PorchLight: Writing Grief
2026-08-13 10:00, 2026-09-06 10:00, 2026-10-04 10:00, 2026-11-15 10:00 (America/Chicago) | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Grief Writing – A monthly exploration of loss and heartbreak
Jennifer New leads this monthly group that uses writing as a reflective tool to explore loss. Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief provides a backbone to consider grief from multiple angles, e.g., death of loved ones, loss of health or ability, grief for the world. This is an ongoing group; you’re welcome to attend once or each time. No writing experience is needed.

Free Generative Writing Workshop for July: Griffin Rockwell
2026-08-16 17:30 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Co-sponsored by Iowa City Poetry and PorchLight Literary Arts Center
The Free Generative Writing Workshops provide a space for career writers, curious beginners, writers of all levels and stages of life. Their goal is to make it easy to meet and learn from some of the most talented writer/teachers living in or passing through Iowa City. Every month a new writer leads a generative workshop, presenting a prompt inspired by their own preoccupations, passions, or interests.
Griffin Rockwell is a queer poet who often writes about gender, science, pop culture, and unusual connections. Xe is the author of the chapbooks listen— (Interstellar Flight Press), body in motion (perhappened press), and Lexicon of Future Selves (VA Press). Their work has also appeared in AGNI, Okay Donkey, Santa Fe Review, Poet Lore, Whale Road Review, HAD, and elsewhere. They earned their MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and their MLitt at the University of Dundee
For more information visit the websites of Iowa City Poetry and/or PorchLight Literary Arts Center!

PorchLight: Write Now - Community Supported Writing Group
2026-08-17 10:30, 2026-09-21 10:30, 2026-10-19 10:30 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
PorchLight’s Write Now Writer’s Group provides community, and learning opportunities for beginning to intermediate writers. At their monthly meetings, share short craft lessons, generate writing from prompts, and, on occasion, provide responses to participants’ work in progress. Writers working in any genre are welcome.
This is a great group for writers who have not had the time or opportunity to pursue a traditional MFA.
RSVP one week in advance on their website!

Sidekick: Reading, Signing and Conversation with Naomi Kritzer
2026-08-19 19:00 | Sidekick Coffee & Books, 1310 1/2 Melrose Avenue, Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Join Sidekick Coffee & Books for a reading from author Naomi Kritzer on Wednesday, August 19th at 7 pm in conversation with author Katie Runde and Doctor Stephanie Radke.
One book purchase admits one person.
About the book: Doctor Liz has just been acquitted for performing the last abortion in North Dakota when she’s kidnapped.
They’re not just any kidnappers, but a fundamentalist cult, deep in the rural west, without respect for law or decency, and in desperate need of an OB/GYN.
Guarded, isolated, without access to the outside world, Liz nevertheless is treated with respect as the only doctor on the compound, but she is very aware of what happened to the last obstetrician they kidnapped.
She must escape, and bring help to the girls trapped at the compound, if it’s the last thing she does.
About the Author:
Naomi Kritzer has been re-reading favorite books since childhood, and probably still has passages from A Wrinkle in Time memorized. She writes for both adults and teens, including Catfishing on CatNet and Chaos on CatNet from Tor Teen and Liberty’s Daughter from Fairwood Press. Her writing has won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Edgar Award, the Locus Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her family and three cats. The number of cats is subject to change without notice.

PrairieLights – A Reading with Matthew Neill Null, Floodgate
2026-08-26 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Writers’ Workshop graduate Matthew Neill Hull will read from his new novel, Floodgate. Described by publisher Blair as a story about “a former West Virginia coal miner [who] encounters corruption and cultural upheaval working on a dam project that will submerge his town,” Floodgate is praised by Jayne Anne Phillips, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Night Watch, as ” a masterpiece and a saga,” while Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot, says: “A lushly rendered, politically radical novel that illuminates not only the American past, but also our present.”
A writer from West Virginia, Matthew Neill Null is author of the novel Honey from the Lion, the story collection Allegheny Front, and, most recently, the novel Floodgate. He is recipient of the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Mary McCarthy Prize, and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and his short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Oxford American, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, and the Missouri Review, among other journals. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, the University of Iowa, and the American Academy in Rome, as well as a resident at Yaddo and the Jentel Foundation, and his books have been published in translation in France and Italy. National Book Award-winner Jaimy Gordon writes, “Matthew Neill Null is bound to become one of the most admired and influential fiction writers of his generation.” Booklist said about Null’s debut novel, “Beautifully written in fresh, lyrical prose, Honey from the Lion brilliantly creates a land and a people experiencing tremendous change. Null successfully and engagingly presents the consequences of this change for both humans and the environment, leaving readers feeling like witnesses to it all.” He currently is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University and a member of the Writing Committee at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

PrairieLights – A Reading with Giano Cromley, American Mythology
2026-09-04 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Giano Cromley will read from his debut novel, American Mythology. Described as a “charming and comic debut novel about a quirky ensemble embarking on an epic quest to find Bigfoot,” American Mythology is praised by Erin A. Craig, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Thirteenth Child, as a book that has ” has completely stolen my heart,” and Ron Rash, author of The Caretaker, says: “American Mythology is a riveting, big-hearted novel about a group of pilgrims who encounter both the mysteries of nature and ultimately those of the human heart. Giano Cromley has given us a much-needed reminder that, if sought, wonder may yet be found in our world.”
Born and raised in Montana, Giano Cromley is the author of two young adult novels and a collection of short stories. He is a recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and was a BookEnds Fellow with Stony Brook University. He is an amateur woodworker, a certified wildlife tracker, and an English professor at Kennedy-King College, where he is chair of the Communications Department. He lives on the Southside of Chicago with his wife and two dogs.

PrairieLights – A reading with Chris Vinsonhaler, Beowulf: An Epic Enigma
2026-09-08 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
University of Iowa PhD graduate Chris Vinsonhaler will read from her translation of Beowulf: An Epic Enigma. Descibred as a “radical reappraisal of the Old English epic” (beowulf.live), Beowulf: An Epic Enigma (Book I) is praised by Robert E. Bjork, Editor of Klaeber’s Beowulf and A Beowulf Handbook as “a riddling maze never seen before, a murder mystery of smoke and mirrors that will intrigue and entertain new readers and aficionados alike,” while Ophelia Eryn Hostetter, Professor of Old English, Rutgers University, Camden and Editor of Teaching Beowulf: Practical Approaches, says: “Chris Vinsonhaler leverages her work in performance and scholarship to reveal major elements obscured in Beowulf’s long critical history: how repetition sparks subtle yet essential impacts; how the poem’s riddling design leaves insinuation hanging; how the sonic landscape of each line draws us into the folds of enigma; and most intriguing of all, how the poem mobilizes irony to flesh out its shockingly honest invocation of heroic criminality. This is absolutely not a Beowulf of epic praise but a scathing exposé of avarice, cultural nostalgia, and the perennial allure of violence.”
Chris Vinsonhaler bridges the worlds of scholarship and performance. A translator, storyteller, and medievalist, she brings Beowulf to life as both text and event — recovering the poem’s riddling structure, its irony, and its power to move audiences through voice and embodiment. Her approach draws deeply on the work of her mentor and dissertation director, Professor Jonathan Wilcox, whose scholarship on humor and riddling shaped her reading of the poem’s enigmatic design. Her work fuses historical insight with the immediacy of live performance, revealing Beowulf not as a relic of the past but as a living act of imagination (beowulf.live).

PrairieLights – Patricia Albers in conv with Garth Greenwell, Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész
2026-09-10 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Patricia Albers will read from her new biography, Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész, and will be joined in conversation with Garth Greenwell. Described as “The first full biography of the innovative ‘father of modern photography’ [which] vividly depicts his life and works, from Hungary to France and America, across the 20th century,” Everything Is Photograph is praised by the New York Times, which says: “Everything Is Photograph is filled with [Albers’s] gorgeous descriptions of Kertész’s pictures, tempting you to interrupt your reading to Google every photo she writes about with such acuity and care. But the life she recounts is fascinating, too.”
Patricia Albers is a San Francisco Bay Area–based writer, editor, and art historian (not to be confused with the anthropologist Patricia C. Albers). She is the author of Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life, the acclaimed first biography of the abstract painter. Her previous books were Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti and Tina Modotti and the Mexican Renaissance. Using photographs discovered during her research about Modotti, Albers co-organized the exhibition “Tina Modotti and the Mexican Renaissance,” shown at European museums and at the Rencontres d’Arles and garnering wide coverage in the European media, including a front-page story in Le Monde hailing it as “the first great [Modotti] exhibition in France.” Albers’s essays, art reviews, and features have appeared in numerous museum catalogs and publications, including San Francisco Magazine, the San Jose Mercury News, and the New York Times. She has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities and a juror for Biographers International Plutarch Award. She is also an instructor emerita of art history at San Jose State University. Her research and writing of Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész was supported by a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation (https://patriciaalbers.net/about).
Garth Greenwell is the author of three books of fiction, most recently Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His first novel, What Belongs to You, won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book, Cleanness, was a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for several awards, including the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. It was named a Best Book of 2020 by The New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, and over thirty other publications. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

PrairieLights – Lizzie Buehler in conv with Julia Conrad, The Obsessed
2026-09-11 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Iowa graduate Lizzie Buehler will read from her debut novel, The Obsessed, and will be joined in conversation by Julia Conrad. Described as “A bighearted portrait of the anxieties of desire [that] explores the trials of modern dating, the strange ennui of academia, and the question of how to create a world for yourself within and without the confines of your influences,” The Obsessed is praised by Forbes.com as “[A] delectable novel about obsession and dating in the modern age,” while Debutiful says: “You will obsess over The Obsessed…It’s sad. It’s weird. It’s horny. You’ll yearn while reading Buehler’s brilliant writing.”
Lizzie Buehler is the translator of The Disaster Tourist (winner of the CWA Dagger for crime fiction in translation), Art on Fire, and Table for One by Yun Ko-eun, and Korean Teachers by Seo Su-jin. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and has studied comparative literature at Harvard and Princeton. The Obsessed is her debut novel.
Julia Conrad is an Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Iowa and is a writer and Italian translator. Her work has been published in The Massachusetts Review, The Offing, Revista Nexos, Asymptote, and the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books 2020), among others, and she’s a contributor to VAN Magazine and The Millions. Her first book, a hidden history of women in classical music, is forthcoming from Scribner Books. She holds two MFAs from the University of Iowa, in Nonfiction and in Literary Translation.

PorchLight: Poetry Exchange
2026-09-12 10:30 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
This writer guided critique group offers poets the chance to receive carefully considered feedback, and find writerly community.
Writers share drafts of work in advance so readers have enough time to provide considered feedback. Feedback is mostly positive, and descriptive, but writers can ask for proscriptive feedback if they wish. This workshop model centers the writer, and gives them control over the amount and type of feedback they receive.
For more information on how to join, visit their website!

PorchLight: Queer Writers' Check In
2026-09-12 13:00, 2026-10-10 13:00 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Similar to their Long Project Check In, this group is for queer writers looking to build literary community together. Each session will include free writing, discussion of works in progress, and general literary support. Occasionally, there will be guests and opportunities for trading work.
Visit their website to RSVP!

PrairieLights – Luis Muñoz, Garth Greenwell, & Idra Novey – One Moment: Poems
2026-09-16 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Renowned Spanish poet Luis Muñoz will read from his debut North American poetry collection, One Moment, and will be joined by his English translators, his husband Garth Greenwell and Idra Novey. Described as “Sweet, surreal, and haunting,” the poems in One Moment “examine both the frictions and elusiveness that can occur between self and others…the gentle observation of sunlight like ‘golden cookies on the bedspread’ as you lie next to a lover. The feeling of solitude rendering you as small and still as a garbanzo bean, yearning as much for water and light as to continue being left alone” (simonandschuster.com). Bestselling poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar praises One Moment by saying, “It’s thrilling to encounter poetry this fresh, this undeniable,” and adds, “No one today sounds like this.”
Luis Muñoz is the author of seven books of poetry, including Vecindad. He has received the Ciudad de Córdoba, Generación del 27, and Ojo Crítico prizes, among others. He divides his time between Madrid and Iowa City, where he directs the Spanish-language creative writing MFA program at the University of Iowa.
Garth Greenwell is the author of three books of fiction, most recently Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His first novel, What Belongs to You, won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book, Cleanness, was a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for several awards, including the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and France’s Prix Sade.
Idra Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. Her most recent novel Take What You Need was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023, a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and chosen as a Barnes & Noble Fiction Pick. Her first novel Ways to Disappear was a finalist for the L.A. Times First Fiction Prize and a winner of the 2016 Brooklyn Public Library Prize and the Sami Rohr Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.

PrairieLights – A reading with Camille T. Dungy, America, A Love Story
2026-09-17 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
The 2024 Paul Engle Prize winner and celebrated poet Camille T. Dungy will read from her newest poetry collection, America, a Love Story. Described by publisher Wesleyan University Press as a “powerful testament to living and loving as a Black woman and mother in today’s America, and her first book of poetry in almost a decade,” America, a Love Story is praised by Charley Burlock of Oprah Daily as an “electrifying new collection [that] arrives just on time, offering a version of patriotism capable of meeting the present moment and carrying us through to a brighter future,” while award-winning poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar says: “What a great fan I am of Camille Dungy’s work. I’ve spent so much time sitting at the foot of her language, just sort of learning what I can in slack-jawed wonder.”
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (2023). She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade (2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), and her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, an Honorary Doctorate from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry (weslpress.org).

SideKick – reading and signing with Paige Towers and Sarah Elgatian
2026-09-17 19:00 | Sidekick Coffee & Books, 1310 1/2 Melrose Avenue, Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Join Sidekick Coffee and Books for the launch of “What they Stole: Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption” by Paige Towers in conversation with Sarah Elgatian.
About the book: In 1955, following the devastation of the Korean War, Bertha and Harry Holt made headlines for adopting eight Korean children. Driven by evangelical convictions and emboldened by a spacial act of Congress, the couple founded the Holt Adoption Program, which would facilitate migration of tens of thousands of Korean children to the United States over the following decades. The Sueppels were among the families profoundly shaped by the legacy of the Holt Adoption Program, until 2008, when Steven found himself facing federal embezzlement and money laundering chargers, he murdered Sheryl and their adopted children before ending his own life. What They Stole traces the interwoven histories of the Holts and the Sueppels, Meticulously researched and sensitive to its storytelling, Paige Towers examines how goos intentions can coexist with systemic harm- and how the consequences of systems like the Holt’s can reverberate across generations.
One book purchase admits two people

PrairieLights – [Virtual Event] Nancy Sowell in conv. with Melissa Febos – Internal Family Systems Health Therapy: Treating Trauma-Related Physical Illness & Toxic Stress
2026-09-18 18:30 | IA
[Virtual Event] Find the link on PrairieLights website
Nancy Sowell, LICSW, will read from her new book co-authored with Martha Sweezy, PhD, and Richard C. Schwartz, PhD: IFS (Internal Family Systems) Health Therapy: Treating Trauma-Related Physical Illness & Toxic Stress. She will be joined in conversation by bestselling author and daughter, Melissa Febos. (Note: This will be a virtual event on Zoom and will start at 6:30 PM CDT.)
The publisher, PESI Publishing, offers this introduction for IFS Health Therapy:
Many chronic health conditions–from inflammation and digestive disorders to metabolic syndrome and autoimmune diseases–are increasingly linked to the lasting effects of chronic stress and trauma. But how do these experiences become embedded in the body, and how can we help?
In IFS (Internal Family Systems) Health Therapy, Nancy Sowell, in collaboration with Martha Sweezy and IFS founder Richard Schwartz, draws upon thirty years of clinical practice and behavioral medicine experience to present a groundbreaking mind-body approach that views protective and vulnerable inner “parts” as key drivers of physical health concerns. From this perspective, relief emerges as clients support these internal parts and release trauma-related burdens.
Through vivid case examples, experiential exercises, and practical tools, clinicians will learn how to use a clear three-phase framework to:

Understand how trauma and chronic stress contribute to illness
Conduct an IFS-informed health therapy assessment
Identify and befriend protective parts that affect physical symptoms
Help vulnerable parts release trauma-related burdens
Collaborate with other health professionals to support whole-person care

Adversity can alter a person’s mind and body, but it does not extinguish the Self’s capacity to heal. This book equips you with the tools to support that capacity.
Nancy Sowell, LICSW, is an IFS senior trainer, consultant, and speaker who teaches internationally and in the US and maintains an IFS health therapy practice. She is a Harvard Medical School teaching associate at the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance, where she has served for many years as a clinical consultant and IFS trainer. Her work integrates personal history, mindful awareness of the body, emotions, thoughts, and deeply held beliefs that influence our mood, behavior, relationships, and health. As the Behavioral Medicine program manager in the Division of Rheumatology, Immunology, and Allergy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, she co-created an IFS program that demonstrated positive outcomes for patients with rheumatoid arthritis. She knows both personally and professionally the power of the Self in healing and restoring health. Visit her website: www.nancysowell.com.
Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and a new memoir, The Dry Season. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Black Mountain Institute, the British Library, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She is a Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in The Nonfiction Writing Program (melissafebos.com).

Sidekick: Conversation and signing with author Grant Faulkner
2026-09-24 19:00 | Sidekick Coffee & Books, 1310 1/2 Melrose Avenue, Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Join Sidekick Coffee and Books for an evening with author Grant Faulkner in conversation with Yasmina Din Madden for his new book Something Out There in the Distance on September 24th at 7 pm.
One book purchase admits two people.
About the book: Flash-fiction master Grant Faulkner and photographer Gail Butensky have partnered to create this unique narrative made up of stories alongside edge-of-the-world photography. The book tells of two lovers taking a reckless, searching road trip through the American West. Dawn is a photographer who captures desert landscapes. Jonny drives just to drive, running away from the end of time or running toward the end of time, looking for a home even as his restlessness overtakes him. By turns funny, poignant, and heartbreaking, something out there is in the distance is big in emotions while brief in words. An extraordinary collaboration between word and image, Dawn and Jonny’s journey transports us to a place, achingly familial, populated by love, loss, and wonder.
About Yasmina Din Madden:
Yasmina Din Madden is the author of the story collection You Know Nothing, Northwestern University Press (2026), and her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Electric Literature, The Idaho Review, The Fairy Tale Review, and other journals. She is the winner of the Oxford Flash Prize and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Award. She teaches creative writing and literature at Drake University.

Iowa City Book Festival
2026-10-19 - 2026-10-25 | Downtown Iowa City
The Iowa City Book Festival is happening October 19–25, 2026! Join us for a week of literary events, author talks, readings, and more at various locations throughout downtown Iowa City. Mark your calendars. More information coming soon.
