4-Week CourseThis class is offered online or in-person at PorchLight on April 9, 16, 23, and 30 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Email Jennifer at jennifer@porchlightliterary for a Zoom link.This hands-on, interactive course taught by Iowa City songwriter Brian Johannesen will guide you through the essential elements of crafting original songs. Whether you’re a beginner or looking to refine your skills, we’ll focus on helping you discover your unique creative voice, generate fresh ideas, marry lyrics and...

This interactive talk for PhD and MFA students in the writing disciplines will outline the publishing process for first books. The session will guide graduate students through the steps of the academic publishing process, with a focus on demystifying the journey from dissertation/thesis to manuscript to published book. Key topics will include identifying the right academic publisher, understanding peer review, negotiating contracts, and building a strong proposal. Led by Mark Simpson-Vos, Senior...

At this public lecture, Mark Simpson-Vos — Senior Executive Editor at University of North Carolina Press — will discuss the way commentators have since the 1970s routinely trotted out the idea that scholarly publishing is in crisis, and how the stance of publishers in particular has been to shrug off such ideas. In this moment, however, it is impossible to ignore the deep strains within the scholarly publishing ecosystem, amidst increasingly turbulent times for American higher education. Lament...

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 National Book Award finalist All This Could Be Different, praises Goddess Complex as "the most interesting, illuminating...

For this workshop, 4–5 UI faculty members will submit book proposal drafts for a collaborative feedback session led by Mark Simpson-Vos, Senior Executive Editor at University of North Carolina Press. The session is designed to help authors write a compelling book proposal, with a focus on crafting a strong pitch, identifying target audiences, and outlining the project’s structure. The workshop’s goal is for participants to walk away with a strong and cohesive book proposal, increasing their...

Time: First Saturday of each month, 10 to 11:15 a.m. Central Time. Saturday, 4/5; Saturday, May 3; Saturday, June 7. "I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive.” - Francis...

4-Week CourseThis class is offered online or in-person at PorchLight on April 9, 16, 23, and 30 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Email Jennifer at jennifer@porchlightliterary for a Zoom link.This hands-on, interactive course taught by Iowa City songwriter Brian Johannesen will guide you through the essential elements of crafting original songs. Whether you’re a beginner or looking to refine your skills, we’ll focus on helping you discover your unique creative voice, generate fresh ideas, marry lyrics and...

Visiting Professor of Poetry, Tom Drury will read in the Frank Conroy Reading Room in Glenn Schaeffer Library.Tom Drury is from the American Midwest. As a teenager he walked beans and worked at a grain elevator, though he doubts that people walk beans anymore, and the grain elevator is gone, as are the railroad tracks that brought the boxcars to the grain elevator.He's written five novels, and his writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Granta, The...

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 Reviews, LitHub, and Electric Lit, Song So Wild and Blue is a "guide to life that is part memoir, part biography [of Joni Mitchell], and part homage," and it's "a...

Writers' Workshop alumni Karla Kelsey and Rebecca Lehmann will read from their latest books of poetry.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...

Simone White will read in the Frank Conroy Reading Room in Glenn Schaeffer Library.Simone White is the author of or, on being the other woman (Duke University Press, 2022), Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem, 2016), and House Envy of All the World (Factory School, 2010), the poetry chapbook, Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and the collaborative poem/painting chapbook, Dolly (with Kim Thomas) (Q Ave, 2008). Her poetry and prose have been featured...

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[ing of] domestic drama into something rich and strange, with echoes of Lorrie Moore’s sardonic humor and Jonathan Franzen’s dissection of class."Claire Lombardo is the author...

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 family and home—and dance, the dedicated practice of which has led her on an unexpected new path. This is a book about grief and the...

Write at the Stanley: A Generative Writing Workshop is back for the Spring Semester!Join us monthly to generate new creative writing inspired by works in the Stanley collection. Each session will be led by a different talented writer from our area, who will be offering a new prompt and a new approach to ekphrastic writing (writing inspired by visual art). Bring your own notebook and pencil or computer and leave with the beginning of a newly written piece.Co-sponsored by Iowa City Poetry. Teen...

NOTE: The April 4th occurrence in this series will move to the Old Capitol Museum for a very special Art & Write Night!Join the long, rich, historical tradition of artists creating in our spaces.Professional, aspiring, and amateur artists alike, make our museum your muse. The return of this popular program series welcomes guests into the Museum of Natural History's magical gallery spaces after-hours to work on sketching or writing projects with other campus and community artists.Tell a friend...