Sidekick: Conversation+Book Signing LT Thompson & Tatiana Scholate-Bonne
2026-07-19 15:00 (America/Chicago) | Sidekick Coffee & Books, 1310 1/2 Melrose Avenue, Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Join Sidekick Coffee & Books for a free to attend reading by LT Thompson and Tatiana Schlote-Bonne as they discuss their new releases on Sunday, July 19th at 2 pm.
Devils We Know is the anxiously awaited sequel to Young Adult Fantasy Devils Like Us! Cas, Remy, and Finn are on the run from the Order of Lazarus, a secret society that wants to use Cas’s prophetic powers to capture Death and ensure that only the “unworthy” and “immoral” meet their ends
The Mean Ones by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne is Midsommer meets The Final Girl Support Group in this horror novel about a woman who survived cult killings as a child and is striving to be “normal,” but a spontaneous trip into the woods and the voices in her head keep pulling her to the dark side.

Free Generative Writing Workshop for July: Leslie Pyo
2026-07-19 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.
LESLIE PYO received a Fulbright for Creative Writing in Korea in 2023-24. She is currently completing that project, a surreal, bilingual (Korean and English) picture book about the emotional dimensions of heritage language loss and reacquisition.
For more information visit the websites of Iowa City Poetry and/or PorchLight Literary Arts Center!

PorchLight: Write Now – Community Supported Writing Group
2026-07-20 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!

Prairie Lights: Meg Richardson in conv with Claire Lombardo – Paradise Pawn
2026-07-20 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Meg Richardson will read from her debut novel, Paradise Pawn, and will be joined in conversation with Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and summer Writers’ Workshop visiting lecturer, Claire Lombardo. Tin House/Zando describes Paradise Pawn as a “dazzling debut novel about best friends, adolescent longing, and the Florida pawn shop that promises to make their dreams come true—if it doesn’t break them apart first.” It’s praised by Gary Shteyngart, author of Vera, or Faith, as “A lovely book that captures the rhythms and travails of working-class life,” while Charlee Dyroff, author of Loneliness & Company, says: “Brilliant and bighearted, Paradise Pawn transported me back to the electrifying intensity of young friendship. It beautifully captures the feeling of slowly waking up from childhood and emerging into the adult world only to realize it’s often not what we thought it would be. A total gem of a debut!”
Meg Richardson is a writer, translator, and cartoonist from Iowa. She currently lives in Vermont. She holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. Her debut novel, Paradise Pawn (Tin House/Zando), is based on her experiences working behind the counter of a pawn shop.
Claire Lombardo is the author of the nationally-bestselling novel Same As It Ever Was. Her debut, The Most Fun We Ever Had, was an instant New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick. Her novels have been translated or are forthcoming in over a dozen languages. Claire is a graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Prior to publishing The Most Fun We Ever Had, Claire spent several years working with homeless children and families in Chicago. She has taught fiction writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Grinnell College and worked as a bookseller at Prairie Lights Books. She lives in Minneapolis. ​

Prairie Lights: Sarah Minor in conv with Melissa Febos – Carousel: An Essay on Seeing
2026-07-21 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Sarah Minor will read from her new book Carousel: An Essay on Seeing, and will be joined in conversation with fellow Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program professor and award-winning author Melissa Febos. Yale University Press gives this description of Carousel :
“Across short, immersive sections masterfully fusing the slide lecture and the lyric essay, Minor invites us to see across time as a professor-narrator tying the Bayeux Tapestry to surrealist paintings, Instagram reels, and drone warfare. Blending art history with memoir, close looking with confession, Carousel considers how the pursuit of panoramic vision frames power, distorts reality, and implicates contemporary viewers and subjects. In language that captures the disorientation of the whirling ride, Minor shows us how the more we strive to see, the more we ultimately reveal ourselves” (sarahceniaminor.com/carousel).
Barbara Browning, author of The Miniaturists, praises Carousel as “A dizzying ride past images stabbed into time,” while fellow Iowa NWP professor Tisa Bryant, author of recently published Residual, says: “Carousel invites us into the interior horizons of war, media, confinement, and creative impulse, (un)framed, artfully rendered in taut, resonant prose. A gaze-changer.”
Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist.​ She’s the author of Carousel: An Essay on Seeing from Yale University Press (2026), Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press, 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press, 2016). Minor’s prose and visual poems have been collected in places like Best American Experimental Writing, A Harp in the Stars, and Welcome to the Neighborhood. She is the recipient of a Research Fellowship to Iceland from the American Scandinavian Foundation, a 2019 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her essay “Something Clear” was awarded the 2018 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose. Minor serves as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry Editor at Brink Magazine and on the Nonfiction editorial team at TriQuarterly Review. She holds a PhD from Ohio University, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA Program. In addition to her writing practice, Sarah is one half of the collaborative duo Haag Cykell—an ongoing performance series with the artist Johanna Winters that explores modes of storytelling through shadow theater and language (sarahceniaminor.com/about).
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).

Rogue Workshops Faculty Reading
2026-07-22 18:30 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Join Prairie Lights Books for a special faculty reading of the inaugural “Authors at Large” Iowa City Rogue Workshops! (You can learn more about this program and the faculty here.)
Xu Xi will read from her new collection of short stories, Horizon Hong Kong.
Kelly Dwyer will read from her recent novel, Ghost Mother.
Robin Hemley will read from his latest essay collection, How to Change History.
Mary Allen and Hugh Ferrer will read from works in progress.
Note: To accommodate these writers and their readings, this event will start a bit earlier than usual, at 6:30 PM instead of seven.

PorchLight: Rooftop Music & Reading for July
2026-07-31 19:00 | Market House, 202 N. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Join PorchLight on the deck of MarketHouse in IC’s North Side for an evening of music, poetry, and prose. The Rooftoop Music & Reading Series brings together some of Iowa’s most exciting artists for a one-of-a-kind collaborative program. Bring a buddy, date, or come alone. Stay for the lovely views, and good company. Purchase tickets for the event on the PorchLight website!

The July session features:

Lauren Haldeman is the author of Instead of Dying (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry), Calenday, and The Eccentricity is Zero. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Tin House, The Colorado Review, Fence, Tupelo Quarterly, among others. A graphic novelist and poet, she’s received an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Scott Russell Morris is a writer and enthusiast. He is the author of Points of Tangency: Essays (Cornerstone Press, Sept 2024) and is the editor and creator of Magpie Zines, a zine about tarot, magpies, and found meaning. He is the Poet Laureate of Mt Vernon, IA, and an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College.

Deb Talan grew up in the small town of Pelham, Massachusetts. She later attended Brown University, where she was a member of the Chattertocks, Brown’s oldest all-female a cappella group, before moving to Oregon, where she was a member of Hummingfish, a Portland band, for six years. Talan’s recurring lyrical motifs include celestial objects, birds, nature, and various historical figures (e.g., Marc Chagall in “Painting By Chagall,” Amelia Earhart in “Thinking Amelia,” and Vincent van Gogh in “Vincent”). Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn inspired Talan to write “Tell Your Story Walking”. This song appears on the 2002 album Songs Inspired by Literature (Chapter One), a benefit of the organization Artists for Literacy. “Tell Your Story Walking” was the winner of Artists for Literacy’s 2002 songwriting contest. In addition to the Weepies’ albums, (Steve Tannen is the other half of the duo), Talan and Tannen collaborated with singer/actress Mandy Moore on her 2007 album Wild Hope. Together, they wrote and recorded five songs with Mandy — the single “Extraordinary,” the title track “Wild Hope,” “All Good Things,” “Few Days Down” and “Looking Forward to Looking Back.”[1] “Forgiven” played over the closing credits of the 2001 film Lovely & Amazing.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the story collections Ask Me About the Money and We Could’ve Been Happy Here. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, his work has received support from the Anderson Center, Iowa Arts Council, and Springboard for the Arts. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, december magazine, Gettysburg Review, New Stories from the Midwest, North American Review, Redivider, Terrain, and elsewhere. He’s a founding editor of Cutleaf and teaches at Northeast Iowa Community College.

PorchLight: Poetry Exchange
2026-08-08 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
2026-08-08 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!

PorchLight: Writing Grief
2026-08-13 10:00, 2026-09-06 10:00 | 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.

PorchLight: The Prose Exchange
2026-08-16 15:30, 2026-08-30 15:30 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Ready to get some eyes on your work? This group provides careful readings and positive, descriptive feedback on works-in-progress. They meet twice a month and workshop two submissions of up to 20 pages at each meeting.
They are currently open to adding one or two more members.
They advise sitting in on a session to determine if this is the workshop for you.
For more information on how to join, visit their website!

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 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States

PrairieLights: Reading – Asha Leena Bhandary – Being at Home: Living Autonomously in an Unjust World
2026-08-17 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
University of Iowa professor Asha Leena Bhandary will read from her new book, Being at Home: Living Autonomously in an Unjust World. Described as a “a care-responsive theory of liberalism to address intersectionality and racism,” Being at Home is praised by José Medina, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, as “an ambitious and brilliant rethinking of the notion of autonomy from a relational and intersectional perspective, bringing together liberalism and critical philosophy of race and gender in original ways.” It’s also praised by Ashwini Vasanthakumar, author of The Ethics of Exile, who says: “An artful synthesis of memoir, philosophy, law, and literature, this is a beautifully written meditation on home-making in an unjust world, and the practices of buoyancy and community that enable those who live ‘counterfactually’ to nevertheless be ‘at home.”
Asha Bhandary is a social and political philosopher working at the intersection of the ethics of care, philosophy of race, reproductive justice, and political theory. Her work focuses on the structural and distributive requirements for caregiving arrangements in society, developing critical care theory that illuminates racialized and non-western practices of care. In her first monograph, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture (2020), she argues that society’s caregiving arrangements must be improved if women, and, women of color, are to have the freedom to care. In her second monograph, Being at Home: Living Autonomously in an Unjust World (2026), she defends the theory of intersectional liberalism, which proceeds from the subject position of the least advantaged, or what she defines as the “grafted subject” (ashabhandary.com).

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.

PorchLight: Send It In!
2026-08-21 19:00 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Curious about where and how to submit your writing to journals or contests? Would some camaraderie help you finally send off that finished piece or complete that residency or fellowship application? Putting your work out there can be hard in a discipline in which rejection is par for the course.
Each session a different writer will present on an aspect of the submission process. Then, browse through PorchLights resources or find a cozy chair and get to work!
This session’s host will be Scott Russell Morris, who will talk about poetry versus prose submissions, how to manage simultaneous submissions, and how to find the right literary journal for your work. Scott is a writer and enthusiast. He is the author of Points of Tangency: Essays (Cornerstone Press, Sept 2024) and is the editor and creator of Magpie Zines, a zine about tarot, magpies, and found meaning. He is the Poet Laureate of Mt Vernon, IA, and an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College.
Drinks and snacks will be served.
This session is just for members.

PorchLight: Survivor’s Stories with Margaret Yapp
2026-08-26 18:30 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Join us for the first writing class of DVIP/RVAP’s new initiative: Survivors’ Stories, a series of five writing classes between August 2026-July 2027. All are free and open to the public, and survivors are encouraged to attend.
All classes will be trauma-informed, and focused on themes of reclaiming one’s story, releasing shame, healing, resilience, and building community. Each workshop will last approximately 1.5 hours and conclude with an optional sharing opportunity for participants who wish to read their work aloud.
A trained DVIP/RVAP advocate will be present at each session to provide support if needed.

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.

PorchLight: Rooftop Music and Reading Series
2026-08-28 19:00 | Market House, 202 N. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Join PorchLight on the deck of Market House in IC’s North Side for an evening of music, poetry, and prose. The Rooftop Music & Reading Series brings together some of Iowa’s most exciting artists for a one-of-a-kind collaborative program. Bring a buddy, date, or come alone. Stay for the lovely views, and good company.
Our August session features:
Jordan Sellergren: Jordan Sellergren is the owner and publisher of Little Village, Iowa’s independent news, arts and culture magazine. Her second full-length album, “Sweet, Bitter Tears” was released in 2020.
Elizabeth Willis: Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book is Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024). Her previous books of poetry include Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015), which was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), recipient of the PEN New England/L. L. Winship Prize for Poetry; Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan University Press, 2006); Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003); The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995); and Second Law (Avenue B, 1993). She also writes about contemporary poetry and has edited a volume of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (University of Iowa Press, 2008).
Mark Levine: Mark Levine is the author of five books of poems, most recently Sound Fury (2022), as well as Debt (1993), Enola Gay (2000), The Wilds (2006), and Travels of Marco (2016), and a book of nonfiction reportage, F5 (2007). A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Debt, with an introduction by Srikanth Reddy, was published in 2018. Recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, an NEA, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, Levine’s poems have be featured in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology, and American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics. Levine has also worked extensively as a long-form journalist for publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Outside, New York, and Men’s Journal, and his work has been selected for Best American Magazine Writing and Best American Sports Writing. He is the longtime editor of the Kuhl House Poets series at University of Iowa Press.
Sarah Minor: Dr. Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist and the author of books Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, winner of the Noemi Press Book Award for Prose (2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press, 2020), a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction, and winner of the Big Other Award in Nonfiction and the hybrid chapbook, The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press 2016), winner of the Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest. Her newest book, Carousel, was recently published by Yale University Press in July 2026.

Prairie Lights: IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series
2026-08-30 16:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Join Prairie Lights for their annual IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series! This week’s event features IWP Residents Sarah Gilmartin (Ireland) and Iván Hochman (Argentina). They will be accompanied by local author and IWP Senior Editor Lauren Haldeman and a current Iowa Writers’ Workshop student (to be announced soon).
Sarah Gilmartin’s short stories have been published in The Dublin Review, The Tangerine and The Stinging Fly. She won the Máirtín Crawford Short Story Award in 2020. Her novels Dinner Party: A Tragedy (2021), Service (2023) and Little Vanities (2026) are published by Pushkin Press. They have been shortlisted for the Irish Books Awards, the Kate O’Brien Award, and translated into Italian, German and (forthcoming) French. She was the 2025 Arts Council Writer-in-Residence at Dublin City University.
Iván Hochman (b. 1994, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an actor, writer, screenwriter, director, and teacher. His play Decir te amo es un atentado received a National Playwriting Award from the Teatro Nacional Cervantes and was presented at the Bienal de Arte Joven. He was selected for the Cannes Writers Club at Canneseries (2024) for his work as a screenwriter. His first novel, Por qué te vas (Milena Caserola, 2020; Alfaguara, 2023), was included in the Mapa de las Lenguas collection (2024). His second novel, Años luz que no brillamos, is forthcoming from Alfaguara. He starred in the Netflix series Love After Music, for which he received several acting awards. He is currently working on a science fiction short story collection and two feature films. He teaches creative writing and mentors long-form literary projects.
Lauren Haldeman is the author/illustrator of the graphic novels Wild That We’re Alive and Team Photograph, and the poetry collections Instead of Dying (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Center for Literary Publishing, 2017), Calenday and the chapbook The Eccentricity is Zero. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Tin House, The Colorado Review, Fence, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast and The Rumpus. A poet, web designer and comic book artist, she has been a recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, a Vermont Studio Center residency, the Colorado Prize for Poetry and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Slamovision Qualifying Slam
2026-09-03 18:00 | PS1 Close House, 538 S Gilbert St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Slam poets from across Iowa are invited to compete on Thursday, September 3, for the chance to represent Iowa City in the 2026 international Slamovision competition, a project of the UNESCO Cities of Literature network.
The Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature, Iowa City Poetry and Mic Check will host the qualifying slam September 3 at 6:30 p.m. at Close House, 538 S. Gilbert St. Sign-up begins at 6 p.m. Poets have three minutes to perform, with the winner advancing to the international competition.
Iowa City is hosting this year’s Slamovision final after Iowa poet Henry Morray won the 2025 international title. Poets from 23 UNESCO Cities of Literature will compete, with the international winner determined by audiences in participating cities. The final will take place at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 1, at the James Theater and will be livestreamed around the world.

Prairie Lights: Will Boast – The Submerged
2026-09-03 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Will Boast will read from his new short story collection, The Submerged, which was named the 2026 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction by the University of Georgia Press.
The University of Georgia Press offers this introduction to The Submerged, which is praised by Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans, as “Bursting with compassion and wit and intelligence:”
“In ten surprising and subtly devastating stories, Will Boast explores the complex ways in which we long for a home, for connection and purpose. A Sicilian barber takes on a refugee as an apprentice and upends his own quiet village life. A lonely New York architect starts an ill-advised relationship with an aspiring congressman. The comic mayhem of teenage locals in a tourist town suddenly turns deadly serious. A shooting in northern Wisconsin involving an immigrant sets a community against itself. The Submerged draws unforgettable portraits of those forced into exile and those who choose it themselves. Boast asks just what we’ll do when the time comes to leave everything behind.”
Will Boast is the author of a story collection, Power Ballads; a memoir, Epilogue; and a novel, Daphne. His second collection, The Submerged, won the 2026 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and is forthcoming this September. His short fiction, reporting, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Guardian, The American Scholar, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He’s held fellowships from Stanford University, the American Academy in Rome, the University of East Anglia, Yaddo, and MacDowell, and he’s taught at Stanford, the University of Chicago, Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center in Rome. He resides in Chicago and London.

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.

PorchLight: Flash Forward
2026-09-05 13:00 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Flash Forward is PorchLight’s monthly studio session for writers interested in short form writing: flash fiction, micro essays, prose poetry, and more. Join them and learn more about these miniature marvels. Each session includes a discussion of short form works we love, a generative writing prompt, optional sharing, and light positive feedback.
Whether you’re new to these very short forms or an old hand, they would love to have you!
First meeting is free!

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).

Prairie Lights: Tabatha Leggett in conv with Jan Steyn – Enchantment
2026-09-09 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
University of Iowa Literary Translation MFA candidate Tabatha Leggett will read from her translation of Riikka Pulkkinen’s novel, Enchantment, and will be joined in conversation with Jan Steyn. Described as “a spellbinding literary mystery that explores the uneasy terrain of girlhood, where one is always being watched, shaped, and judged by others” (scribepublications.com), Enchantment is praised by Shelf Awareness as “a striking novel about girlhood, perception, and death,” while Catherine Airey, author of Confessions, says: “An intricate tapestry of a novel by a masterful writer. Enchantment’s real triumph is its investigation into what we mean to one another as imperfect people.”
Tabatha Leggett is a writer and literary translator from North Wales. She is a current Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation MFA program and a graduate of New York University’s Fiction MFA programme, where she was an Axinn Fellow. Enchantment is her debut translation.
Jan Steyn is a writer, scholar, and translator working from Afrikaans, French, and Dutch. His forthcoming translations include Wilma Stockenström’s Abjater’s Laughter and two books by Ronelda Kamfer, the novel Compound and the poetry volume soil/Santekraam. He is the author of Jig (Sylph Editions, 2026) and editor of Translation: Crafts, Contexts, Consequences (Cambridge, 2022). He teaches at the University of Iowa, where he directs the MFA in Literary Translation.

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.
