Pulitzer Prize finalist and MacArthur Fellowship recipient Karen Russell will read from her newest novel, The Antidote, and will be in conversation with New York Times bestselling author Kaveh Akbar. Says Akbar of The Antidote: “…Karen Russell writes indelible characters who keep choosing messy community over silo’d righteousness, motion over despair. She presents for inspection America’s most persistent chorus of moral self-defense, “Better them than us,” and shows how it rots the minds, hearts, and land of all who sing it. Only Karen Russell could write a dust bowl opus with such raucous brio…It’s magic, a book doing this big work and also making it propulsive, eminently readable.” Meanwhile, novelist Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds, says, “The Antidote is an achingly gorgeous book about dust, memory, basketball, murder, yearning, photography, and the way the land holds both the memory of what went before and the dreams of what may come. Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange.”

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She received the NYPL’s Young Lions Award and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and the New Yorker’s 20 under 40. Now decisively over 40, she’s the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, and the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, among other honors. She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she lives in Portland, OR with her husband, son, and daughter.

Kaveh Akbar is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Martyr! as well as poetry collections Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine and co-editor with Paige Lewis of the anthology Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. He lives in Iowa City.