Prairie Lights

Iowa City author Louisa Hall will read from her genre-defying novel that explores the surreality of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in a country in crisis, Reproduction. “I read this novel in a single rapturous sitting, torn between the desire to hurtle through its hypnotic prose and the desire to reread every perfect sentence. Reproduction exquisitely captures the lunacy of inhabiting an animal body with a human mind, and somehow manages also to be gross, funny, heartrending, and formally acrobatic. Louisa Hall is a singular talent and I am a devotee.” — Melissa Febos

Louisa Hall is the author of the novels Speak and The Carriage House, and her poems have been published in The New Republic, Southwest Review, and other journals.  She is a professor at the University of Iowa, and the Western Writer in Residence at Montana State University.  Hall will be joined in conversation by Sam Chang, Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and author of the acclaimed novels The Family Chao, All is Forgotten Nothing is Lost, Hunger, and Inheritance.