Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature

Spring 2024 Simon & Schuster AuthorFest
2024-04-24 18:00 (America/Chicago) | A Virtual Event
Join TJ Alexander, Kaliane Bradley, & Jackie Lau in conversation with Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the duo behind the romance power-house Christina Lauren. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24th At 7PM ET/ 6 PM CT / 4 PM PT VIA ZOOM From fake relationships to star-crossed time travelers to queer throuples, these authors are not your mother’s romance writers. Ahead of their upcoming releases, Alexander, Bradley, and Lau will discuss what makes a great romance, and how the genre can go beyond a simple love story.

R.S.V.P. at www.simonandschuster.com/p/authorfest

Marathon Public Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
2024-04-23 13:00 - 16:00 | Pedmall Weatherdance Fountain Stage, College St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
April is Shakespeare’s birthday month (not to mention National Poetry Month), and Riverside Theatre and the City of Literature will celebrate by highlighting literary masterpieces rarely explored on stage: the Bard’s 154-poem sonnet cycle. This public reading will take place on the Ped Mall’s Weatherdance Fountain Stage on Tuesday, April 23 from 1:00-4:00pm. We welcome ALL members of our community to sign up for a reading slot using this form. Volunteers will be notified at least a week before the event with their assigned time and sonnets.

Jr. High Writing Jam! Featuring the IYWP and author Jen Ferguson
2024-02-24 13:00 - 15:00 | The Tuesday Agency, 404 E College St, Unit 408, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
All 6th, 7th, and 8th graders who like to write are invited. Come together with other writers to compare ideas and be inspired to write something new. Instructors from the Iowa Youth Writing Project will moderate this awesome event. Open mic, and amazing door prizes. FREE!
Loading…

Credit Jen Ferguson
Métis with ancestral ties to the Red River (on her father’s side) and Canadian settler (on her mother’s side), an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD in English and Creative Writing. Jen believes writing, teaching and beading are political acts. She is represented by Patricia Nelson at Marsal Lyon Literary Agency.
Her debut young adult novel, THE SUMMER OF BITTER AND SWEET, won a 2022 Govenor General’s Literary Award and is a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book, among other accolades. Her newest book THOSE PINK MOUNTAIN NIGHTS is a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection and has four starred reviews. Her novella “Missing” won the Malahat Review’s 2022 Novella Prize and her essay “Off Balance” was selected for the Best Canadian Essays 2020.
Jen lives on the traditional and unceded territories of the Meskwaki, the Báxoje and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ nations, and teaches fiction writing at Coe College.

The Tuesday Agency is located in The Chauncey, just upstairs from the festival, on the 4th floor, Unit 408.

Author Talk with Jen Ferguson
2024-02-24 11:30 - 12:00 | FilmScene at The Chauncey, 404 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Métis with ancestral ties to the Red River (on her father’s side) and Canadian settler (on her mother’s side), an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD in English and Creative Writing. Jen believes writing, teaching and beading are political acts. She is represented by Patricia Nelson at Marsal Lyon Literary Agency.
Her debut young adult novel, THE SUMMER OF BITTER AND SWEET, won a 2022 Govenor General’s Literary Award and is a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book, among other accolades. Her newest book THOSE PINK MOUNTAIN NIGHTS is a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection and has four starred reviews. Her novella “Missing” won the Malahat Review’s 2022 Novella Prize and her essay “Off Balance” was selected for the Best Canadian Essays 2020.
Jen lives on the traditional and unceded territories of the Meskwaki, the Báxoje and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ nations, and teaches fiction writing at Coe College.

I Quit! with Jean Herring – Cancelled
2024-02-24 11:00 - 11:30 | FilmScene at The Chauncey, 404 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Unfortunately this event is cancelled due to illness. Please check out I Quit! at you local library or bookstore.
Have you ever quit something?
Parents, educators, and coaches often emphasize the importance of motivation, perseverance and determination, but rarely acknowledge the importance of quitting, and how it goes hand in hand with life satisfaction and trying new things. Because sometimes quitting is the best thing – sometimes quitting leads to BETTER things.
In this story, Sophie wants to find an activity she loves. She tries new things and quits along the way as she searches for the perfect fit. Join Sophie and her dog, Dilly, on all their adventures!

The Little Old Lady and the Riceballs with Monica Leo
2024-02-24 10:15 - 11:00 | FilmScene at The Chauncey, 404 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
The Little Old Lady and the Riceballs, a Japanese tale told with puppets, followed by a short discussion of the history of Eulenspiegel as told in Monica Leo’s new book, Hand, Shadow, Rod. from Ice Cube Press.
Since 1974, Eulenspiegel has toured in thirty-one states and four countries around the world. All along establishing and maintaining an internationally known puppetry center in West Liberty, Iowa. Hand. Shadow, Rod traces the theatre’s history and explores the relationship between work and play, between loss and recovery, and between puppets and puppeteers. It also reflects, first hand, on life and culture between the late 1970s and the present day.

Free Flicks: Rabbitson Crusoe and Rabbit of Seville
2024-02-24 10:00 - 12:00 | FilmScene at The Chauncey, 404 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
FilmsScene presents free screenings of classic Looney Tunes shorts, Rabbitson Crusoe and Rabbit of Seville. The films run on a loop all morning.

Werner Herzog
2023-10-15 19:30 | Englert Theatre, 221 E. Washington St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Legendary film director Werner Herzog will receive FilmScene’s Cinema Savant award and appear in conversation to discuss his life in film and read from his soon-to-be-released autobiography, Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir.

Presented in collaboration with Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City Book Festival, Infinite Dream Festival, and The Englert Theatre.

Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Crime Novel
2023-10-15 14:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
“The levels of mystery here astound. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts and then the parts decide to act alone and challenge the whole. Lethem is not only interrogating the form of the crime novel, but the venture of storytelling itself. All of this while remaining a joy to read. Full of strange characters and expertly rendered place. This brilliant, genre-defying work will certainly leave a mark.”
—PERCIVAL EVERETT
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighborhood its name.
The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory’s prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget.
Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan Lethem, “one of America’s greatest storytellers” (Washington Post), has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we’ve made.

Open House Party at PorchLight Literary Arts Center
2023-10-14 18:00 - 20:00 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Join us for drinks and appetizers at PorchLight Literary Arts Center. Walk through our space and find out about all we do: residencies, our new co-op model, Misfit Master Classes, the PromptPress Reading Room, and our free programming.

Ayana Mathis: The Unsettled
2023-10-14 16:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Ayana Mathis with special guest moderator Lan Samantha Chang.
From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter’s squalid conditions: the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can’t forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living.
Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents—families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations—and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte’s venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava’s inheritance.
As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him—his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there.

Patchwork: A Reading of Literary Translation
2023-10-14 16:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
In every corner of this universe, there is a story waiting to be heard. Join the students of the Literary Translation MFA as they gather and read excerpts from their translations of world literature. In collaboration with Exchanges Literary Journal, the inaugural session of this reading series celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Iowa Translation Workshop.

Nathan Hill: Wellness
2023-10-14 14:30 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Nathan Hill’s best-selling debut novel, The Nix, was named the number one book of 2016 by Entertainment Weekly and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate, and many others. The native Iowan returns with Wellness. Moving from the gritty ’90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home-renovation hysteria, this new novel mines the absurdities of modern technology and modern love to reveal profound, startling truths about intimacy and connection.

Mindy Mejia: To Catch a Storm
2023-10-14 14:30 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Mindy Mejia is a CPA and a graduate of the Hamline University MFA program. Her debut novel, The Dragon Keeper, was published by Ashland Creek Press in 2012. She lives in the Twin Cities with her family, and is the author of Strike Me Down, Everything You Want Me to Be, and Leave No Trace. Her latest mystery novel is To Catch a Storm.

Eskor David Johnson: Pay As You Go
2023-10-14 13:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Eskor David Johnson is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago and the United States. His writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently lives in New York City. Pay As You Go is his debut novel.

Kristen Roupenian: Cat Person
2023-10-14 13:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Kristen Roupenian holds a PhD in English from Harvard, an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and a BA from Barnard College. She is the author of the short story, “Cat Person,” which was published in The New Yorker. She will read from her short story collection, Cat Person. Presented in partnership with the ReFocus Film Festival.

Storytelling Across the Arts: A Conversation with Lonnie Holley & Lee Baines
2023-10-14 13:00 | Old Capitol Senate Chamber, 21 N. Clinton St., Iowa City, 52242, United States
Note: Kurt Vile will no longer be a part of this event.
We are excited to present instead a conversation between Lonnie Holley, a renowned visual artist and musician, and musician and writer Lee Baines.
Holley’s most recent album Oh Me Oh My reflects on his difficult personal experiences growing up in the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in the 1950s. Lee Baines, who first met Lonnie Holley when Baines was a child, is a musician and writer. He is the frontman of the remarkable punk band Lee Baines & The Glory Fires. His poems “Work Lunch” were recently published in The New Yorker.
Part of Hancher’s Infinite Dream festival

Daniel Kraus: Whalefall
2023-10-14 11:30 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Daniel Kraus is a New York Times bestselling author. His collaboration with legendary filmmaker George A. Romero, The Living Dead, was acclaimed by The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Iowa native will discuss his new novel, Whalefall.

Justin Torres: Blackouts
2023-10-14 11:30 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he will read from and discuss his new book, Blackouts. Fellow Workshop graduate Jamel Brinkley will moderate.

Josh Larsen: Fear Not!
2023-10-14 10:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Josh Larsen is the co-host of the radio show and podcast Filmspotting and author of Movies Are Prayers. He will discuss his new book, Fear Not! A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies. Presented in partnership with the ReFocus Film Festival.

Poetry Talks Live Iowa – Japan: A bilingual reading held simultaneously in Iowa City and Tokyo
2023-10-13 20:00 - 23:00 | 120 Phillips Hall, 16 N Clinton St, Iowa City, IA, 52245, United States
Involving the Japanese poet YOTSUMOTO Yasuhiro (IWP 2023), the Akutagawa Prize-winning writer LI Kotomi (IWP 2023), the Japanese poet SUGA Keijiro, UI students from JPNS 3201 Workshop in Japanese Literary Translation; International Writing Program writers from Japan, Taiwan, Jamaica, Nigeria, and Kazakhstan; 10 young Japanese poets and several dozen Japanese undergraduates who will connect to us via Zoom; and other guests. Our students are translating poems by these young Japanese poets, and the Japanese students will be translating poems by the IWP writers from English into Japanese.
Presented by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and International Programs at the University of Iowa.

John Irving in Conversation with Lan Samantha Chang
2023-10-13 19:30 | Hancher Auditorium, 141 Park Rd., Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Presented in collaboration with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, University Lecture Committee, Iowa City Book Festival, and Refocus Film Festival
Part of Hancher’s Infinite Dream festival
John Irving is one of the foremost writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is the author of several books, including the novels The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp, and most recently The Last Chairlift. He was also inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Irving returns to our campus and community to discuss his life and creative process alongside Iowa Writers’ Workshop director Lan Samantha Chang.

International Writing Program Panel Discussion: On the Body
2023-10-13 12:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
A person’s body affects the way they navigate the world, and their experiences in it. How much power does a body (with regard to, for instance, race, gender, sexuality, physical ability) have over, or in, an artist’s work? And, with what devices can a writer affect issues their body can present– for instance via symbolism, or by changing media, or in the physical circumstances of reading and writing?

Busi Mahlangu (South Africa), Wesley Macheso (Malawi), Kevin Chen (Taiwan)

Dreamwell Theatre Presents: Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters
2023-10-12 19:30 | The James Theater, 213 N Gilbert St, Iowa City, IA, 52245, United States
Terry Pratchett takes Shakespeare’s Macbeth and then turns it up ’till the knob comes off. It’s all there – a wicked duke and duchess, the ghost of the murdered king, dim soldiers, strolling players, a land in peril. And who stands between the Kingdom and destruction? Three witches.
Written by Sir Terry Pratchett, and adapted for the stage by Stephen Briggs
Directed by Josh Sazon
Ticket info:
https://www.thejamesic.com/
319-600-2936
213 N. Gilbert Street, Iowa City

The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality
2023-10-12 19:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Author Dr. Chris Jones (The Swine Republic) is joined by journalists Keith Schneider and Erin Jordan to examine Iowa and the Midwest’s efforts at water quality, public information, and the modern myth of the “farmer.”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Translation! Ever New, Ever Elusive
2023-10-12 18:30 | Old Capitol Senate Chamber, 21 N. Clinton St., Iowa City, 52242, United States
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. Her first job was at Iowa (1965-77), where she went through the ranks, and profited greatly by the absolute support of colleagues among whom she would mention President Sandy Boyd, Vice President May Brodbeck, Chairs John Gerber and David Hayman, and many many others. She met Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Okot p’Bitek, and Sankha Ghosh at the International Writing Program; worked with John Cheever and Anthony Burgess at the Writer’s Workshop, and was involved in the hiring of Maureen Robertson, Danny Weissbort, Steven Unger, Ruedi Kuenzli, Sheldon Pollock and others. Her special friends were Alexander Aspel, Cassia Tomasini, Dale Godwin. She has written a few books, received a few prizes and holds a few honorary degrees. For many years, she has been grappling with finishing a book on W.E.B. Du Bois and writing an Afterword on the first English translations of Gramsci’s conversation with Julia and Tatiana Schucht while imprisoned. Humanities for social justice is her obsession. Translation is the medium of this work.

Tracie Morris: human/nature poems
2023-10-11 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Weaving intimate portraits of home with what could be the travel journals of a 21st-century troubadour, Tracie Morris’s human/nature poems is a hymn to the human and more-than-human world. These poems bear the record of a state of heightened perception, springing from the displacements of travel and returning, of memory and its triggers, of global pandemics, ecological catastrophe, political unrest, and mourning. With great precision and abundant insight, Morris articulates the seam of our “human/nature”: “Sol has hands in Cairo, in Luxor / today He Rises. I wonder where / the outstretch lands. It matters knot / what circles your head. What your / kin says is power. Aspects of ever / lasting light, life is always made from parting.”

How to read old paper: Searching for meaning in early modern English writing paper
2023-10-11 18:00 | Shambaugh Auditorium, University of Iowa Main Library, 125 W Washington St, Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
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 modern English writing paper” at 6pm October 11th in Shambaugh Auditorium and on Zoom.
In the late 1580s and 1590s, England experienced a writing paper renaissance. High status people began to have access to and develop a vocabulary for an expanding range of imported fine paper. At the same time, a German refugee jeweler named John Spilman began one of the first viable paper mills in England. Despite his documented struggles in sourcing rags, he supplied writing paper to Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council and a handful of printers, adorning it with intricate watermarks depicting the queen’s coat of arms, royal badges, and cypher. Join Wolfe as she digs into the archival evidence to tell a story about paper that begins with impoverished and unhoused London rag women and ends with Queen Elizabeth.
In addition to stewarding the manuscript collection, Wolfe teaches people how to read English secretary hand and oversees transcription crowdsourcing projects at the Folger. She publishes widely on early modern English manuscripts and hybrid books. Her essay “The Material Culture of Record-Keeping in Early Modern England,” co-written with Peter Stallybrass, received the 2019 Archival History Article Award from the Society of American Archivists. She was also the Munby Fellow in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge in 2021/22. Wolfe received her BA from Amherst College, her M.L.I.S. from UCLA, and her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.
This is a hybrid event. You can join us in person at 6pm at Shambaugh Auditorium in the Main Library, or on Zoom by registering here

Marta McDowell: Gardening Can Be Murder
2023-10-11 12:00 | Coralville Public Library, 1401 5th St., Coralville, IA, 52241, United States
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 ways in which our greatest mystery writers, from Edgar Allen Poe to authors on today’s bestseller lists, have found inspiration in the sinister side of gardens.
From the cozy to the hardboiled, the literary to the pulp, and the classic to the contemporary, Gardening Can Be Murder is the first book to explore the mystery genre’s many surprising horticultural connections. Meet plant-obsessed detectives and spooky groundskeeper suspects, witness toxic teas served in foul play, and tour the gardens—both real and imagined—that have been the settings for fiction’s ghastliest misdeeds. A New York Times bestselling author herself, McDowell also introduces us to some of today’s top writers who consider gardening integral to their craft, assuring that horticultural themes will remain a staple of the genre for countless twisting plots to come.

The Machine Stops: A New Opera by John Lake and Cecile Goding
2023-10-10 19:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
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 scholar Brooks Landon (UI Dept. of English).
The Machine Stops, featuring a libretto written by Iowa author and UI workshop graduate Cecile Goding and original score composed by Iowa City musician John Lake, debuted at the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts in July 2022. Based on a 1909 science fiction story by E. M. Forster, the opera imagines a world where all reality is filtered through The Machine. Everyone lives alone, communicating solely through their hand-held devices. Sound familiar?
Selected videoclips of the CCPA production of The Machine Stops will be shown. Audiences responded to the debut performance with high praise: “Surprisingly contemporary;” “a powerful experience;” “a stunning success;” “beautiful and complex;” “gorgeous music and strong libretto.”
