Rachel Corbett will read from her newest book, The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling, and will be joined in conversation by former Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program professor Kerry Howley. Described by publisher Norton as “A riveting work of true crime that tells the strange story of criminal profiling from Victorian times to our own,” The Monsters We Make is praised by Publisher’s Weekly as “[combining] riveting accounts of such infamous murderers as Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy with sharp insights about the rise of the public’s fascination with criminal psychology,” while bestselling author Mary Roach says: “Serial killers have spawned hundreds of books, but none like this. With a daughter’s heart and a reporter’s keen gaze, Rachel Corbett turns the stories inside out. She profiles the profilers—their methods, their hubris, and the evils they unwittingly commit. An expertly titrated mix of history, true crime, and memoir, The Monsters We Make is the most intriguing crime book I’ve read in quite some time.”

Rachel Corbett is the author of You Must Change Your Life, which won the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. She is a features writer at New York magazine, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and Atlantic. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Kerry Howley is an essayist, screenwriter, and the author of Bottom’s Up and the Devil Laughs, a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award. In the Times, critic Jennifer Szalai called Bottom’s Up “riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.” Howley’s first book, Thrown, was a pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues, translated into five languages, and named among the top 100 books of the year in the New York Times. Howley is the screenwriter behind WINNER, a film directed by Susanna Fogel starring Emilia Jones, Connie Britton, and Zach Galifianakus. The coming of age comedy debuted at Sundance in 2024. In 2020 Howley left a professorship at the University of Iowa’s celebrated Nonfiction MFA program to join the staff of New York Magazine, where she has published essays about Erewhon, Jorie Graham, and January 6th. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Best American Sportswriting, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, and Harper’s. A 2025 Guggenheim Foundation fellow, Lannan Foundation Fellow and three-time National Magazine Award nominee, she divides her time between Iowa City and Los Angeles.