In the summer of 1989, a 19-year-old Waverly woman, Melissa Koontz, disappeared late at night after leaving work on the far west-side of Springfield. What followed was a series of events in ...

During and immediately after Reconstruction in the South, the same entrepreneurs and bankers who had built the Confederacy's munitions and armament plants during the Civil War ...

Why would Naperville commission a life-size bronze statue of an elderly woman in a cardigan, place it on a downtown stone bench, and have a city ceremony in 1999 in her honor? Why, in a 200...

To say that Job Conger is into airplanes would be an understatement. In fact, Conger's interest in aviation could easily be considered a love affair. It began with him photograph...

Sometimes the evening news reminds me of a decades-old school incident when My Group was unkind to Their Group, to put it mildly. I have excuses about immaturity and adolescent angst, but th...

This novel of historical fiction, on the Springfield race riot of 1908 by Springfieldian Melinda McDonald, is told from a unique point of view. Sheba Tully, a young black woman, obtains a ho...

Some college literary magazines exist primarily to publish the scribblings of a group of friends. I edited — OK, perpetrated — a couple of them back in the d...

This isn't the Kingsolver you've grown to love. It's nonfiction, about herself and family; in fact, it's partially written by her husband, Stephen Hopp, a biologist, and her daughter Ca...