Toya Wolfe writes in her spectacular novel “Last Summer on State Street” that “The memories won’t go away; they’re proof that once upon a time, I lived in a brick skyscraper on State Street where stairwells filled with echoes of stampeding gym shoes and harmonizing winos.”

A child of what is now the Robert Taylor public housing complex on the South Side, where her novel is set, Wolfe will be making some very pleasant new memories on Saturday when she and her novel will be honored with the Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award.

This is the second year of this award, presented by the Highland Park-based nonprofit organization to promote the notion of reading about Chicago in Chicago. A small committee selects winners from a few dozen books and the top prize is a stunning $25,000, a sum that makes this among the most substantial monetary prizes in the literary world. (By comparison, the venerable Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is $15,000). The winner of the inaugural prize last year was my former Tribune colleague Dawn Turner for her magnificent “Three Girls From Bronzeville.”

Wolfe will be honored during an event titled “Chicago Storytelling in Bughouse Square,” taking place Saturday in the patch of greenery formally known as Washington Square Park, which sits across Walton Street from the Newberry Library, between Dearborn and Clark streets.

That is a place rich in memories. It is the oldest park in the city and has long been familiarly known as Bughouse Square, “Bughouse” being a slang term for a mental health facility because that is what it often resembled from the 1880s through the 1930s when all sorts of people would stand on soap boxes or crates and spout their passions and philosophies to anyone who would listen. Some were famous and smart (Carl Sandburg). Many others were anonymous goofs, anarchists, dreamers, poets and preachers.

[ Six Loyola University students have captured the magic of Bughouse Square, the city’s oldest park ]

In the mid-1980s an event was created to “honor” those times. The “Bughouse Square Debates” were conceived by the social historian and author Arthur Weinberg and his wife, Lila, a historian, author and teacher. He served as the event’s emcee and after his death in 1989, others filled that role, most dramatically author and activist Studs Terkel, who had spent some of his early years listening to the soapbox orators. Then came my turn 2008 after Terkel’s death and I did so with all the energy I could muster.

Last year the event changed. It became a less confrontational gathering of voices because, as then Newberry President Daniel Greene said, “We are living in a time when there is a lot of screaming at one another and very little listening.”

So the creative Newberry staff started “Chicago Storytelling in Bughouse Square.” Though some attendees missed debates, it satisfied the majority.

And so I will be there again Saturday to introduce and listen to some dignitaries and the six storytellers. I’ll then introduce the members of the Jumping Juniors, a nonprofit organization that uses the sport of double Dutch to mentor young people. That’s appropriate because jumping rope is among one of the activities that peppers Wolfe’s coming-of-age tale.

It is a book filled with young but distinct personalities, girls who live on the page and provide observational insights into a slice of the city that few knew beyond the horrors of newspaper headlines and the gore of television news. It is a novel of friendship, hope and resilience.

You can, of course, buy the book at any of the places where books are sold. You might even try to find a copy in a couple of weeks at the Newberry for its annual book fair, which runs from July 28-30.

“Chicago Storytelling in Bughouse Square 2023: Chicago Forward” is 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. July 15 at Washington Square Park, 901 N. Clark St.; free, more information at www.newberry.org

The 2023 Newberry Book Fair is 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. July 28-30 at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St.; www.newberry.org

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