Author Liese Greensfelder will read from her new book, Accidental Shepard, and will be joined in conversation by Iowa Writers' Workshop alum, Mary Swander. Based on what was supposed to be a summer job on a remote sheep farm in Norway that turned into a yearlong experience, Accidental Shepard is praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder as...

Join us for a double-feature reading by poets Patrycja Humienik, who will read from her new book of poems, We Contain Landscapes, and Austin Araujo, a current Iowa NWP student who will read from his new poetry collection, At the Park on the Edge of the Country. Described as a collection "haunted by questions of desire, borders,...

Poet Steven Leyva will read from his newest collection of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, and will be joined in conversation by fellow poet Cory Hutchinson-Reuss. "In The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva’s poems ask readers to see and remember beauty when the world seems to be in ruins, to notice and praise “the industrious cherry // trees...

Central Ohio-based author and Iowa Writers' Workshop alum Michelle Herman will read from her newest book, an essay collection called If You Say So. Galileo Press, which published If You Say So and which originated in Iowa City in the 1970s, describes Herman's essays as "true stories about loss and reinvention, longing and loneliness, friendship and community, and...

New York Times bestselling author and former Prairie Lights bookseller Claire Lombardo will return to Iowa City to read from her newest novel, Same As It Ever Was, which was just released in paperback! New York Times book critic and author, Hamilton Cain, praised Same As It Ever Was in a June 2024 NYT review as a "refashion domestic drama into...

Poet Karla Kelsey will read from her newest book, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy. Described as a "lyric-documentary rendezvous with iconoclastic writer and visual artist Mina Loy (1882–1966)" (karlakelsey.com), Transcendental Factory is praised by writer Danielle Dutton as "a brilliant novel from inside and outside Mina Loy—a novel that is also a poem, a dictionary, a historical compendium,...

Brooklyn-based writer and Iowa Writers' Workshop alum Paul Lisicky will read from his newest book, Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell. He will be joined in conversation with fellow Writers' Workshop alum and current Iowa City resident, Garth Greenwell. Named a Most Anticipated Book of Spring 2025 by Kirkus...

Montreal-based professor of English and translator Nathan Brown will read from his translation of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire. Verso Books says: "Probing the depths of the modern psyche in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, Baudelaire’s infamous book brings to the surface a new understanding of evil, of eroticism, and...

Iowa Writers' Workshop alum Sanjena Sathian will read from her new novel, Goddess Complex, and will be joined in conversation by Ren Arcamone, also a Writers' Workshop alum. Penguin Random House, which published Goddess Complex, describes it as "a darkly funny, vertiginous novel about the dilemmas of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting." Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of the...