Prairie Lights: Katie Bennett in conversation with Nina Lohman & Alisha Jeddeloh

Katie Bennett will read from her new book, She Was Wild Grass, and will be joined in conversation with BRINK publisher and author Nina Lohman & BRINK editor Alisha Jeddeloh.

Bennett’s website offers this introduction: “She Was Wild Grass intertwines Bennett’s artistic coming-of-age with the story of Joan Vollmer, the remarkable yet overlooked figure of the Beat Generation whose life was cut short when her husband, William S. Burroughs, shot her in 1951. Braiding past and present, Bennett explores art, ambition, gender, and freedom, asking what it means to create in a world where women’s stories are so often silenced and forgotten” (katiepbennett.com/book). Sarah Manguso, author of Liars, praises She Was Wild Grass as “so dense with narrative, and it goes down like spring water,” while Rachel Yoder, bestselling author of Nightbitch and University of Iowa professor, says: “Highly recommend this new book by Katie Bennett which dignifies the life and death of Joan Vollmer, the fascinating & flawed woman who was (sort of) married to William Burroughs and was ultimately murdered by him. The book also dignifies Katie’s own story of becoming. It feels amazing to read women give other women, and themselves, their due.”

Katie Bennett is a writer based in Philadelphia. Her first book, She Was Wild Grass, will be released by BRINK Books September 2026. She’s published work in Lit Hub, swamp pink, and The Rumpus and received fellowships from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Monson Arts. She runs the reading series Personal Velocity. She also spent a decade touring North America and Europe with various bands and her songwriting has been featured in Pitchfork, SPIN, Rolling Stone, and NPR.

Nina Lohman writes hybrid nonfiction that seeks to understand pain through the lenses of medicine, theology, and philosophy. Her memoir The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2024. She is the Literary Programming Director for the Mission Creek Festival and the Nonfiction Editor of PromptPress, an interdisciplinary book-arts journal that pairs writers and visual artists to create and publish new work. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, Paste Magazine, The Rumpus, Essay Daily, The Other Journal, Earth Island Journal, and elsewhere.

Alisha Jeddeloh is a writer and editor based in Iowa City. As a writer, she explores community, belonging, and the fault lines in the stories we tell each other and ourselves. As an editor, she enjoys being surprised by characters and prose.