What to know about Amy Eshleman, Lori Lightfoot’s wife and Chicago’s soon-to-be first lady – Chicago Tribune

Chicago Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot and her wife, Amy Eshleman, live in Logan Square with their 11-year-old daughter.

When Lightfoot’s sworn in as the city’s 56th mayor May 20, Eshleman will become the city’s first lady.

Here are some things to know about her:

* Eshleman is originally from Sterling, Ill., and has lived in Chicago since 1991.

* She is a former Chicago Public Library assistant commissioner. Eshleman worked there for the entirety of former Chicago Public Library Commissioner Mary A. Dempsey’s tenure, which was from 1994 to 2012. During her time there, Eshleman helped develop YOUmedia, a digital media center for teens that started in 2009 at the Chicago Public Library’s Harold Washington branch. The program had success and a similar version was spread nationally.“President (Barack) Obama cited (the) YOUmedia digital space for teens as a type of new and innovative learning space that needs to be replicated throughout the country,” then-Mayor Richard M. Daley said at the 2010 Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner. Eshleman later helped expand a similar Learning Labs program nationally while the program leader for education at the Urban Libraries Council, according to a 2013 article by the Remake Learning network.

* Dempsey worked closely with Lightfoot in the Daley administration, when the mayor named Dempsey in 2005 to head reforms of the city Procurement Department in response to a federal investigation into the city’s minority- and women-owned businesses hiring program. Daley named Lightfoot as Dempsey’s top deputy in the cleanup effort. Dempsey took a leave of absence from the library to lead the politically sensitive work at procurement. Dempsey, who is now the president of DePaul College Prep, gave Lightfoot’s mayoral campaign $64,776, according to state campaign finance records.

* Lightfoot and Eshleman have been together for 16 years. They got married on the day same-sex marriages became legal in Illinois. In a previous interview with the Tribune, Eshleman discussed why the couple chose to get married when they did and the anxiety of coming out: “You don’t know what your life is going to be like,” she said. “You want certain things for yourself, and falling in love and having a family and doing all those things felt really important to us. To be able to be married on that day felt really big.”

* Eshleman and Lightfoot walked in last summer’s Chicago Pride Parade. She recently told the Tribune that experience was “one of the most profound and emotional and humbling” moments of her life. It showed most Chicagoans are “open and welcoming and diverse and loving and nonjudgmental.”

* According to an entry for Eshleman on the Sterling Schools Foundation website, she was a student-athlete at Sterling High School who played tennis and basketball. A 1980 graduate, Eshleman also played on the school’s 1977 girls basketball team, which was the first girls basketball state champion in Illinois.

* She also has a bachelor’s degree in history from Miami University in Ohio and worked on two congressional staffs from 1984-88, according to the foundation’s website.

MORE COVERAGE OF THE MAYOR’S RACE:

Mayoral runoff election results: Who won in your precinct? »

Source Article from https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/elections/ct-met-cb-amy-eshleman-what-to-know-20190403-story.html

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What to know about Amy Eshleman, Lori Lightfoot’s wife and Chicago’s soon-to-be first lady – Chicago Tribune

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