Travels with the Muse is a journey into the creative life, told through Lori Erickson’s travels to places where art and spirit meet. From the luminous interior of Barcelona’s Sagrada Família to the rhythms of the Mississippi Blues Trail, from quilting traditions in Nebraska to the turning dance of the whirling dervishes in Türkiye, Erickson
Stop by the lobby of the Iowa City Public Library between festival events to browse for a new (to you) book.
A diverse collection of titles, journals, magazines, and book arts from local and regional publishers and literary organizations. A unique opportunity for book lovers to discover new authors and genres. 508 Press | Annie's Foundation | Catharsis | Earthwords | Gray Hawks Writers | Guild Writers | Ice Cube Press | Ink Lit Mag | Iowa
Celebrate queer joy and artistry during Refocus Film Festival and the Iowa City Book Festival! The Queer Coffee Social is a space for queer folks and allies to meet each other and be in community. This event is free to attend and open to the public. Featured Artist: Mari Johnson Mari Johnson is a painter, printmaker
Aphorisms are literature’s hand luggage. Light and compact, they contain everything you need to get through a rough day at the office or a dark night of the soul. Aphorisms, the oldest written art form on the planet, have been going viral for thousands of years, delivering the short, sharp shock of old forgotten truths.
In A Marriage in Startled Air, Patricia Foster shares the dramatic story of how the diagnosis of her husband’s rare cancer changed the dynamics of their marriage and opened the door to the hidden world of his childhood, revealing the seeds of trauma and childhood PTSD. In vivid, often poetic prose, Foster reflects on how the
Told from the alternating perspectives of five friends who grew up together on the same council estate, I See Buildings Fall like Lightning asks what happens when all the expectations we have of our lives are dashed. Only Rian has made it out of the estate and moved away to another city, but his money
Gerry Sass is not who he appears to be. On the surface, he is the proud owner of a local country music station outside of Mystic, Iowa. Beneath it, he’s a mob-connected hitman-for-hire who launders money through the station WIOA. One morning in 1986, his life of crime catches up to him when two men
Gabriel Fisher was born an orphan, weighing eighteen pounds and measuring twenty-seven inches long. No one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of him. He walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and seems to possess extraordinary athletic talent. But when the older brother who has been caring for him dies, Gabriel is taken
At the age of eight, Brian Lackey is found bleeding under the crawl space of his house, having endured something so traumatic that he has blacked out an entire five-hour period. During the following years he slowly recalls details from that night, fragments that hint at yet cannot explain what happened to him, leaving him
In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Tisa Bryant’s Residual retrieves and catalogs what remains of her home, her psyche, and her creative practice. She filters through the remnants of her mother’s everyday life, asking what becomes an archive—a bookshelf, a dresser, a relationship, a secret? Drawing on personal memories as well as archives of renowned
Carousel opens as a professor begins delivering a lecture to a hot room. Her students have the internet in their pockets, screens on their wrists, seeing in more directions than students ever could before. But what, in fact, are they looking at? In the spirit of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Sarah Minor’s Carousel explores how the pursuit of
