Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program alum Darius Stewart will read from Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir. “Darius Stewart is a charming, searching, and unflinching interlocutor, whether he’s speaking through the book’s presiding influence, Essex Hemphill, or regaling the reader with messy hookups and botched attempts to snort coke through a cigarette. Calling Be Not Afraid of My Body artful belies just how readable, dazzlingly propulsive this book is. I already can’t wait to read it again.”–Kaveh Akbar

Darius Stewart is the author of the poetry collection Intimacies in Borrowed Light. His poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in the Arkansas International, the Brooklyn Review, Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Fourth Genre, Salamander, Verse Daily, and others. He holds MFAs from the Michener Center for Writers and the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Currently, he is a Lulu Johnson Doctoral Fellow in Literary Studies at the University of Iowa.