Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum Stephen Starring Grant will read from and talk with Daniel Khalastchi about his new memoir, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. The Atlantic says about Mailman: “A love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, Mailman is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal….[Grant] proves to be a compelling and empathetic guide, observing his country and its citizens, not just himself, with open and unjaded eyes.” 

Stephen Starring Grant is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in Poetry and Fiction. After twenty years as a consumer strategist, he became a rural letter carrier during the pandemic. Raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he now lives with his family in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Daniel Khalastchi is the author of American Parables, Manoleria, Tradition, and The Story of Your Obstinate Survival. He lives in Iowa City where he is the Executive Director of the Office of Writing and Communication at the University of Iowa.