Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program Professor and bestselling author Melissa Febos will read from her newest memoir, The Dry Season, and will be in conversation with fellow bestselling author and University of Iowa professor, Kaveh Akbar. Taking place after the challenging relationship Febos describes in her second book, Abandon Me, The Dry Season examines “the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster” (melissafebos.com). Over the course of a year, Febos chronicles her own discoveries of pleasure without sex and combines her earned wisdom with cultural criticism of other influential women, including Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, Octavia Butler, and Sappho. Leslie Jamison, bestselling author of The Recovering and Splinters, praises The Dry Season as “an utterly consuming and deeply generous book—an illuminating exploration of solitude and partnership, intimacy and manipulation, the stories we tell ourselves about the choices we make and how we might unlearn those stories to see ourselves more clearly,” while Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts and most recently, Like Love: Essays and Conversations, says, “Reading The Dry Season is like having a nourishing conversation with a smart, wry, and ever-probing friend—a conversation so full of wisdom and pleasure that you don’t want it to end…The example of Febos’s commitment throughout these pages is inspiring and rare; we’re lucky and better off for it.”

Melissa Febos is the author of five books, including the national bestselling essay collection, Girlhood, which has been translated into ten languages and was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and named a notable book of 2021 by NPR, Time, The Washington Post, and others. Her craft book, Body Work (2022), was also a national bestseller, an LA Times Bestseller, and an Indie Next Pick. The recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary, Melissa’s work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is a Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly (melissafebos.com).

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.