Literature

Join us for a special 6pm poetry and translation event co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Asian Studies department!  Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her fellow poet and translator, Yuki Tanaka will present the first collection in English of twentieth century Japanese surrealist poet Shuzo Takiguchi, A Kiss for...

Scholar and essayist Samira Mehta will read from her book of blended memoir, cultural criticism, and theory, The Racism of People Who Love You. She will be joined in conversation by Ari Ariel.  What Kirkus Reviews describes as "Thoughtful meditations on identity" and what Simran Jeet Singh, author of The Light We Give, describes as "insightful, provocative,...

Middle-grade author H.M. Bouwman will read from her newest novel, Scattergood, which features a thirteen-year-old protagonist named Peggy who witnesses numerous changes in her small Iowa farm community (West Branch) in 1941. Writers' Workshop alum Laurel Snyder wrote in her New York Times Book Review of Scattergood that it's "...a brave, beautiful book, wise enough to reach for something beyond...

Writers' Workshop alum Stuart Nadler will read from his newest novel, Rooms for Vanishing, which is a "prismatic, mind-bending family epic about the splintering of a Jewish family from Vienna—exploring the weight of exile and how grief twists our sense of the impossible" (stuartnadler.net). Kirkus Reviews describes Rooms for Vanishing as "beautifully written," while Sabrina Orah Mark, author...