In this session, two of Iowa's leading spiritual writers discuss their work. Spiritual writing is a growing subgenre in fiction as well as in memoir, poetry, meditations, and self-help. It may or may not be aligned with an organized religion, faith, belief system, or philosophy, yet all spiritual writing seeks to discover human truths and also typically

Jerald Walker, author of the 2020 National Book Award finalist How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, will discuss that work and more. For the black community, Jerald Walker asserts in How to Make a Slave, “anger is often a prelude to a joke, as there is broad understanding that the triumph over this destructive emotion lay

Sit in on a one-of-a-kind conversation with Iowa Writers’ Workshop director and renowned novelist Lan Samantha Chang (93MFA), who will chat with host Charity Nebbe, of Iowa Public Radio’s Talk of Iowa, and read from her most recent book, The Family Chao. Oprah Daily Insider recognized Chang as one of eight women writers changing the world—and The Family Chao appeared

Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp will moderate a conversation about Identity: In Fiction and in Life, with New York Times bestselling authors John Irving and Jason Reynolds. The event will include an open chat, but no live Q&A.  We are accepting a limited number of pre-submitted questions from the registrants. This is a free,

The 2023 One Community, One Book is The Farm by Joanne Ramos. Told from the perspective of four women, The Farm explores gender, race, and class, and of who has access to power, freedom, and choice. This event is free and open to the public. This event will have ASL interpretation. Doors open at 1 p.m. Author Keynote begins at

  Year after year, some of the area’s most treasured comics and writers gather together to relentlessly burn and mock everything sacred and dear about our town. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.

This 19th-century period piece is an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's classic novel. On a trip to St. Petersburg, Anna Karenina (Greta Garbo), neglected wife of the famed Alexei Alexandrovitch Karenin (Basil Rathbone), meets a handsome military officer, Count Vronsky (Fredric March). Vronsky becomes enamored of Anna and follows her back to Moscow to confess his

Hey Buddy, I’m Bill tells the story of Bill Sackter, the namesake of Wild Bill’s (formerly Wild Bill’s Coffee Shop) in the University of Iowa School of Social Work. From his early life in Minneapolis to his 44-year institutionalization for an intellectual disability to his years of friends and fame in Iowa City, the exhibit shares

A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great aunt's secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage. In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a

The Machine Stops: A New Opera by John Lake and Cecile Goding Selected Videoclips and Talkback Opera fan and UI Professor Emerita Miriam Gilbert leads a talkback session on The Machine Stops: A New Opera by John Lake and Cecile Goding, joined by the opera’s lead soprano Élise DesChamps (UI School of Music) and sci-fi

With their deadly plants, razor-sharp shears, shady corners, and ready-made burial sites, gardens make an ideal scene for the perfect murder. But the outsize influence that gardens and gardening have had on the mystery genre has been underappreciated. Now, Marta McDowell, a writer and gardener with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, illuminates the many

Please join us for our annual invited Iowa Bibliophiles lecture as we study Shakespeare’s world through a unique lens. This year we are joined by Heather Wolfe, a consulting curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. She will present her talk “How to read old paper: Searching for meaning in early