Tina Tchen’s journey to eight years in the Obama White House started one day in 1978 when she dropped by the offices of NOW in Springfield, IL. The fight to ratify the ERA was on; “I showed up to volunteer … and never left,” she says. Although the ERA ultimately failed, Tina’s fire for leading…
Dr. Miranda tends to two “hives”—one, a farm in Indiana where she and her husband nurture hundreds of thousands of honeybees; and the other, the bustling center of learning and research called the University of Illinois Chicago where Dr. Miranda is Chancellor. To arrive at what Dr. Miranda calls “the best job in Chicago and…
Rachel Feldman’s superpower is storytelling. She discovered it as a little girl growing up in a household marred by conflict and emotional pain that she could block out by living in her imagination. She developed it as a child actor who made up characters and voices while appearing in hundreds of TV commercials and cartoons….
If Carol Ross Barney had a coat of arms, it might be emblazoned with Chicago’s skyline and the motto, “Good spaces make good people.” As the so-called People’s Architect of the Windy City, Carol has dedicated her career to “the dignity of design,” as she puts it — that is, to creating urban spaces that…
After high school, when most of Anne Sempowski Ward’s friends were headed to the University of Michigan a few miles down the road for college, Anne took herself in a different direction—toward Duke University in North Carolina and its school of Engineering. Not that she knew exactly how to get there. The oldest child in…
Since babyhood, Tena Clark had a habit of tapping out rhythms with whatever was at hand — pencils, her fingers, eating utensils, you name it. “Drumming felt like music, and the music felt like it was coming straight out of me,” she wrote in her autobiography Southern Discomfort. But good Southern girls growing up in…