Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature

Ari Berman – Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It
2024-10-19 14:30 (America/Chicago) | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Ari Berman is the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and a reporting fellow at Type Media Center. He will read from Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It,. He is also the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction) and Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. He is a native of Fairfield, Iowa.
The event will be moderated by Ty Rushing, an assistant professor of practice at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is the former chief political correspondent for Iowa Starting Line, and co-founder of the Iowa Association of Black Journalists.
This event is presented in partnership with the League of Women Voters of Johnson County

James Fitzmaurice – Hobgoblin Gennel
2024-10-19 14:30 | Shambaugh Auditorium, University of Iowa Main Library, 125 W Washington St, Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Join author James Fitzmaurice for a conversation about his new young adult novel, Hobgoblin Gennel.
In this off-beat tale of adventure, teenagers Irie and Fred are fast friends. Irie, of Afro-Caribbean heritage, was born in Sheffield where they both live. Fred is an expat American transplanted from Yuma, Arizona with a keen interest in Sheffield’s Anglo-Saxon era. While trapped in an underground passageway, they come across the kitchen of a foodie hipster named Hobgoblin who is what his name suggests. Hobgoblin uses a modern induction hob, of course, and only the best ingredients. The irritable little chef sets them the task of finding the Fairy Queen’s red-garnet and golden cup, but he is cagey about his reasons.
Fitzmaurice was born in Ventura, California. Jim taught English at Northern Arizona University for many years before retiring to the UK, where he has been associated with the University of Sheffield. He is a fiction writer and screenwriter. He also continues to devote time to scholarly research and publishes on the early modern woman writer Margaret Cavendish.
This event is presented in partnership with the University of Iowa Libraries

Forrest Gander – Mojave Ghost
2024-10-19 13:30 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
A novel-poem taking us to the Pulitzer-prize winning poet Forrest Gander’s birthplace in the Mojave Desert and his current northern California home, where tumultuous memories coalesce with the present.
Mojave Ghost initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Moving through grief and loss towards a renewal that never sidesteps the wholeness of experience, Gander’s new collection discovers an articulate language for the merging of exterior and interior landscapes. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked along much of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault toward the desolate town of his birth and found himself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating his emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions: the fractures and folds underlying not only our country, but any self in its relationship with others. The result is this moving new collection that unforgettably describes a spiritual and physical journey. With its confiding tones and candid self-examination, Mojave Ghost is Gander’s most inviting and poignant book yet.

Panel Discussion: Politics
2024-10-19 13:00 | Iowa City Senior Center, 28 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
In this panel, writers will discuss how the current political landscape affects their work and the role politics plays in their writing.
Featuring: Hatice Açıkgöz (International Writing Program), Ari Berman, Natalie Goldberg, Amanda Jones, and Nina Lohman

Willy Vlautin – The Horse
2024-10-19 13:00 | Iowa City Masonic Building, 312 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, Willy Vlautin is the author of six novels and is the founder of the bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines. Vlautin started writing stories and songs at the age of eleven after receiving his first guitar. Inspired by songwriters and novelists Paul Kelly, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, William Kennedy, Raymond Carver, and John Steinbeck, Vlautin works diligently to tell working class stories in his novels and songs.
In his latest book, The Horse, Al Ward lives on an isolated mining claim in the high desert of central Nevada fifty miles from the nearest town. A grizzled man in his sixties, he survives on canned soup, instant coffee, and memories of his ex-wife, friends and family he’s lost, and his life as a touring musician. Hampered by insomnia, bouts of anxiety, and a chronic lethargy that keeps him from moving back to town, Al finds himself teetering on the edge of madness and running out of reasons to go on—until a horse arrives on his doorstep: nameless, blind, and utterly helpless.
A poignant meditation on addiction, heartbreak, and the reality of life on the road in smalltime bands, The Horse is a beautiful, haunting tale from an author working at the height of his powers.

Jarod K. Anderson – Something in the Woods Loves You
2024-10-19 13:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Sometimes in life, you find yourself lost in an utterly dark place. When poet and author Jarod K. Anderson found himself trapped by a deep and lonely depression, he turned to the woods, literally. In his new book, Something in the Woods Loves You, Anderson explores the inherent ways nature can help fight mental illness, saying, in nature, “We are being offered a lesson, if we are wise enough to accept it.”

Elizabeth Willis – Liontaming in America
2024-10-19 12:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Elizabeth Willis is the author of Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024), a hybrid work engaged with American belief and relationship structures, theatre, activism, and film. The collection is on the 2024 Longlist for the National Book Award for Poetry.
Her other books of poetry include Alive (New York Review Books, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Address; Meteoric Flowers; Turneresque; The Human Abstract; and the artist’s book Spectral Evidence . She also writes about the intersection of art and labor and edited the volume Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Panel Discussion: Writing on Film
2024-10-19 11:30 | Iowa City Senior Center, 28 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
A discussion on film criticism and writing, featuring accomplished film writers Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader) and Marya E. Gates (RogerEbert.com) moderated by Ariana Martinez of Little Village.

Marguerite Sheffer – The Man in the Banana Trees and Sharon Wahl – Everything Flirts
2024-10-19 11:30 | Iowa City Masonic Building, 312 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Marguerite (Maggie) Sheffer is a writer who lives in New Orleans. She is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University, where she teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction as tools for social change. Formerly, she taught English at the East Oakland School of the Arts, Castlemont High School, Life Academy, and GW Carver High School.
Her debut short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees, was selected by judge Jamil Jan Kochai for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and will be published in Fall 2024.

Sharon Wahl is a writer and documentary film producer. Her collection of love stories inspired by classic philosophy texts, Everything Flirts, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and will be published by the University of Iowa Press in the fall of 2024. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in the Iowa Review, the Chicago Tribune, Harvard Review, Pleiades, and other periodicals. She is currently writing Bitter Tales, a collection of flash fiction and essays.

Josh Cowen – The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers
2024-10-19 11:30 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Josh Cowen is Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, and an author on topics related to education politics, school choice, and culture wars in the United States. In addition to each of the major academic outlets in his research field, his popular writing has appeared in outlets such as The Conversation, the Dallas Morning News, the Detroit Free Press, The Hechinger Report, the Houston Chronicle, The New Republic, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, The Tennessean, the Washington Spectator and more. He lives in mid-Michigan with his family.
In The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, Cowen lays bare the surprising history of tax-funded school choice programs in the United States and warns of the dangers of education privatization. A former evaluator of state and local school voucher programs, Cowen demonstrates how, as such programs have expanded in the United States, so too has the evidence-informed case against them.
Cosponsored by the Iowa City Public Library’s Carol Spaziani Intellectual Freedom Festival, an annual event series promoting our right to seek information, read, and speak freely.

Jennifer Croft – The Extinction of Irena Rey
2024-10-19 10:30 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Jennifer Croft won the Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is the author of Homesick, a Saroyan Prize winner, and numerous pieces in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Her debut novel is The Extinction of Irena Rey, which tells of eight translators who arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The result is a hilarious, thought-provoking tale that is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language.
This event is presented in partnership with the International Writing Program

Christopher Merrill – After the Fact
2024-10-19 10:00 | Iowa City Masonic Building, 312 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Christopher Merrill has published eight collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, and On the Road to Lviv; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries.
After the Fact is a lively and imaginative conversation between two legendary poets. Marvin Bell, writing from Iowa City and Port Townsend, and Christopher Merrill, writing from around the world, give us an intimate look into collaboration at its best.

Amanda Jones – That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America
2024-10-19 10:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Amanda Jones has been an educator for 23 years, at the same middle school she attended as a child. She has served as President of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians and won numerous awards for her work in school libraries, including School Library Journal Librarian of the Year. A sought-after keynote speaker, Amanda is a frequent volunteer for state and national library associations, as well as a co-founder of the Livingston Parish Library Alliance and founding member of Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship. She lives in Livingston Parish, Louisiana.
In That Librarian, Jones maps the book banning crisis occurring across the nation, drawing the battle lines in the war against equity and inclusion, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.
Jones will be joined by by Sam Helmick, the American Library Association Council 2024-2025 president-elect and the Iowa City Public Library Community & Access Services Coordinator.
Cosponsored by the Iowa City Public Library’s Carol Spaziani Intellectual Freedom Festival, an annual event series promoting our right to seek information, read, and speak freely.

Film Screening: Racialism and the Media
2024-10-18 17:30 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
A presentation by University of Iowa Professor Venise Berry and S. Toriano Berry, a professor emeritus at Howard University. Includes a screening of the hour-long film and a post-screening Q&A with the Berrys.
The nature of racial ideology has changed in our society. Yes, there are still ugly racists who push uglier racism, but there are also popular constructions of race routinely woven into mediated images and messages. Racialism includes, but moves beyond traditional racism. It involves images, ideas, and issues that are produced, distributed, and consumed repetitively and intertextually based on stereotypes, biased framing, historical myths, as well as traditional racism. These representations are normalized through the media, ultimately shaping and influencing societal ideology and behavior. Based on 25 years of research by Venise Berry, this documentary explores the connection between media, African Americans, and popular culture.
This event is co-presented by Refocus Film Festival.

Ezra Claytan Daniels – Upgrade Soul and “We Are Not Alone”
2024-10-18 16:30 | Daydreams Comics, 229 E Washington St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Join the Eisner-nominated comic and tv creator–and Sioux City native–as he reads a selection of short comics, including We Are Not Alone (now a short film, with its Iowa premiere at the Refocus Film Festival). Followed by a Q&A and signing.
Presented in partnership with Daydreams Comics and Refocus Film Festival

Typedancing
2024-10-18 14:00 | Pedmall Weatherdance Fountain Stage, College St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Typedancing is a collaborative interdisciplinary performance featuring musicians, poets, dancers and visual artists making music with and dancing to obsolete office equipment. With audience participation, it also includes live-produced zines from the artifacts of the performance.

International Writing Program Panel: Balancing Life as an Artist
2024-10-18 12:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Featuring IWP Residents:
Lisa ALLEN-AGOSTINI (fiction writer, poet, editor; Trinidad and Tobago) is the author of the historical noir novella Death in the Dry River (2024), the young adult novel Home Home (2020), and the domestic noir novel The Bread the Devil Knead (2021), which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2022. She is currently working on a memoir in poetry and a novel set in the world of steelpan, which is the national instrument of her homeland.
Putra HIDAYATULLAH (nonfiction and fiction writer, art curator, educator; Indonesia) is the author of a short story collection entitled Kebun Jagal [The Butcher’s Garden] (2023). His nonfiction writing has appeared in Artlink, Curatography, The Jakarta Post, and Check-In, while his fiction has been published in InterSastra, Porch Litmag, and Koran Tempo, among others. He served as a harvester for the international art exhibition documenta fifteen in Germany. He is currently writing a novel.
Mélanie WERDER-AVILÉS (playwright, theatremaker, scholar; Spain) is the author of the plays *Buena suerte, chica; Sharenting; Nutella Days; and Tiradísimo de Precio [Dirt-cheap]; among others. Her play La Protagonista won the Lope de Vega award. She has been selected as a resident playwright at the Spanish National Drama Centre and has been a member of the International Summer Workshop at the Sala Beckett. She has been awarded the Carlota Soldevila Fellowship by the Teatre Lliure de Barcelona and is a member of the SGAE Playwriting Laboratory and the ETC of Contemporary Creation at the Sala Cuarta Pared in Madrid, among others. She is currently researching documentary theatre practices as a predoctoral fellow at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Daryl LI 李振宏 (nonfiction and fiction writer; Singapore) is the author of two collections of creative nonfiction—The Inventors (2023) and Tenderly, Tenderly (2024)—as well as a forthcoming short story collection, Minor Illusions. He was a finalist for the Georgia Review Prose Prize, and his work has been longlisted for both the Australian Book Review’s Calibre Essay Prize and the same publication’s Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. In 2013, he received a Golden Point Award for a short story in the English category. He is currently at work on a full-length nonfiction project as well as an essay collection.

Nancy Miller Gomez – Inconsolable Objects – Reading and Workshop
2024-10-16 19:00 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Nancy Miller Gomez grew up in Kansas, but currently lives in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Adroit Journal, Shenandoah, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology and her chapbook, Punishment, was published as part of the Rattle chapbook series. She co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails and the Juvenile Hall.
Presented in partnership with Porchlight Literary Arts Center

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz – The Indian Card
2024-10-16 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
To be Native American is to live in a world of contradictions. At the same time that the number of people in the US who claim Native identity has exploded—increasing 85 percent in just ten years—the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not. While the federal government recognizes Tribal sovereignty, being a member of a Tribe requires navigating blood quantum laws and rolls that the federal government created with the intention of wiping out Native people altogether. Over two million Native people are tribally enrolled, yet there are Native people who will never be. Native people who, for a variety of reasons ranging from displacement to disconnection, cannot be card-carrying members of their Tribe.
In The Indian Card, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity-formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes. With archival research, she pieces together the history of blood quantum and tribal rolls and federal government intrusion on Native identity-making. Reckoning with her own identity—the story of her enrollment and the enrollment of her children—she investigates the cultural, racial, and political dynamics of today’s Tribal identity policing. With this intimate perspective of the ongoing fight for Native sovereignty, The Indian Card sheds light on what it looks like to find a deeper sense of belonging.
For this special Iowa City Book Festival event, Schuettpelz will be joined in conversation by Harry Smith. Smith is a well-known broadcast journalist who had a long career with CBS and NBC News. After retiring earlier this year, Smith returned to teach at his alma mater, Central College in Pella.

Iowa Bibliophiles – Guest Author Megan Rosenbloom
2024-10-16 18:00 | Shambaugh Auditorium, University of Iowa Main Library, 125 W Washington St, Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Iowa Bibliophiles is a group for book lovers and enthusiasts of all kinds hosted by the University of Iowa Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives. All are welcome at this special event.
Hear a talk by special guest Megan Rosenbloom, author of Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin. This award-winning book explores Rosenbloom’s work with anthropodermic books, weaving together stories of doctors, murderers, and the modern-day curators and scientists trying to discover the truth behind these macabre and controversial items.
Rosenbloom is a writer and Collection Strategies Librarian at UCLA in Los Angeles. She served as a medical librarian for many years, where she developed a keen interest in the history of medicine and rare books. This led her to founding the Southern California Society for the History of Medicine and leading a research team called The Anthropodermic Book Project, which aims to find historic and scientific truths behind alleged books bound in human skin.
Learn more about the talk by visiting the Special Collections and Archives website.

Austin Allen Hamblin and John Ira Thomas – Big Guns Stupid Rednecks
2024-10-16 13:00 - 15:00 | Daydreams Comics, 229 E Washington St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Yeehaw! Join us at Daydreams Comics, where Austin Allen Hamblin and John Ira Thomas, 2/3 of the creative team behind indie comics sensation Big Guns Stupid Rednecks, will be on hand! Take a break from fish’n and mud’n and come enjoy some old fashion comic book fun!

Literary Legends: Tracy Kidder in conversation with Stuart Dybek
2024-10-15 19:30 | Iowa Memorial Union, 125 N Madison St, Iowa City, IA, 52245, United States
Sit in on a one-of-a-kind evening with writer and Iowa graduate Tracy Kidder, “a master of the nonfiction narrative” (Baltimore Sun), as he reflects on his lengthy literary career and reads from some of his bestselling work.
Register here: https://foriowa.info/3yN03tD
The event will feature a conversation about the power of long-form investigative writing between Kidder and renowned author Stuart Dybek (73MFA), as well as a Q&A session and book signing.

This event is possible due to support from the Jonathan C. Goldsmith Visiting Author Fund in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Literary Legends is a special collaboration among the University of Iowa Center for Advancement, the UI Lecture Committee, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine, and the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature.

Film Screening: Taxi Driver with Notes from Underground
2024-10-15 18:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
This screening is part of a larger program that celebrates the 160th anniversary of the publication of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground.” Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film is the novel’s most famous US adaptation. University of Iowa Adjunct Assistant Professor Anna Barker will lead a post-screening discussion immediately following, where she will discuss the way the film explores the issues of underage woman trafficking, prostitution, gun violence, war caused PTSD, and urban decay of the U.S. in the 1970s through the prism of Dostoevsky’s tale of moral decline and social alienation.

Bruna Dantas Lobato – Blue Light Hours
2024-10-15 18:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. She was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translation for The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel. Dantas Lobato was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Blue Light Hours is her debut novel.

Anna Barker: From Peter the Great to Napoleon the Lesser: Dostoevsky and the Great Men of History
2024-10-15 16:30 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), his first consequential post-Siberian imprisonment publication, explores the tragicomedy of humanity’s entrapment in the confines soul-sapping modernity and serves as the foundation of the existential and metaphysical concepts he addresses in the Great Five: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent, and Brothers Karamazov.
In commemoration of the 160th anniversary of the novel’s publication, The Iowa City Book Festival presents an evening with two parts:

At 4:30 p.m., University of Iowa Adjunct Assistant Professor Anna Barker will present the talk “From Peter the Great to Napoleon the Lesser: Dostoevsky and the Great Men of History.”
At 6 p.m., Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film that is the novel’s most famous US adaptation, will be screened. Barker will lead a post-screening discussion immediately following, where she will discuss the way the film explores the issues of underage woman trafficking, prostitution, gun violence, war caused PTSD, and urban decay of the U.S. in the 1970s through the prism of Dostoevsky’s tale of moral decline and social alienation.

Resilient Voices: A Multimedia Exhibition Celebrating Youth Empowerment, Global Perspectives, and the Legacy of Anne Frank
2024-10-15 - 2024-10-25 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
A comprehensive initiative composed of several integrated elements that features a Digital Diaries Exhibit that showcases the firsthand experiences of youth across the globe, focusing on themes of war, struggle, and resilience across time.
The digital diaries exhibit, inspired by Anne Frank’s iconic, red-checked diary, showcases narratives from young individuals around the world and across different historical periods. Created by undergraduate students at the University of Iowa and local community members, this exhibit features personal stories from various families, and cultures. The digital diary provides viewers with insights into the history, experiences, and legacies of previously untold stories, and encourages thoughtful reflection with collaborative discussion questions.
A collection of submissions from Iowa City youth spotlights the young voices within our community. Drawing inspiration from Yeva Skalietska’s diary living through the Ukrainian war and themes of resilience, personal struggles, and peace, these submissions convey the inner thoughts and experiences of young people in Iowa right here and now.

Stuart Dybek
2024-10-14 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Stuart Dybek is the author of five books of fiction--Ecstatic Cahoots, Paper Lantern, I Sailed with Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods–as well as two collections of poetry, Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their Own Ink. Dybek is the recipient of many prizes and awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writers’ Award, four O. Henry Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is distinguished writer-in-residence at Northwestern University.
Presented in partnership with the University of Iowa Center for Advancement

It Can’t Happen Here – A Staged Reading
2024-10-14 18:30 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
A cautionary dark satire about the fragility of democracy and how fascism can take hold even in the land of liberty, It Can’t Happen Here follows the ascent of a demagogue who becomes president of the United States by promising to return the country to greatness. Witnessing the new president’s tyranny from the sidelines is a liberal, middle-class newspaper editor from Vermont who trusts the system will fix itself—until he ends up in a prison camp. Sinclair Lewis’ eerily prescient 1935 novel gets a fresh update in this adaptation that examines what brings a citizenry to the point of sacrificing its own freedom and how a courageous few can prevail to overcome the fall.

SlamoVision Slam
2024-09-22 19:00 | PS1 Close House, 538 S Gilbert St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
SlamoVision is a project of the international UNESCO Cities of Literature. Slam poets in some of the 53 Cities of Literature around the world will compete in their home cities. One poet from each participating city will move on to an international competition to be judged by fans from the other cities. At the end of the process, one poet will be named the SlamoVision champion for 2024.
Henry Morray, winner of the 2022 Iowa City event, will emcee the slam.
The Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature and Iowa City Poetry will co-host Iowa City’s slam poetry event at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 22 at Close House, 538 S. Gilbert St. Poets from across Iowa may participate. Sign-up begins at 6:30 p.m., the slam begins at 7 p.m. Each poet has four minutes to perform. At the completion of three rounds, the winning poet will be chosen to represent Iowa City in the international competition.

Spring 2024 Simon & Schuster AuthorFest
2024-04-24 18:00 | 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
