The University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program is pleased to announce that celebrated music critic Greil Marcus will visit the campus this November. Marcus, the NWP's Fall 2016 Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor, will read from his acclaimed work on November 1, 2016 at

7 p.m. at the Englert Theatre. This event is free and open to the public.

Greil Marcus

Presented by The Nonfiction Writing Program Tuesday, November 1, 2016, 7 p.m.

The Englert Theatre

221 E. Washington Street, Iowa City, IA

Free and open to the public 

Enormously influential and intensely prolific, Marcus is widely acknowledged to be the greatest living chronicler of rock music. He served as Rolling Stone’s original reviews editor and has since written and edited more than fifteen books that place popular music in a larger cultural context. Marcus is the author of the seminal work Mystery Train, called “the best and funniest book ever written about America or its music” by Rolling Stone, “the book that launched a thousand rock critics” by the New Yorker, and “perhaps the finest book ever written about pop music” by the New York Times Book Review.

Marcus’s other books include Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992, The Doors: A Life of Listening to Five Mean Years, The Dustbin of History, Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives, The History of Rock ‘N’ Roll in Ten Songs, and Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus.  (“Why read anyone else’s work on Dylan?” asked the San Francisco Chronicle of that last one.)

A contributor to the New York Times, Esquire, Creem, the Village Voice, Artforum, Salon, the Believer, Pitchfork, and others, Marcus has written his long-running column, “Real Life Rock Top Ten,” for the past three decades. At once timely and timeless, sly and surprising, breathless and wild in its reach, Marcus’s virtuosic prose continues to energize critics, writers, musicians, and lovers of American culture. 

Greil Marcus’s visit is sponsored by the Nonfiction Writing Program, the Department of English, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the School of Music, the American Studies Department, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Provost’s Office, the Englert Theatre, and Prairie Lights Books.