Billy Lombardo: Chicago Native, Author, and Teacher

Billy Lombardo is the 2011 Nelson Algren Award winner for Fiction. He is the author of four books of fiction – The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, How to Hold a Woman, The Man with Two Arms, and Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns. His novel, How to Hold a Woman was re-issued as Morning Will Come by Tortoise Books in January 2021.  A high school English Literature and creative writing teacher for 25 years at The Latin School of Chicago, and for nine years at other Chicago-area high schools, he now runs his own writing and editing business called Writing Pros/e. Billy is the founder of Polyphony Lit, a global literary platform for high school writers and editors, at the core of which is a literary magazine run by an international staff of more than 200 high school editors around the world who comment on every one of the thousands of submissions that come to them every year.