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International Writing Program @ Prairie Lights
Join us for the Sunday International Writing Program Prairie Lights Reading Series to hear some of this years’ IWP residents read from their work.
Claire Lombardo @ Prairie Lights
Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Claire Lombardo will read from The Most Fun We Ever Had, a multi-generational novel in which the four adult daughters of a Chicago couple match wits, harbor grudges, and recklessly ignite old rivalries until a long-buried secret threatens to shatter the lives they've built. "Everything about this brilliant debut cuts deep: the humor, the wisdom, the pathos. Claire Lombardo writes like she's been doing it for a hundred years, and like she's been alive for a thousand." —Rebecca…
Sarah Seo @ Prairie Lights
University of Iowa Law Faculty Sarah Seo will talk about her new book, Policing the Open Road. “A brilliant and groundbreaking book that will fundamentally reshape the way we think about the police, criminal procedure, and American freedom. Seo takes us from the Model T to the twenty-first century to show how policing cars, unexpectedly, made possible both the democratization of law enforcement and the systematic racialized policing of minorities.”--Bernard E. Harcourt Sarah A. Seo is Associate Professor of Law at…
Paul’s Book Club @ The ICPL
There are so few books that I go back to again and again, and fewer still that were written in the last 20 years. But I can never get enough of Jesus' Son. It's a small volume of 11 short stories. And it is brutally honest and painfully beautiful. It's set in a down-and-out world of drugs and drink. But wait — don't turn that dial — Mr. Johnson succeeds at this where so many others fail. He doesn't ever romanticize these…
Lila Savage @ Prairie Lights
Writers’ Workshop graduate Lila Savage will read from her new novel, Say Say Say. "An emotional masterpiece . . . Bryn, a retired carpenter, hires Ella, an artist in her late 20s, to take care of his wife. In their house, Ella witnesses a level of love and passion she's been bereft of in her day-to-day life. Say Say Say is a heartbreaking book bracingly honest, unflinching prose . . . it meditates on empathy and finding human connection even in the worst…
T Fleischmann @ Prairie Lights
The Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program presents alum T Fleischmann, who will read from Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through. "Chicago-based writer T Fleischmann melds personal narrative and art criticism in a poetically titled, genre-defying work. Mining the interactive art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, this book-length essay explores power, desire, gender fluidity and subverting limitations." --Chicago Tribune T Fleischmann is the author of Syzygy, Beauty, and the curator of Body Forms: Queerness and the Essay. A nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM and contributing editor at the blog Essay…
Melissa Isaacson w/ Lisa Bluder @ Prairie Lights
University of Iowa alum Melissa Isaacson will talk with UI Women’s Basketball coach Lisa Bluder about Isaacson’s book, State: A Team, A Triumph, a Transformation. Isaacson was born in Chicago and was a member of the 1979 girls state championship basketball team for Skokie's Niles West High School. “In State, Melissa Isaacson perfectly captures the birth of Title IX and a time when high school girls were starting to gain equality in sports and in the classroom, showing us how opportunities on the…
International Writing Program @ Prairie Lights
Join us for the Sunday International Writing Program Prairie Lights Reading Series to hear some of this years’ IWP residents read from their work.
Colin Gordon @ Prairie Lights
UI Professor of American History Colin Gordon will talk about his new book, Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs. Citizen Brown explores the long backstory to the death of Michael Brown in 2014, looking at the conditions and circumstances faced by African-Americans living in the suburbs of St. Louis. “Gordon creates a compelling and well-documented account of the ways in which local governments first refuse to provide services to certain neighborhoods and then use that lack…
Domenica Martinello & Christopher Kondrich @ Prairie Lights
Writers’ Workshop graduate Domenica Martinello will read from All Day I Dream About Sirens. "Steering a pirated flagship through the grottos of nightmare, Domenica Martinello ferries us dangerously close to the cliffs in her mermaid-spotting boat tour, All Day I Dream About Sirens. Offering much more than sight-seeing, these poems dare us to really hear the furious, lascivious lyricism of the sirens, and though Martinello's poems ripple softly over the surface, beware the deadly riptide and swim at your own risk, as lyric…
Chandrahas Choudhury @ Prairie Lights
IWP alum and one of India’s most celebrated young writers, Chandrahas Choudhury, will read from his new novel, Clouds. Clouds illuminates the inner lives of characters forging their own paths in the great metropolis and shows a vast, prismatic portrait of modern India in all its tumult and glory. “Chandrahas Choudhury is one of the most clever and quirky, lively and witty of India’s new generation of novelists. Clouds signals the blossoming of a major new talent‘.-- William Dalrymple Chandrahas Choudhury is the…
Cara Wall @ Prairie Lights
Writers’ Workshop graduate and co-founder of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio Cara Wall will read from and talk about her new novel, The Dearly Beloved. "God and literary fiction don't always get along; perhaps that's why Cara Wall's The Dearly Beloved, a thoughtful debut that follows the lives of two ministers and their wives, feels so galvanizing. Its four characters get equal voice--Charles, son of a rigid academic; Lily, orphaned as a child; James, born into family hardship; Nan, a well-adjusted minister's…