Iris Jamahl Dunkle  will read from her new biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb.  She’ll be joined in conversation by UIowa Professor Harry Stecopoulos.
Riding Like the Wind brings well-deserved attention to writer Sonora Babb, whose writing on the migrant farmers of the Dust Bowl was used by John Steinbeck in the creation of The Grapes of Wrath, but Babb’s own novel wasn’t published.  Her life and work feature heavily in Ken Burns’s award-winning documentary The Dust Bowl and inspired Kristin Hannah in her bestseller The Four Winds. Riding Like the Wind reminds us with fresh awareness that the stories we know—and who tells them—can change the way we remember history.

“No novelist captured the relentless devastation of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, or the cruel treatment of the desperate ‘Okies’ forced to leave their homes on the Plains for California, better than Sanora Babb. In this biography, Iris Jamahl Dunkle explains why. Hardship, hunger and struggle, discrimination and stubborn prejudice, big dreams thwarted by fate and bad luck––these were also recurring elements of Babb’s own remarkable personal story. But she met it all with an indomitable will, a vivaciously free spirit, and an unbending devotion to her artistic vision. Riding Like the Wind is a both heartbreaking and heroic tale that brings to vivid life an important American writer who never received the critical acclaim and commercial success she deserved.”—Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, producers of The Dust Bowl

Iris Dunkle earned her MFA in poetry from New York University and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of the biography, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), and four collections of poetry, including West : Fire : Archive, published by The Center for Literary Publishing.
Dunkle curates Finding Lost Voices, a weekly blog dedicated to resurrecting the voices of women who have been marginalized or forgotten. Her writing has appeared in publications like Orion, Electric Lit, Liber, Pleiades, Tin House, Calyx, Fence, The Los Angeles Review, and Split Rock Review. Her work was featured on The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and showcased on one hundred buses during the Muni Art 2020 campaign.

Professor Harry Stecopoulos is the former editor of The Iowa Review, and teaches courses on modern U.S. literature, African American literature, the energy humanities, and creative writing at the University of Iowa. His publications include Telling America’s Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy (Oxford, 2022), Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and US Imperialisms, 1898-1976 (Cornell, 2008), and the edited collection A History of the Literature of the U.S. South (Cambridge, 2021).  He is currently working on his first novel, tentatively titled “Myrtle Wilson, Queen of Flushing Creek.”