Please join us for an afternoon with the multi-talented Zaq Baker as he accompanies a reading from his first book Unspectacular with a piano performance.

About Unspectacular:

Mae Strand, twenty, is a compulsive liar and budding but reluctant Chicago vocalist whose mother's mysterious prior life is starting to loom dangerously large over her own. Coerced into recording a studio album by entertainment lawyer Robert Koenid, Mae is forced to choose between a small shot at fame or music's intrinsic value, all while she crests adulthood with her independence at stake. 

A few blocks away, Ajay Chadhana is offered a rare opportunity: Skip a step in the software career he's been building since he decamped from the cricket pitches of Eastern India to Illinois... at the cost of severely hardening his heart. As he races toward thirty, Ajay must draw a line between the advantages of corporate life and his harried nights as a session drummer - a crisis of ambition and self-care.

Zaq Baker is a songwriter, pianist, keyboardist, vocalist, co-arranger, director, performer, recording artist, and occasionally published essayist. Among other 2024 accolades, Zaq Baker’s original music is featured in new film How to Break a World Record (Apple TV, Amazon Prime); and this summer he shared the keynote speaking and performing role at Youth Mental Health Day, a nonprofit conference with 730 attendees. In addition to albums, singles, music videos, and performances under his own name, Zaq plays in ten bands in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His prose has been published twice in accredited magazines. Unspectacular is his first novel.