University of Iowa alum Kathleen Williams Renk will read from her newest book, No Coward Soul Have I, and will be joined in conversation with local writer Mary Helen Stefaniak. Described as “an alternate historical fiction, a type of what-if,” No Coward Soul Have I is praised by Christina Marrocco, author of Addio, Love Monster, as “exquisite storytelling and also immaculate research…Readers will find themselves immersed, contemplating the visceral realities of pre-famine nineteenth century Ireland, a people still engaged in a multi-century struggle to throw off the shackles of colonization…Renk truly weaves the fabric of history with a keen eye from human complexities at all ends of class and intent and nationality.”

Kathleen Williams Renk taught British, Irish, and Women’s literature for nearly three decades in the U.S. and abroad. She writes fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism. While earning her Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa, Williams Renk studied fiction writing with James Alan Macpherson, who won the Pulitzer Prize. In November 2020, Cuidono Press (Brooklyn) published her debut novel, Vindicated: A Novel of Mary Shelley, which won Story Circle Network’s 2021 May Sarton Award in Historical Fiction. Her second novel,The Rossetti Diaries, was published in November 2023 with Bedazzled Ink Publishing in California. In addition, she published Orphan Annie’s Sister, which focuses on her mother’s and her mother’s twin orphan experience during the Great Depression. Williams Renk’s short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Iowa City Magazine, Literary Yard, Page and Spine, CC & D Magazine, and the Scarlet Review. In her spare time, she plays violin and guitar. She also loves to hike on the Front Range in Colorado where she lives.

Mary Helen Stefaniak’s third novel, The World of Pondside, was published by Blackstone Publishing in April 2022. In October of the same year, the University of Iowa Press released her first nonfiction book, The Six-Minute Memoir: Fifty-Five Short Essays on Life, selected from 20+ years of her Alive and Well column in The Iowa Source. A native of Milwaukee, Mary Helen now divides her time between Iowa City, where she and her husband John live in a 168-year-old stagecoach inn they restored, and Omaha, where she is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at Creighton University. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Iowa Review, EPOCH, The Yale Review, AGNI, The Antioch Review, The North American Review, Cream City Review, and Bardball, as well as several anthologies, including New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best 2000 & 2006 (Algonquin Books) and A Different Plain (University of Nebraska Press). She has also served as a commentator on Iowa Public Radio, a columnist for The Iowa Source, a contributing editor for The Iowa Review, and a professor of creative writing in the International Summer School at Renmin University in Beijing.  She often teaches in the M.F.A. program in writing at Pacific University in Oregon.