
It showed her daughter Caroline, then 7, eating lunch with a Black girl on the first day students from other neighborhoods were bused to her predominantly white school.
The move caused an uproar among some parents who opposed having the Black students brought to the school. Osness’s column recalls the story in poignant detail.
“Caroline was a child, it was over her head, she treated everybody like she treated everybody else,” according to Osness, who marched for civil rights and refused to be a part of her neighbors’ protest.
Her daughter grew up to be a police officer in Oak Lawn. The framed front page hangs in her house.
“I just think we can all be a little nicer and kinder to each other, and I think that would go a long way,” Osness said. “I see so much hate and animosity and meanness and nastiness and rudeness and hatefulness. It makes you sick. It’s a poison to you to be that way. If people can turn it around and take deep breaths and be nicer to one another, I think that would make a difference. I really do.”
EMILY DAGOSTINO
Emily Dagostino doesn’t want people to miss out on exploring and experiencing Chicago because they get hung up on the negatives.
“There’s a lot of feeling it’s unsafe to be in the city, and those concerns are real,” said Dagostino, 42, who works in communications for a health care system and lives in Oak Park, where she grew up. “But, when you focus on those things exclusively, you overlook the good parts: the diversity, the culture.”
She loves how, in Chicago, you can go a few blocks in any direction and be in a different neighborhood and experience different cultures.
“As much as I can, I try not to stay in my little corner and make sure I am experiencing and seeing for myself what’s out there,” said Dagostino, who’s married and has two kids. “I think that’s when we run into trouble, when we all stay in our own little pockets.”
Her father taught physical education and coached basketball at Roberto Clemente High School. Dagostino went to a lot of games.
“I don’t live inside the city’s borders,” she said. “I live a half-mile away. But I’ve spent a lot of my time in Chicago and have invested a lot in this city and, semantics aside, I guess I would consider myself a Chicagoan. I feel like I have a big stake in this place and want to see it continue to thrive.”
RANDI FORREST
Randi Forrest, 66, who raised her family on the Northwest Side before moving to Mount Prospect, doesn’t mind talking about sex, aging body parts and becoming seemingly invisible — things that make some people uncomfortable.
“Life can be uncomfortable, and people are so afraid to talk about things we all have in common, especially getting old and the things we have to go through,” she said. “People who are my age might enjoy reading about these things and saying, ‘Oh, my God, here’s someone willing to talk about it.’ It’s not taboo. It’s OK to talk about it.”
Like, say, about seeing a cute, younger guy. Or not being noticed. Forrest is game to think and talk about these things.
Her daughter works for Amazon, her son is in the Air Force, and her husband is a retired city worker.
Forrest was a restaurant manager and special education teacher before retiring from a career as a textbook editor — and becoming an usher at Wrigley Field.
“It’s the best job ever,” she said.
CHRISTOPHER BIGELOW
Christopher Bigelow, who is trans, lived in New York City for 12 years before moving to Chicago.
The first time he felt truly embraced in Chicago was when he noticed a trans flag had been painted in the crosswalk at an intersection along North Halsted Street.
“The first experience I had like that — that made my decision to stay in Chicago — was crossing the street on the trans flag crosswalk in Boystown just because there are rainbows kind of everywhere in many big cities now and trans rights are kind of more controversial and seeing that trans rights are so permanent here as to be painted on the street,” said Bigelow, 29, who lives with his partner in Boystown. “That did make me feel a lot more comfortable and supported by the city.”
Bigelow, who works in publishing, grew up in southern Illinois and volunteers at the Center on Halsted, an LGBTQ+ community center, working with young people “who consider themselves refugees from states like Florida and Texas.”
He said a great next step for Chicago would be improving news coverage of these issues and featuring more queer people telling their own stories.
LUCY BIEDERMAN
Since she became a parent, Lucy Biederman, a writer, began noticing rich veins of seldomly mined material.
A park around the corner from her Hyde Park home that her 3-year-old daughter was obsessed with during the pandemic became a source of inspiration.
“Now that I’m a parent, I see all this stuff that no one writes about or at least not that I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It’s like people who know about that stuff are too busy to write about it.”
Biederman, 41, grew up in Hyde Park and moved back in 2020 after living in Ohio, where she taught writing at Heidelberg University.
“I think it’s important to see and notice and write about this part of the world,” she said. “It’s a huge part of it, hanging out at the playground, picking them up, being exhausted because you have kids.”
Biederman is the author of “The Walmart Book of the Dead,” which she describes as a work of experimental fiction “that’s based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but it takes place in Walmart.”
Biederman works on the staff at the Writer’s Center at University of Chicago Lab Schools.
SAM CICCHELLI
Sam Cicchelli has the demeanor of a crossing guard, so he decided to finally become one.
“I’ve just always been that type of person where people for some reason feel comfortable coming up to me to ask questions or directions,” Cicchelli said.
The semi-retired graphic artist from Beverly was looking for something to do part time. So he applied on the Chicago Public Schools website and forgot about it until he got a call.
After the vetting process, he was assigned last fall to St. Bede the Venerable Catholic School in the Southwest Side Scottsdale neighborhood. CPS pays for crossing guards for private schools, too.
Cicchelli, 62, a tall, broad-shouldered man who is white, became known as Mr. Sam and was accepted into the fabric of the largely Black and Hispanic school community.
He said the positive impact that he’s had — as a smiling adult who says “Good morning” and “How are you doing today?” — has left him speechless and holding back a tear at times.
VALERY PINEDA
Valery Pineda, a child of Mexican immigrants, dreamed of being the first in her family to go to college and made that dream come true.
She dreamed of getting a job in the Loop. She did that, too.
Pineda’s journey was aided by a nonprofit called the Chicago Scholars Foundation, which ultimately hired her to help guide others to success.
Pineda, 22, went to Acero Garcia High School, a Southwest Side charter school in Archer Heights not far from where she grew up and where she still lives. She graduated with honors from DePaul University.
“My biggest passion has always been to write,” Pineda said. “One day, maybe I’ll become a famous author. It sounds very farfetched, but I prefer to dream big than not dream at all.”
MAHAM KHAN
Maham Khan, 40, is a journalism teacher at Harper College in Palatine who worries that students who don’t want to be burdened with deadlines and other course requirements, like interviewing people in person — because such things cause anxiety — aren’t preparing themselves for the real world.
“You can’t call in and be like my anxiety is overtaking me today, so I will not able able to produce any sales this week or tell your landlord you won’t be paying rent because you have anxiety,” she said.
Khan is all for creating safe spaces for learning but also is an advocate for the value of resiliency.
Khan, a former journalist who worked for WBEZ, attended Harper before transferring to Northwestern University.
“That’s why I feel like I have clout to say these things,” she said.
EFFIE KOLIOPOULOS
Effie Koliopoulos once had a cop appear at her door because someone reported her for suspicion of misusing disabled parking privileges.
Koliopoulos, who has rheumatoid arthritis, writes about her experience.
“The saying in the chronic illness community is, ‘You can look normal, but still be struggling with a lot of things,’ and people need to realize you really don’t know what’s going on with someone else in general,” she said.
Koliopoulos, 36, who lives in the north suburbs, is a budding children’s author.
