Journalist Elaine Weiss will read from her new book, The Woman’s Hour, which tells of the ratification of the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote. “Unfolding over six weeks in the summer of 1920, The Woman’s Hour is both a page-turning drama and an inspiration for everyone, young and old, male and female.” —Hillary Rodham Clinton  Weiss is an award-winning journalist and author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army in the Great War. A MacDowell Colony Fellow, her work has...

Please join us with seven contributing authors to this years’ The Best Small Fictions Anthology for short readings from their work. This series, which began in 2015, has featured an international group of both seasoned and emerging authors who work in flash, micro fiction, prose poetry, haibun, and other hybrid forms. Readers will include Audra Kerr Brown, Kathy Fish, Brenda Peynado, Denise Howard Long, Scott Garson, Jolene McIIwain, and Angela Mitchell.

Want to join a book club to meet other book lovers in Iowa City? Join Paul Ingram’s Book Club! Led by Paul Ingram, Prairie Lights’ legendary bookseller, this monthly book group is open to all. This month’s book is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, so to read the book, and meet up to talk about it at the Iowa City Public Library meeting room D on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. When Kurt Vonnegut was teaching in the Writer's Workshop, in 1965–66, the Vietnam War was getting underway and the student...

Inman’s War and Shell Games author Jeffrey Copeland will read from Plague in Paradise: The Black Death in Los Angeles, 1924.   "This narrative non-fiction tells the story of how the medical community and civic leaders in Los Angeles worked to stop the highly-contagious Black Plague in 1924. It highlights the work of the doctor, nurse, and priest at the center of the outbreak and how politics, racism, and greed delayed its resolution" —Paragon Jeffrey Copeland is a professor and head of the...

Dana Bowman will read from her new recovery memoir How to be Perfect Like Me, which is featured for the month of September on The Today Show’s website. Dana Bowman can’t escape the lure of perfectionism, but when she experiences a short-lived relapse during the Christmas holiday, she has the startling realization that recovery is more than just giving up alcohol. A funny and revealing follow-up to her best-selling book Bottled: A Mom’s Guide to Early Recovery. Author of the popular momsieblog...

Mitchell L.H. Douglas and Heather Derr-Smith will read from their poetry. Mitchell L.H. Douglas will read from his recent collection, dying in the scarecrow’s arms. “Douglas depicts the assault on people of color in America’s increasingly divided Heartland. A devotee of American popular culture, from rock ’n’ roll to Star Wars to Marvel comic books, Douglas is a poet of “scrutinizing intellect, imagination, and soul.” —Terrance Hayes Mitchell L. H. Douglas is also the author of  \blak\ \al...

Writers’ Workshop graduate Robin Green will read from her new memoir, The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of the Rolling Stone. In the seventies, Green was at Rolling Stone as Hunter S. Thompson crafted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and now, with a distinctly gonzo female voice, she reveals her side of that tumultuous time in America. Brutally honest and bold, Green pulls back the curtain on the iconic magazine that defined a generation, and the boys’ club that surrounded it....

Rebecca Makkai will read from her new novel The Great Believers. “At turns heartbreaking and hopeful, the novel brings the first years of the AIDS epidemic into very immediate view, in a manner that will seem nostalgic to some and revelatory to others…Makkai's sweeping fourth novel shows the compassion of chosen families and the tension and distance that can exist in our birth ones.” —Library Journal Rebecca Makkai is the author of The Borrower, The Hundred-Year House, and Music for Wartime...

Julie Schumacher will read from her new novel, The Shakespeare Requirement. The eagerly awaited sequel to Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement “satirizes the pitfalls of academia with searing wit, skewing everything from the abominable faculty offices to the eccentric personalities throughout the university. Beneath the comedy lies a tragic commentary on the state of higher education, when money counts for more than scholarship, and power is directly tied to fundraising ability...

Translator Corinne Stanley will read poetry by Esther Bendala Pavón in her newly translated poetry collection Silence from the Forest (Silencios Del Bosque). A journey through the landscape of El Bosque, the White Pueblo village of her grandmother, Pavón’s poetry is reminiscent of a young Pablo Neruda's contemplations on life, love, and death, transcended through nature.  Corinne Stanley met Pavón in Spain in 2017. Stanley, who previously worked as a translator for the International Writing...

Iowa City native Julie Boatman Filucci will read from and talk about her book Honest Vision: The Donald Douglas Story. From the author of Together We Fly: Voices From The DC-3 comes an exploration into the life of Donald Wills Douglas, founder of the Douglas Aircraft Company, a genius innovator and engineer. What inspired Douglas to envision a commercial airliner when aviation was in its infancy? What motivated him, and what key elements to his leadership style led the Douglas Aircraft Company...

Iowa City author Kate Kasten will read from her new story collection, Foreign Ground. “(Foreign Ground is) a historically rich chronicling of private suffering across time, strata, and space...(with) a varied cast of characters navigating the trauma of trying to reconcile past with present…The collection swells with heart-rending tension.”—Kirkus Reviews Kate Kasten is the author of four novels: Better Days, The Deconversion of Kit Lamb, Ten Small Beds, and Too Happy as well as a book of fairy...

Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Malinda McCullom will read from her short story collection The Surprising Place. Set largely in Des Moines, Iowa, these 12 stories explore the surprising places where our outsized longings may lead us. In prose as lean and unflinching as an Iowa winter, these stories explore confrontation as equally as consolation. McCollum’s stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Epoch, ZYZZYVA, and the anthologies The Worst Years of Your Life and The Paris...

Iowa native Elizabeth Leiknes will read from her novel The Lost Queen of Crocker County. "This heartwarming redemptive novel proves that you can indeed 'go home again.'...What a charmer this book is! Highly recommended for female reading groups." —Nancy Simpson-Brice Elizabeth Leiknes grew up in rural Iowa and can make thirty-seven dishes featuring corn. She received her master's in writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, and currently lives near Lake Tahoe.

The International Writing Program presents authors Armen of Armenia, Ameena Hussein, and Kiki Petrosino, who willl read from their work. Armen of Armenia is a writer and activist. His first book The Return of Kikos is a collection of interactive short stories, which encourages readers to act as co-authors. His work has appeared in the literary almanac Inqnagir and the Gretert literary newspaper. Ameena Hussein is a sociologist, editor, publisher, and novelist from Sri Lanka. She has published...

Thomas Frank will read from Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society. From the acclaimed author of Listen, Liberal and What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a scathing collection of his incisive commentary on our cruel times―perfect for this political moment. What does a middle-class democracy look like when it comes apart? When, after forty years of economic triumph, America’s winners persuade themselves that they owe nothing to the rest of the country? Thomas Frank is the author...

B&B owner Deedie Runkel will read from Scone By Scone: Tales from an Innkeeper’s Life.  “The stories about an innkeeper’s life are hilarious and heartfelt. The characters are unforgettable, the recipes delectable. But it’s Runkel’s flair for treating life as a delicious challenge, and for treating the most outrageous guest with grace, that make this book such a rich meal.” —Lisa Loomer Runkel majored in English at Penn State, where she met her husband when they both wrote for The Daily...

An American Orwell for the age of Trump, Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day with fierce insight and honesty. We're Doomed. Now What? penetrates to the very heart of our time. Our moment is one of alarming and bewildering change—the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what?   Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic...

Diana Goetsch will read from her new chapbook, In America.  “Diana Goetsch possesses one of the most enviable gifts of poetry—the elasticity and warmth of a genuine human voice.” —Tony Hoagland Goetsch is the author of The Job of Being Everybody, Your Whole Life, Nobody’s Hell, and Nameless Boy. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, the Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize, as well as in the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune...

Thomas Fox Averill will read from his novel Found Documents from the Life of Nell Johnson Doerr. Told entirely through fictional journals, letters, photos, drawings, notes, and clippings, Found Documents follows Nell’s life in Lawrence, Kansas, between 1854 and 1889, where she first discovers fossils her house’s foundation.   “Averill has a remarkable facility for expressing wisdom in the simplest of language. Indeed, sincerity—in both language and feeling—is a signature feature of this unique...

Writers’ Workshop graduate Tom Macher will read from his memoir, Halfway, about his time spent in boys’ homes and halfway houses as a teen. “In Tom Macher’s tough new memoir, halfway is a condition of the heart and soul as much as it is a refuge for wayward boys… Many of the boys we meet along the way don’t make it, but one of them endures, and a lone voice survives, as Tom Macher returns to tell this beautiful tale.” —Charles d’Ambrosio Tom Macher grew up in Georgia, New York, and California...

Michael Martone will read from Brooding: Aria, Choruses, Lullabies, Follies, Dirges, and a Duet. “At once erudite and plainspoken, Brooding draws us in with Martone’s wry curiosity...This quirky, enlightening book will have you thinking differently about everything from hats to railroads to coffee to Captain Kangaroo. What a treat.” —Valerie Miner Martone is also the author of The Flatness and Other Landscapes, Racing in Place, Four for a Quarter, The Blue Guide to Indiana, and Michael...

Sandra Scofield will talk about her new writing guide, The Last Draft: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision. “Drawing deeply on her own teaching and writing and using a multitude of examples from classic and contemporary fiction, (Scofield) offers a meticulous guide to revising a novel... love the process and what you learn.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Scofield is the author of seven novels, the memoir Occasions of Sin, Swim: Stories of the Sixties, and Scene Book. She is on the faculty of...

Slam poet and Emmy-winning actor Amber Tamblyn will read from her new cross-genre thriller, Any Man. This blazingly original novel brings to startling life a specter of sexual violence in the shadowy form of Maude, a serial female rapist who preys on men. "An explosive, shapeshifting piece of literary real estate, Amber Tamblyn's arresting debut offers a scathing portrait of American celebrity culture and the way in which it transmutes human tragedy into a vicious circus." —Janet Fitch...

Iowa City author Sarah Prineas will read from her new book, The Lost Books: From the Scroll of Kings. From the author of the acclaimed Magic Thief series comes a stunning new tween fantasy where books literally come to life! The powerful Lost Books at the palace library are infecting the rest with an evil magic, and two unlikely friends must figure out who, or what, is controlling the books and their power. “A page-turner of a fantasy with elements of humor as well as intrigue, swordplay, and...