Writers' Workshop alum Kevin Clouther will read from his latest short story collection, Maximum Speed. Booklist enthuses, "These wonderfully evocative, interconnected stories are about growing up, growing apart, and how modern communications technology enables distant figures from the past to suddenly be brought into the present." Author Frances de Pontes Peebles writes, "With meticulous craft and profound compassion, Kevin Clouther conjures this vibrant collection of connected stories of...

Bradley Tusk: Lunch & Q&A with Venture Capitalist and Bookstore Owner  To subscribe to a weekly emailing list of Writers' Workshop events, please fill in the linked form or email iww@uiowa.edu with “Events Mailing List Subscribe” in the subject line.

Ted Anton will read from and talk about his grand tour through synthetic biology, Programmable Planet. “If you’ve ever wondered about the promise―and the peril―of synthetic biology and its power to transform life, then Programmable Planet is the book for you. Ted Anton’s exploration of both the history and the future of the ways we engineer life is incisive, engaging, and downright fascinating. -- Deborah Blum Ted Anton is Professor Emeritus of English at DePaul University. He is the author of...

Please join us on Zoom for a special reading and conversation with best-selling author Mary Pipher and Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program Professor Emerita Patricia Foster, who will talk about A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence. To attend this virtual event, REGISTER HERE. In this luminous memoir in essays, Mary Pipher—as she did in her New York Times bestseller Women Rowing North—taps into a cultural moment, to offer wisdom, hope, and insight into loss and change. Drawing from her own...

Iowa City author Andy Douglas will read from Songs of the New Dawn: Selected song-poems of Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar. The poems are in the vein of Rumi or Hafiz, speaking of the divine energy flowing through all creation. The book also features 20 full-page illustrations by artist Kindle Corwell, depicting subtle aspects of the poems, bringing out their beauty even more. This event will feature poetry reading, a display of art from the book, and music from multi-instrumentalist Craig Klocke and...

Please join us from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. for Claudia McGehee's Iowa River Frost Fair (an event in name inspired by medieval artisan fairs held on the frozen river Thames in London, home to Claudia’s ancestors!). Iowa City based Illustrator/Author Claudia will sign her new 2024 Engagement Calendars, copies of her beloved illustrated books, and we will have lots of her new holiday cards and prints on hand! All who stop by will receive a small Frost Fair paper gift.   Claudia McGehee is a local...

PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author and Writers' Workshop visiting faculty Kate Christensen will read from her new masterwork of fiction, Welcome Home, Stranger !  “Kate Christensen’s new novel, Welcome Home, Stranger is a revelation, offering characters as real as your family and friends, a rich, vividly drawn setting, grab-you-by-the-throat drama and always, lurking in the shadows, a fierce authorial intelligence. What more could you ask?”—Richard Russo Kate Christensen is the author of seven...

Cleo Qian will read from her short story collection, LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO, longlisted for The Story Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction.  These 11 short stories explore the alienated and technology-mediated lives of young Asian and Asian-American women today. "Cleo Qian's LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO is an uncanny Asian American fantasia where fringe artist collectives, melancholy K-pop stars, anxious piano prodigies, disembodied digital ghosts, and lovelorn...

Ted Wheeler will read from his new novel, The War Begins in Paris, and be joined in conversation by Mary Helen Stefaniak. "Paris was home for the foreign correspondents who covered events in Europe for British and American media outlets during the interwar period. With the fall of France in 1940, a few of them such as the factual William Joyce, Robert Best, and Jane Anderson stayed behind and were recruited by Joseph Goebbels to broadcast treasonous Nazi propaganda from Germany. Theodore Wheeler...

Iowa City author Cheryl Walsh will read from her debut novel, Unequal Temperament. Through the lens of art, music, and meteorology, Unequal Temperament examines how we navigate the storms of our lives. "Sharply observed, built of masterful prose, Unequal Temperament affirms the vitality of art in our lives at a time when devotion to craft and the pursuit of the sublime are made out to be old-fashioned terms. This is a book as awed by a great piece of music as it is by the shadings and...

Award-winning author of A Questionable Shape and White Dialogues, Bennett Sims will read from his new collection Other Minds and Other Stories, published by Two Dollar Radio. "[Bennett Sims] draws on academia, art, and technology for a superb collection about identity and memory.... Throughout, Sims boldly plays with form, such as in 'Introduction to the Reading of Hegel,' which consists of one paragraph that extends for nearly 30 pages and chronicles an adjunct professor’s self-sabotage as he...

Join us for an inspiring evening with Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector turned human rights activist and TED Speaker. Park's powerful story of escape from North Korea, her viral TED talks, and her mission to combat oppression worldwide will be discussed. The event is open to the public, free, and will also be livestreamed. A Q&A session will follow. Don't miss this chance to hear Yeonmi Park's incredible journey and her call to action for freedom and human rights.

Translator Wendy Call will read from In the Belly of Night and Other Poems by Irma Pineda. "Irma Pineda's poems and Wendy Call's translations evoke tragedy, and celebrate the ways in which the human is built from dream, tradition, and nature. Self-translated as "mirror-poems" by Pineda, from Isthmus Zapotec into Spanish, and then translated into English through a complex process that is fascinatingly articulated by Call, the trilingual poems in this collection show us how translation serves as...

Sara Nicholson will read from April. "Intimate and expansive, with dazzling wit and music throughout, Nicholson's poems fit the stars, the sun, the trees, and their sap in the same frame."--Michael Andor Brodeur Sara Nicholson is the author of What the Lyric Is and The Living Method, published by The Song Cave. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Review, Harper's, Poetry, The New York Times, and the Yale Review. In 2018, she was the Holloway Poet-in-Residence at the University of California...

Drake University professor Carol Roh Spauling will read from and talk about her new book, Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories with author Sam Chang. “In Carol Roh Spaulding's amazing linked story collection, Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories, we find that rare gift--writing that gets just about everything done, and done very well. Every page not only delights and instructs but also provokes and moves us, lingering like a remembered dream. ... Waiting will quietly pull you in and knock you...

Former Iowa Citian John J. Waters will read from his debut novel, River City One. The tale of a man and the memory that haunts him, River City One is the poetic and compassionate story of John Walker, a lawyer and ex-Marine adrift in a nameless city. Home from the war, he has become a man on the edge, quietly raging against the people he must now work for and live among—the kind of people incapable of understanding the terror he felt in combat and the guilt he carries in his heart. John J...

POSTPONED! Poet and Professor Elizabeth Willis will be reading from her work and answering questions regarding writing and poetry. To submit questions, visit https://forms.office.com/r/XbP8rXgfxf

The Writers' Workshop presents a reading with Workshop visiting faculty members, Kate Christensen and Cody-Rose Clevidence. Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of Aux Arc / Trypt Ich (Nightboat, 2021), Listen My Friend, This is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night (The Song Cave, 2021), Flung/Throne (Ahsahta, 2018), and BEAST FEAST (Ahsata Press, 2014), as well as several chapbooks (flowers and cream, NION, garden door press, Auric). They live in the Arkansas Ozarks.  Kate Christensen is the author...

The Writers' Workshop presents a Q&A with D.A. Powell.  To subscribe to a weekly emailing list of Writers' Workshop events, please fill in the linked form or email iww@uiowa.edu with “Events Mailing List Subscribe” in the subject line.

The Writers' Workshop presents a Q&A with Danez Smith. "Danez Smith is the author of three collections including Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead. They have won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critic Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Danez's poetry and prose has been featured in Vanity Fair, The...

The Writers' Workshop presents a reading with D.A. Powell. D. A. Powell's books include Cocktails (Graywolf, 2004) and Chronic (Graywolf, 2009), both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012), winner of the 2013 Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Powell's awards include the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Kingsley Tufts Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the California Book Award.1...

Alexandra Chang Reading and Q&A Books will be available for purchase at the event.

Join us with Workshop Director Sam Chang and Workshop professor Margot Livesey for a reading and discussion of Chang’s Hunger: A Novella and Stories, which has just been reissued by W.W. Norton for the 25th anniversary of its publication. Chang wrote Hunger when she was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Livesey was her thesis advisor. A powerful exploration of the Asian American experience, Hunger illuminates the lives of first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and...

The Writers' Workshop presents a reading with Writers' Workshop Professor of Poetry, James Galvin. James Galvin has published eight books of poems, most recently Everything We Always Knew Was True (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). His new and collected poems, Resurrection Update (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Poet's Prize. His poetry collection, God's Mistress, was a National Poetry Series winner. James...

Join novelists Laura Kat Young and Anya Johanna DeNiro as they read from their new books, The Collector and OKPsyche. The Collector is described as “A frightening dystopian horror novel where grief is forbidden and purged from the mind—a nightmarish mix of 1984 and Never Let Me Go.” Publisher’s Weekly says "Writing in spare prose, Young harkens to some of the dystopian greats, with a keeper of memories who seems right out of The Giver, and a horrific solstice celebration scene of public gore...