Evanston RoundTable

Attention Evanston families — here’s a resource you won’t want to miss! We’ve launched a new weekly newsletter that will keep you in-the-know about everything going on around town, from school and neighborhood updates to family-friendly events and parenting tips. We know you’re busy, so Raising Evanston will be conveniently curated and delivered to your inbox on Tuesdays. Our writers are plugged into the E-town ecosystem (and maintain a high bar for what’s relevant!) As a Raising Evanston reader, you’ll always know what’s going on in Evanston. And here’s the best part: It’s completely free! Subscribe now at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundTable #etown #raisingevanston #ert #parenting #parents #families #parentingnewsletter #familynewsletter #familyfriendly 📝 & 📸 : Evanston RoundTable

Evanston Township High School seniors are steps away from receiving diplomas that represent years of hard work, learning and personal growth. The official last day of school for seniors May 8 kicked off a whirlwind of traditions and events, bringing students together for memorable shared experiences before their next chapter begins. When the last bell rang, seniors were invited to stay on campus a little longer – not to study, but to celebrate at Lazier Field. There was a DJ, free food, time to pick up yearbooks and say goodbye to classmates, teachers and a high school that helped to shape them. The following day, May 9, was Senior Prom, held at the Aon Grand Ballroom on Navy Pier. This week is a transition period, where academic classes and bell schedules are replaced by a slate of mandatory and celebratory “must do” activities for seniors before their May 17 graduation. Members of the Class of 2026 made a brief return to ETHS Wednesday for senior check-out, held in Beardsley Gymnasium. Soon-to-be graduates paid remaining fees, returned textbooks and devices and were cleared for graduation. The last stop was to pick up a cap and gown — the physical representation of a student’s academic success. Students waited patiently in lines that moved quickly, chatting with friends and greeting ETHS faculty, staff and volunteers. Cap and gown in hand, students seemed to take in the reality of what graduation means — the end of high school and a step towards adulthood and independence. Some students said they have mixed emotions as they move on from high school, and several said they are excited about graduation day. Swipe for more photos, and read the full story at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable 📝 & 📸: Heidi Randhava

The Fired Up! podcast, produced by Evanston-based nonprofit the Trade Collective, offers honest and open discussions of the trades with local voices and incorporates data and real life stories. It is co-hosted by Trade Collective founder Patrick Hughes and Pete Bavis, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction at Evanston Township High School (ETHS). Seven episodes in, the show has featured a politician, heads of local manufacturing and other businesses and numerous ETHS alumni who’ve turned their lives around through the trades. Conversations are candid — sometimes uncomfortably, sometimes humorously so — the guests are passionate and the message is timely. What the show is about and why it matters The premise of Fired Up! is simple but urgent. According to Hughes, there are more than 900 unfilled trade positions within 10 miles of Evanston right now. According to Rich Gallagher, a member of the International Union of Bricklayers & Allied Craftworkers and a masonry foreman, despite the Chicago area having one of the highest-paid and largest unionized workforces in the nation, local projects like Ryan Field often import skilled workers from out of state, housing them in hotels, because there aren’t enough available locally. Meanwhile, Bavis said the Evanston community has a “college-for-all mentality.” Since the class of 2023, about one-in-four ETHS graduates has chosen not to go tocollege. A significant number of them are struggling. Bavis, who brings an educator’s perspective to every episode, describes pressure to go to college as both explicit and implicit. Evanston, he notes, reportedly has one of the highest concentrations of master’s degrees per capita in the country “which means we’re an elite and overeducated population.” Evanston also celebrates its diverse population, which means it’s home to many young people for whom college may not be the best fit. Read the full story at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable #firedup #thetradecollective #podcast #ETHS #fireduppodcast 📝: Patricia L. Stankovic 📸: The Trade Collective

Has your child torn through the Baby-Sitters Club series and is hungrily looking for their next fix? Are you hoping to find a book to gently wean them off their Diary of a Wimpy Kid-only diet? Want help tracking down some bedtime read-alouds that will not put you to sleep? The Evanston Public Library offers a concierge service to connect your child with their future favorites. Kids LitMatch is a free, personalized book-matching service, run by EPL’s children’s librarians, that pairs a young reader with titles tailored to their tastes, reading level, and whatever weird specific thing they’re into lately. (Historical fiction early readers? They’ve got it handled.) Users fill out a short form on the EPL website, the librarians pull from their well of knowledge and within five business days, send a curated list of at least five books — with the option to have holds placed for you at the main library on Orrington Avenue or the Robert Crown Branch. How it works The service launched in 2020, when the library’s doors were temporarily closed and staff wanted to keep connecting patrons with books even from a distance. “We wanted to up the support we could offer patrons even while our doors were closed,” said Jessica Iverson Wu, one of the children’s librarians who handles incoming LitMatch requests. It has continued ever since, and the team wants more families to know it exists. The LitMatch form asks for information like your child’s age and grade, whether they read at, above, or below grade level, their preferred genres, up to three books they’ve read and enjoyed recently, and whether they want read-alikes or something new. There’s also a catch-all field for anything else the librarians should know. Read the full story at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable #evanstonpubliclibrary #kidslitmatch #books #reading #booksommelier 📝: Claire Zulkey @klarzulk 📸: Hope Perry

“If they would have given us an extra one-eighth of an inch, it would have slipped on like a glove.” That’s how installer Alex Cardos described the predicament that he and his Nova Sign company crew faced as they tried to attach the new Northlight Theatre sign onto brackets outside the soon-to-be completed “jewel box” (that’s the term everyone seems to use) at 1012 Church St.. “It was too tight,” Cardos said. But he was not worried — even in front of dozens of people watching from across the street who had come to celebrate the new theater. “We kept pushing, pushing, pushing,” he said. Several minutes later, the crew shimmied the sign in place. To a standing ovation. “This is a moment of history for us,” said BJ Jones, Northlight’s artistic director. The company was founded in 1974 as the Evanston Theatre Company and began its first season in 1975 in the decommissioned Kingsley Elementary School. “Now we are coming back. What a powerful statement,” said Jones. “This is a dream come true for people in Evanston who didn’t even know they had the dream,” said Sandra Farrow, a Northlight board member who lives a couple blocks away. The theater, she said, will help Evanston “in our ability to express ourselves.” The inaugural season in downtown Evanston for the regional theater starts Sept. 9 with the premier of a new adaption of “The Front Page.” Five plays have been announced for the season. In a few nights, the letters of the new sign will be illuminated. “It’s real,” said Mayor Daniel Biss, who watched the sign being set in place. “Opening night is arriving.” Swipe for more photos, and read the full story at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable #northlighttheatre #downtownevanston #theatre 📝 & 📸: Richard Cahan

I’m Hope Perry, the education reporter here at the RoundTable. Over the past year, I’ve attended more than 25 Evanston/Skokie School District 65 school board meetings to keep the community informed. Just last month, our newsroom was the first to report that the district was planning to eliminate middle school counselors, prompting a community response. I live-blogged school board meetings this winter as education officials repeatedly deadlocked over school closures. That way, even families who couldn’t attend in person or watch the live video could stay up to date on decisions affecting their lives. Night after night, I’ve heard the passion this community has for its students. After reporting on issues across the district, I know how much it matters to have a local journalist on this beat. The relationships I’ve built here in Evanston keep families informed. The team here at the RoundTable has broken story after story to hold District 65 accountable. But it’s not easy to sustain this type of dedicated reporting, and we can’t do it without your help. If our coverage at the RoundTable has informed your thinking about Evanston schools this year, we ask that you consider making a donation. That way, we can keep doing the watchdog reporting that our community turns to, time and again. Support school coverage at the 🔗 below #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable /2026/05/13/strong-schools-need-a-strong-local-press/ 📝 & 📸: Hope Perry

Local arts nonprofit @evanston_made will host a grand opening May 14 for its new retail space at 822 Dempster St., called Shop Evanston Made. The opening coincides with the Evanston Arts & Craft Beverage Crawl, co-hosted by Evanston Made and the @maindempstermile . Residents can get tickets for the crawl for $34 before online through May 12, or $44 at the door. Along the stops of the crawl, attendees will get tastings of local craft beverages and opportunities to meet Evanston Made artists and view or purchase their work. Around 50 of Evanston Made’s roughly 400 member artists will participate. A portion of ticket proceeds will go to Evanston Made. The crawl runs from 5 to 8 p.m. May 14 and includes dozens of stops; along the route, attendees will get taskings of local craft beverages and opportunities to meet Evanston Made artists and view or purchase their work. About 50 of Evanston Made’s roughly 400 member artists will participate. A portion of the ticket proceeds will go to Evanston Made. Katherine Gotsick of the Main-Dempster Mile expects hundreds of people to attend the event, pointing to attendance of about 400 attendees at previous crawls. “It’s one of the best ways to introduce people to our businesses, period,” Gotsick said of the crawl. “This is a great way to get people to walk inside a business they walk past all the time.” Space for connection During the crawl, attendees can also stop in at the grand opening of the Shop Evanston Made space. Several member artists will be at the store to meet residents alongside Evanston Made co-directors Liz Cramer and Lisa Degliantoni. “It’ll be a good sort of live example of what this shop is going to be, which is a place where you can always meet the owners,” Degliantoni told the RoundTable, “but then also meet the makers.” Read the full story at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable #evanstonmade #maindempstermile #artsandcraftbeveragecrawl #nonprofit #shopevanstonmade 📝 & 📸: Margo Milanowski @margo.milanowski

The joy of prom season was on display Saturday afternoon, as ETHS students and their families captured candid, joyful moments and “golden hour” scenes that will be treasured for a lifetime. For many Evanston students, Mallinckrodt Park in Wilmette was “that place” to gather before heading to Navy Pier for the prom. Here are some photos that showcase the attire and excitement of this year’s prom-goers. Swipe for more photos, and see the full collection at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable #prom #ETHS #promphotos 📝 & 📸: Heidi Randhava

MetaMedia, a signature middle school initiative of the McGaw YMCA, is a place for students to discover and “become.” With a wood shop, music studio, computer lab and beanbags, it is a happy haven humming with activity. After school five days a week, MetaMedia welcomes 25 or so sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders to choose from a variety of activities from 3 to 6 p.m. On one afternoon in April, that included making slime, an annual spring project that participants look forward to with zeal. A group of about seven students worked at a table mixing glue and activator, holding up drippy sheets of pastel goop. One student had a big glob stuck to her sweatshirt and asked an educator to help her remove it. Another student said his slime smelled like lemons. Matthew, an eighth-grader who has been coming since sixth grade, when asked what he likes about the program said, “The community, you know, the people, everybody’s nice. Something fun to do.” Matthew recalled a favorite, a snowflake project the group made from paper bags that they gave to the Y to be hung for a winter party for YMCA residents. His current project? “I’m making a baseball bat,” he said. Making friends, mentorship Lulu Madise, the lab’s program coordinator and a 2024 Northwestern University School of Communication graduate, said a main goal of the program is to help students build relationships with each other. “They are at that age where they’re just learning how to ‘become’ right now, and how to do it,” Madise explained. “Our job is really to just help make sense of it with them. And that comes with a lot. It’s hard. I feel that at this age they are developing so much, emotionally, their ideas of how they are in the world and who they’re becoming. And it’s really beautiful to witness that.” Read the full story at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable #MetaMedia #MCGawYWCA #mentorship 📝 & 📸: Belinda Lichty Clarke

To Daniel Kraus, winning a Pulitzer Prize was never in the cards. The New York Times-bestselling writer and novelist has lived in Evanston for the past 12 years, and said he never felt that his work would win the award because of the “intense” horror element that his works primarily feature. “It’s obviously exciting and wonderful, but it’s also primarily disorienting,” he said. “I’m still trying to figure out how this all happened.” Kraus won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on Monday, May 4 for his book Angel Down, a dark, otherworldly tale of a WWI soldier who comes face-to-face with a fallen angel in No Man’s Land, who may have the key to ending the nightmarish conflict. The novel, which was included in numerous Best of 2025 book lists such as the New York Times, USA Today, People and Vulture, was described by the Pulitzer Center as “a breathless novel of World War I, a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence.” Kraus has written over two dozen books that all dabble in the frightening world of horror, but don’t primarily rely on the “horror” generalization. He has also co-authored projects with many other creative forces in the literary and entertainment world, such as director and writer Guillermo del Toro and legendary filmmaker George A. Romero. Kraus has won many awards as well, such as the Bram Stoker Award, Scribe Award, two Odyssey Awards and his works have appeared multiple times as Library Guild selections. Growing up in a small Iowa town, Kraus fell into the world of horror during his early adolescence through works such as Night of the Living Dead, The Twilight Zone, Dawn of the Dead and Faces of Death. Read the full story at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable #danielkraus #Pulitzerprize #author #book #evanstonauthor #writer 📝 & 📸: Matt Brady

As the RoundTable’s Food Editor, I don’t just review restaurants. I help shape how Evanston experiences its food scene. I want to be that trusted guide who helps you discover new spots and remember old ones. Years in the industry and a deep connection to the community are what make my reporting stand out. At a time when many outlets overlook smaller, independent restaurants, I’m working to highlight their importance. My work ensures those places are seen, supported, and part of the conversation, giving readers a fuller picture of the Evanston community. Local food coverage is essential. If I didn’t write about some of these restaurants, who would cover them? That kind of dedicated, trustworthy coverage only exists because of reader support. If my work has helped you explore Evanston in new ways, I hope you’ll consider donating to the newsroom behind it. Support the RoundTable at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable 📝 : Julie Chernoff @juliechernoff 📸: Brian McConkey

Evanston may be losing a beloved restaurant that has operated for more than 60 years. The property at 2628–2632 Gross Point Road, which includes Sarkis Cafe, was listed for sale Wednesday on Zillow for $2.95 million. Sarkis, long a North Shore institution, was founded in 1965 by Sarkis Tashjian. Marla Cramin, who manages the restaurant, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Cramin has been involved with the restaurant since 2000 and took full ownership in 2012. It was not immediately clear whether the listing meant that restaurant would move or cease operations entirely, though the Zillow posting noted that “the restaurant operation and [furniture, fixtures and equipment] are not included in the sale.” The listing describes the .29 acre property as an “absolute once in two lifetimes opportunity.” Michael Levin of @Properties for Christie’s International Real Estate is listed as the broker. Levin did not immediately respond to a call from the RoundTable. “This is an Outstanding investment or Development opportunity [sic], The City of Evanston has hinted at a two story structure with Retail on the lower floor And residential or office on the second floor [sic],” the listing reads. The property is in a B1a zoning district, which allows retail, above-ground office and above-ground residential development without requiring special approval. In March, Sarkis closed for one day at the same time that stickers from the Illinois Department of Revenue — saying that the “certificate of registration has expired” — were seen on windows facing the parking lot. At the time, Cramin told the RoundTable the closure was a “non-issue” caused by a “simple misunderstanding.” The restaurant reopened the following day. Read the full story at the 🔗 in our bio #Evanston #EvanstonRoundtable #sarkis #restaurant 📝 : Hope Perry 📸: Bob Chiarito