My name is Randy Richardson. I work as an attorney in Evanston and live here with my wife and son and our two cats, Smokey and Bandit. When I’m not working or coaching my son’s baseball team, I am either sitting in the left field bleachers at Wrigley Field or writing about baseball and my fictional worlds. I am the author of two novels, Lost in the Ivy and Cheeseland, both from Chicago’s Eckhartz Press.
1) Once I Was Cool by Megan Stielstra (2014)
For the past four years, I’ve been judging books for the Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year Contest. Each year, there’s always that one book I can’t get out of my head. This year, it was Megan Stielstra’s Once I Was Cool, a collection of personal essays about daily life and how it is anything but ordinary. In a voice that is all her own, Stielstra seamlessly weaves together a tapestry of stories, lifted from her own life, that speak to the strength of the human spirit. As you cry and laugh along with her, you will come away from it all feeling a bit dizzy but in a good way.