Michael Bowie

"Lost in Darkness" speaks to the voices never heard, the stories never told. The voices of those with no guarantee of hearth and home. Books on housing usually don't make the best-seller lists. Housing isn't "sexy". You won't hear these stories in the late-night on Letterman or Leno. But many of us are just a couple of paychecks away from the street. Recent studies have confirmed it: Twenty-first Century Chicago faces an alarming crisis - a severe shortage of affordable house. This collection captures the real, human stories of housing and homelessness. The words of human beings who shuffle, invisible, through half-lives of bus shelters, viaducts and abandoned basements.

Participants in the Neighborhood writing Alliance collaboratively write our shared history through the personal.

Reflections on the lives of ordinary people by writers from a network of adult education centers all over the city