Performers at the festival will include Angelique Kidjo, Tito Jackson, and Chicago’s own Chaka Khan. Check out the festival website for more information on all the events and activities that are part of the festival. The festival is a project of Africa International House.

You can view some photos of a fundraiser I hosted for the festival at Egami Photos.

On another note, the appearance on the Channel 2 Monsters & Money in the Morning show that we previously announced on the home page has had to be rescheduled. I’ll let you know when a new date is set.

The June 14 issue of Jet magazine has a brief “designer spotlight” that features my thoughts on the Eyebobs design, which are a response to the difficulty in finding fashionable reading glasses for men. Our press page has a link to the article.

Truly the best thing about these glasses is that the proceeds go to Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. Those of you who’ve seen The Pursuit of Happyness may know Glide as the homeless shelter and soup kitchen that assisted my son and me during our period of homelessness in the early 1980s. Glide today continues the work helping the community that the church and its pastor Rev. Cecil Williams have been committed to for nearly 50 years. If you’re not interested in the eyeglasses but would like to help Glide, you can contribute at the Glide website.

While speaking there, the folks at TechTown had a number of artists stand behind me and sketch their impressions of what I was saying on a whiteboard as I spoke. Recently they sent me photos of the artwork that was created, and I was very impressed with the work the artists spontaneously created to illustrate my speech.

I’d like to share all this artwork with you, and have instructed my staff to obtain clearance with TechTown and obtain the names of all the artists so they can be properly credited. In the meantime, here’s a little sample:

Sponsors of my speaking appearances are free to use these photos in your publicity efforts. Please add a “photo by Steve Fenn” credit where applicable. High resolution versions of the photos are available by clicking the appropriate link after you click the thumbnail image.

Anyway, we have left our comments section open and have not required site registration so far, to keep an open dialog going and to provide the least friction for folks to express their thoughts. We might have to rethink that in the future, but for now my staff will manually delete bogus spam comments, probably long before anyone clicks on them or Google indexes them. So you’re wasting your time! Move along, there’s nothing to see here …

And to all the folks who’ve posted legitimate comments, I really appreciate your interest, and the decent and respectful tone you’ve maintained. I see that folks have posted a lot of questions, and I’ll try to answer those I can as time permits. Thanks once again for visiting the site and leaving your thoughtful comments.