Moon 52 Things to Do Series

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Rosalind Cummings-Yeates is a born-and-raised Chicagoan. She grew up on a placid South Side street, lined with wide lawns and laughter, called Avalon. Since then she’s lived all over the city and currently resides in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood, Roger's Park.
 
As an award-winning journalist, Rosalind has spent most of her career telling the overlooked and unexpected stories of her city, in publications including the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, and Ebony Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Chicago Blues: Inside the Scene, Past and Present.
 
What Rosalind loves about Chicago is that each neighborhood has its own personality, with its own rules, aesthetics, and even unofficial mayors. Its 77 neighborhoods come together to form the vibrant and warm essence of the city.

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Teena Apeles is a native Angeleno who has spent two decades covering art, culture, design, activism, history, and beyond for print and online media. She has written for numerous outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, KCET, PBS SoCal, PBS Canvas, LAist, WHERE Traveler Los Angeles, Hunker, JoySauce, BUST, Giant Robot, LA Weekly, and Pasadena Weekly. Teena has also contributed to and edited numerous books covering a wide range of topics, from L.A.’s public parks and urban wildlife to comic book culture and Disneyland.
 
Her works include the history book for teens, Women Warriors: Adventures from History's Greatest Female Fighters, and essays in the anthologies Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them, and Bare Your Soul: The Thinking Girl's Guide to Enlightenment, among others.

In 2016, Teena founded the creative collective Narrated Objects, which produces books and experiences to showcase the diverse voices of the city of Los Angeles. The collective published the L.A.-themed books We Heart P-22, We Heart L.A. Parks, and Dear Seller, which feature artwork and stories by Angelenos of all ages. Past collaborators have included Homeboy Industries, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the L.A. Conservancy, the Autry Museum of the American West, Helms Bakery District, the National Wildlife Federation, Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, and USC Pacific Asia Museum.
 
For her work with Narrated Objects, Teena has received an Awesome Grant, a Creative Economic Development Fund Grant, and a Certificate of Recognition from the California Legislature Assembly, and appeared on Spectrum News 1, KCRW’s DnA: Design and Architecture, and the podcasts Bookstories and The Hidden History of Los Angeles, to discuss their collective’s unique projects.

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Jessica Dunham lives in Phoenix with her husband and two spunky dogs, but inherited a family summer home on Lake Champlain in Vermont. This seemed heavenly to her, until she tried to imagine getting there from halfway across the country. Then it required some effort and a little imagination. The only way to transport the herd from one place to another was to pile into a Jeep and drive. That's is how she came to know and love the Mother Road, and became an expert on the ins and outs of Route 66. 

She's since driven from Phoenix to Vermont and back again six times, traversed the Southwest portion of Route 66 hundreds of times, napped in leafy parks, slept in a wigwam and at a Best Western, camped in tents, dined at mom-and-pop eateries, met strangers, and made friends in almost every town dotting the famed highway. She's seen the sun rise over Illinois cornfields and watched it set over the Pacific Ocean. After all this, she considers the beating heart of blacktop from Chicago to Santa Monica home.

Formerly a travel guide editor at Madden Media, Jessica is now a freelance travel writer. Her writing has been featured in PHOENIX magazine, Valley Guide, Phoenix Travel Guide, Arizona Visitor's Guide, Midwest Living, Phoenix New Times, Modern Luxury, Annapolis Visitors Guide, Connecticut Visitors Guide, Runner's World, Jane, Discover South Carolina, and more. Jessica is also the author of The Open Road: 50 Best Road Trips in the USA.

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