Curator Guided Tour: Paper Engineering in Art, Science, and Education
2025-10-06 16:00 (America/Chicago) | University of Iowa Main Library Gallery, 125 W Washington St, Iowa City, IA, United States
Join co-curators Giselle Simón, Elizabeth Yale, and Damien Ihrig for a special guided tour of the current University of Iowa Libraries Main Library Gallery exhibition, Paper Engineering in Art, Science, and Education. All are welcome to attend this free event, which is being held in partnership with the Iowa City Book Festival.
About the exhibit:
Paper Engineering in Art, Science, and Education showcases the fascinating world of movable books and paper technologies. The exhibition invites visitors to enjoy seeing flap books, pop-ups, tunnel books, volvelles, and books that use paper to make sounds while learning about their historical and contemporary significance.
Paper has long held a crucial role in communicating information to artists, scientists, and students. Medical flap books from the 16th to the 19th centuries provided an affordable way for physicians to gain hands-on knowledge about the body. Children’s books from the 18th century onwards used movable elements to instruct and entertain, acting as precursors to interactive media. Artist’s books from the last century demonstrate how paper technologies can engage viewers in new and exciting ways. Through these and other rare materials from University of Iowa Libraries collections, this exhibition celebrates the creativity, design, and ingenuity of paper engineering.
Learn more: lib.uiowa.edu/gallery.

Steve Kemp: An Exaltation of Parks
2025-10-06 19:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
America’s national parks are facing unprecedented challenges. With visitation pressures mounting and the National Park Service struggling to keep up, author, former park ranger, and Iowa City native Steve Kemp looks toward one exceptionally effective historical example of conservation philanthropy and park building—the collaboration between John D. Rockefeller Jr. and NPS legends Stephen Mather, Horace Albright, and Arno Cammerer.
Kemp’s latest book, An Exaltation of Parks reveals the inspiring story of this collaboration, showing how the partnership transformed some of America’s most cherished national parks, including Acadia, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. It recounts Rockefeller’s lifelong dedication to conservation, digging into his own pockets and toiling as a volunteer to achieve his goals for converting private land into public use. Bringing to life the history and significance of America’s most magnificent landscapes, this volume is both a tribute to past conservation victories and a call to action for the future, emphasizing the need for continued vigilance to preserve these national treasures for generations to come.
This event will be livestreamed and archived at the Iowa City Public Library’s YouTube channel.

Donika Kelly: The Natural Order of Things
2025-10-07 19:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
What does a life look like on the other side of survival, and can the one who survived come to recognize that she did?
Donika Kelly’s poetry is known for its resonant, unflinching confrontations with trauma and inheritance, translated through myth and nature. The Natural Order of Things expands these explorations into a new realm: one defined by joy and connection. It is an ode to companionship with people, animals, and our planet, and reveals the reparative power of intimacy. In poems inventive, playful, and formally nimble, Kelly pays homage to the voices and people she comes from, the songs of her lineage. Other poems follow the early stirrings of love to erotic transcendence with the lover and the self. Throughout, Kelly finds mirror and marvel in nature, art, and precious friendships. Though it once seemed impossible, she realizes a surprising place for herself, a rightness in the larger world.
Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield Wolf Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
This event will be livestreamed at the Iowa City Public Library’s YouTube channel.

The Making of a Book: A Conversation with Johanna Drucker
2025-10-08 13:00 | University of Iowa Main Library room 2032 (second floor), 125 W Washington St., Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Join the University of Iowa Libraries for an intimate conversation with author, artist, and scholar Johanna Drucker about her new book, Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture. In this talk, Drucker will discuss her book, along with its development , and publication. It’s your chance to learn the ins and outs of writing and publishing your book.

Iowa Bibliophiles Presents: Artists’ Books: Critical Writing in the Field with Johanna Drucker
2025-10-08 18:00 | Shambaugh Auditorium, University of Iowa Main Library, 125 W Washington St, Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Artists’ books continue to be a hard-to-define and multifaceted field of works made at the intersections of conceptual art, the craft of the book, independent publishing, alternative culture and other aesthetic motivations. No simple single lineage is shared by these works, and even tracking them to an origin point (Illuminated manuscripts? The books of William Blake? The 20th century avant-garde?) can be problematic. Artists’ books have remained more marginalized in the mainstream art world than other forms like video or performance art, in part because they are also difficult to exhibit in a way that lets them be read and experienced. The challenges for critical writing in the field are thus logistical as well as aesthetic. For a quarter of a century, JAB: The Journal of Artists’ Books created a vital forum for critical writing. Literally hundreds of writers from dozens of countries contributed under the editorial vision of Brad Freeman. The University of Iowa Press recently issued The JAB Anthology, a selection of works published from the journal.
This talk looks at the contributions of JAB, relates these to other work in the field including my The Century of Artists’ Books (1994, Granary Books), and includes a personal note on the dilemmas of producing one’s own artists’ books for decades. Brief interview clips with Brad Freeman will also be part of the talk.
Johanna Drucker is an artist, writer, and scholar, Emerita Breslauer and Distinguished Professor, UCLA, who has written and published widely on topics related to visual forms of knowledge production, the historiography of the alphabet, experimental visual poetry, art history, and other topics. Her recent titles include Affluvia: The Toxic Off-Gassing of Affluent Culture (Bridge Books, 2025), Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Hopkins University Press (2020).

John Warner – Only Humans Write: Why You Shouldn’t Outsource Your Humanity to ChatGPT
2025-10-08 19:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
John Warner, author of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI believes there are important distinctions to be made between the writing of humans and the syntax generation of large language models like ChatGPT. These distinctions are at the root of what he believes we should value, the fact that human communication comes from our “unique intelligences” and that humans are not reducible to patterns and predictions. In this presentation he will talk about how to navigate the tensions that generative AI has introduced into our schools, workplaces, and lives in order to preserve essential and meaningful experiences related to our deepest human selves.
In the book, Warner argues that generative AI programs like ChatGPT not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don’t challenge students to do the real work of writing. To Warner, writing is thinking—discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page—and feeling—grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human. The fact that we ask students to complete so many assignments that a machine could do is a sign that something has gone very wrong with writing instruction. More Than Words calls for us to use AI as an opportunity to reckon with how we work with words—and how all of us should rethink our relationship with writing.
This event will be livestreamed and archived at the Iowa City Public Library’s YouTube channel.

Co-Presented by the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Guild of Book Workers Showcase & Market
2025-10-09 - 2025-10-11 | Graduate by Hilton Iowa City, 210 South Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Step into the world of book arts! The Guild of Book Workers is in Iowa City this week for their annual conference, and their Showcase & Market is open to everyone.

October 9, noon – 5 p.m.
October 10, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.
October 11, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Browse bookbinding tools, unique and decorative papers, artisanal leather and parchment, artist books, and more.
Vendor List

Abra Mueller Marbled Paper
American Academy of Bookbinding
Campbell-Logan Bindery
Colophon Book Arts Supply
Crowing Hens Bindery
Daniel Mellis
Gabrielle Fox
Hiromi Paper
Harmatan Leather
Herramientas Grosso
Islam Aly
Jim Croft
Jim Freely
J Hewit & Sons
Kerner Marbled
Midwest Marbling
Wake Robin Paper & Books
Washi Arts

Teresa Dzieglewicz: Something Small of How to See a River
2025-10-09 19:00 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Something Small of How to See a River interrogates the idea of narrative. Who gets to tell a story and what does it mean when the official story, the story told by the governor, the police, or the local media, is a fundamentally dishonest one? The poems collected here meditate on failure: how systems fail us and our environment, how whiteness fails to hold itself accountable, how future generations and the land are being failed—and how, in the face of all this, the Standing Rock movement was not a failure. At the heart of this collection is the strength, care, and radical joy of the movement, which shines through and against the violence.
Teresa Dzieglewicz is a poet, educator, and lover of rivers and prairies. She is a fellow with Black Earth Institute, a Poet-in-Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, and part of the founding team of Mni Wichoni Nakicizin Wounspe (Defenders of the Water School). She organizes “Watershed: Ways of Knowing the Chicago River” with poet/visual artist, Natasha Mijares. Her first book of poetry, Something Small of How to See a River was selected by Tyehimba Jess for the Dorset Prize. Her first children’s book, co-written with Kimimila Locke, is forthcoming from Chronicle Books. She has won a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, the Gingko Prize, the Auburn Witness Prize, and the Palette Poetry Prize and has received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Community of Writers at Tahoe, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Brooklyn Poets. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Teresa lives with her family in Chicago, on Potawatomi land.

Waters of the United States: A Conversation with Royal C. Gardner and Silvia Secchi
2025-10-09 19:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Join author Royal C. Gardner, Professor of Law, Hugh F. Culverhouse Chair, and Director of the Stetson Institute for Biodiversity Law and Policy at Stetson Law, at Prairie Lights for a reading from Waters of the United States, his groundbreaking exploration of the legal and political battles that have shaped water protection in America. In conversation with University of Iowa Professor and Mississippi River Basin water research expert Silvia Secchi, Royal will discuss the history and high-stakes future of the Clean Water Act, the Supreme Court’s narrowing of WOTUS, and what these decisions mean for our communities and environment.
Presented in partnership with the Hubbell Environmental Law Initiative

International Writing Program Panel: Trials and Tribulations of Literary Translation
2025-10-10 12:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
A panel featuring International Writing Program participants Tomás Downey (Argentina) and Florencia del Campo (Spain), with guest author Kazim Ali.
The International Writing Program (IWP) is a unique conduit for the world’s literatures, connecting well-established writers from around the globe, bringing international literature into classrooms, introducing American writers to other cultures through reading tours, and serving as a clearinghouse for literary news and a wealth of archival and pedagogical materials. Since 1967, over 1,600 writers from more than 160 countries have been in residence at the University of Iowa.

SlamoVision Watch & Judge Party
2025-10-10 17:30 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Join us for a special SlamoVision judging night! Attendees will watch performances from slam poets representing 17 UNESCO Cities of Literature around the world and help decide the outcome by scoring each one. Enjoy free pizza while you cast your votes—the scores from Iowa City will be combined with those from other cities to help crown the next international SlamoVision champion.

Laura Julier – Off Izaak Walton Road: The Grace That Comes Through Loss
2025-10-11 10:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Loss and sorrow can overwhelm even the strongest person, forcing them to reckon with their emotions whether they want to or not. In this extraordinary debut, Laura Julier recounts her reckoning, which took place in an old cabin tucked away on a hidden and forgotten gravel road along the Iowa River. In company with silence and snow, with eagles, owls, and a host of other birds, Julier finds solace and begins to emerge from the dark corners of grief. Over time, she comes to understand she cannot bury grief or turn aside from loss but must walk in its presence, awake and humble, until, at last, she finds her own wholeness within it.

Friends Foundation Pop-up Used Book Sale
2025-10-11 10:00 - 15:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Stop by the lobby of the Iowa City Public Library between festival events to browse for a new (to you) book.

ICON Vendor Hall
2025-10-11 11:00 - 17:00 | Iowa City Masonic Building, 312 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
The ICON Science fiction convention returns to downtown Iowa City during the Iowa City Book Festival!
Browse booksellers, authors, and others at the ICON Vendor Hall, Iowa City Masonic Lodge Social Hall, 312 E College St.
Free admission and open to the public.

Ted Geltner: Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures
2025-10-11 11:30 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
The year was 1988, and Denis Johnson was at a low point. He caught malaria on a reporting trip into the jungles of the Philippines and was nearly pronounced dead. The disease left him unable to write. His second wife left him. He didn’t have enough money to pay his taxes. His publisher was waiting for a book that he hadn’t started. But in the life of Denis Johnson, when things were at their bleakest, something good was usually waiting around the next corner. This time, what emerged from the chaos was his masterpiece Jesus’ Son, a book that would tap into the zeitgeist of the 1990s and become a bible for Generation X and an American classic.
Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures tells the complete story of Johnson’s fascinating life, his thrill-seeking trips into war zones as a magazine correspondent, his battles with addiction, his live-it-before-you-write-it style of fiction. It follows the arc of his tremendous body of work as a novelist, journalist, poet, and playwright, and in the process recovers the true stories from the hazy myths that one of our most beloved, yet enigmatic, writers left behind.

Gregory Galloway: All We Trust and Scott Phillips: The Devil Raises His Own
2025-10-11 11:30 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
In All We Trust, what starts out as a family squabble turns into an international battle between competing crime organizations, moving from small town New England to San Francisco to Mexico. Along the way the brothers encounter betrayal, double-dealing, kidnapping, and ultimately, revenge.
The Devil Raises His Own, meanwhile, picks up the story of Bill Ogden, protagonist in Phillips’s earlier novels Cottonwood and Hop Alley, as he navigates the early days of the film industry in this bawdy tale.
Both authors are steeped in the history of noir fiction, and will discuss their own work against that backdrop.

John Scalzi: The Shattering Peace
2025-10-11 11:30 | Iowa City Masonic Building, 312 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
For a decade, peace has reigned in interstellar space. A tripartite agreement between the Colonial Union, the Earth, and the alien Conclave has kept the forces of war at bay, even when some would have preferred to return to the fighting and struggle of former times. For now, more sensible heads have prevailed – and have even championed unity.
But now, there is a new force that threatens the hard-maintained peace: The Consu, the most advanced intelligent species humans have ever met, are on the cusp of a species-defining civil war. This war is between Consu factions… but nothing the Consu ever do is just about them. The Colonial Union, the Earth and the Conclave have been unwillingly dragged into the conflict, in the most surprising of ways.
Gretchen Trujillo is a mid-level diplomat, working in an unimportant part of the Colonial Union bureaucracy. But when she is called to take part in a secret mission involving representatives from every powerful faction in space, what she finds there has the chance to redefine the destinies of humans and aliens alike… or destroy them forever.

Jennifer Fawcett: Keep This For Me
2025-10-11 13:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
One hot August night in 1993, a young couple go to a party. When their car breaks down, they are picked up by a truck driver who attacks the man and abducts the woman. She is never seen again.
That woman was Fiona Green’s mother.
When the trucker, Eddie Ward, is caught, a mass grave of bodies is discovered in his backyard but Fiona’s mother isn’t there. Thirty years later, on his prison deathbed, Ward insists that he didn’t kill her, so Fiona finds herself back in the small town where her mother disappeared. Fighting demons of her own, she’s shocked when history repeats itself: another woman, another roadside breakdown, and another disappearance. Only this time the primary suspect is Jason Ward, Eddie’s son. Desperate, Fiona hunts down answers, unaware that she is being drawn into a dangerous trap.
Fawcett will be joined in conversation by Tim Budd.

Art Cullen: We Crapped In Our Nest
2025-10-11 13:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
We have fouled our nest over the past half century in a way that was almost unavoidable, given our history of seeking domination — first over the Indigenous people of the Western World, then over their land. Native people for millennia lived with the land in a vital relationship. Europeans set out to transform that relationship brutally, and this destruction has reached a head. We simply cannot go on like this, washing our soil down the river while the planet bakes, ignoring our own immigration story.
As Art writes, “Fifty years around a small town amid the teeming waves of golden corn, a lot has changed, but corn remains king, just like when we were in school. But the place we knew is gone, that world of family farms and the Saturday livestock auction. We are the poorer for it. This is how it went down, or at least how I put it down, in notes compiled over this strange time from Irving Street just up from the lake in the small town we called home.”

Joe Haldeman and The Forever War
2025-10-11 13:00 | Iowa City Masonic Building, 312 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel and the first sci-fi work shaped by the Vietnam War, continues to resonate decades later. Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran and Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum, crafted a story that John Scalzi calls “timeless, because what’s in the book touches on something that never goes away.” Join Haldeman, his wife Gay, Scalzi, and Haldeman’s former student Mike Miller as they discuss this landmark novel and ICON, Iowa’s beloved science fiction and fantasy convention, which marks its 50th anniversary this year.
Moderated by Pete Balestrieri

Incognito Lounge: Celebrating the work of Denis Johnson
2025-10-11 14:00 | Riverside Theatre, 119 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Denis and Cindy Johnson
Friends and admirers of the late Denis Johnson read from and discuss his work at this special event co-presented with FilmScene’s Refocus Film Festival and the University of Iowa Office for Writing and Communication. Participants include Chris Offutt, Cindy Lee Johnson, Will Patton, Rachel Yoder, Red Danielson, and James Galvin.

Candle Light Press 30th Anniversary signing
2025-10-11 14:00 - 16:00 | Daydreams Comics, 229 E Washington St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Come celebrate the 30th anniversary of Iowa City’s own Candle Light Press! Carter Allen, Austin Allen Hamblin, and John Ira Thomas will be signing books at Daydreams on Saturday, October 11th at 200p-400p. It’s been a big year for the press, so there’s lots of new books–Zoo Force: Blue Route and Stops Along the Way, Ectyron V. Rojo Gallo, the Twells/Hamblin Collection, Savage Dirt Axes, and Zoo Force: The Works!
Presented in partnership with Daydreams Comics.

Panel Discussion: Sense of Place
2025-10-11 14:30 | Iowa City Masonic Building, 312 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
In this panel, writers will discuss place and setting as key in many kinds of writing. They will explore the following questions: How do you convey a sense of place or paint a unique landscape? In what ways does location contribute to your writing? Can a literary work truly be ‘universal,’ or will place always determine how a piece is understood?
Featuring: Agnes Chew, Siddharth Dasgupta, Jennifer Fawcett, Vlora Konushevci, and Ndongolera C. Mwangupili. Moderated by Derek Nnuro.

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne: The Mean Ones
2025-10-11 14:30 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
So what if Sadie hears talking dead animals and a strange, comforting male voice in her head? The therapist insists these are just symptoms of PTSD. It makes sense considering that she hid under the bed and watched as her best friends were slaughtered.
But the murders were seventeen years ago, back when her name was Sabrina. Now, she’s Sadie: a perfectly normal 29-year-old. She works as a physical therapist assistant and lifts weights with her boyfriend, Lucas, who’s the sweetest, most considerate man—as long as he’s not angry. But when Lucas spontaneously agrees to join a couples trip to a cabin in the woods, the visions get worse, a strange figure stalks her during the night, and that male voice in Sadie’s head keeps calling, asking her to do things she’s never fathomed.
Sadie’s not sure if it’s her paranoia or something else entirely . . . But she is sure of one thing—this time, she’s not going to sit idly by as everything starts to unravel.
Tatiana will be joined in conversation with Carey Dunne.

Christina Ward: Holy Food
2025-10-11 14:30 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Does God have a recipe? Christina Ward’s Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat – An American History investigates the explosion of religious movements since the Great Awakenings that birthed a cottage industry of food fads and cookbooks. Ward uncovers the interconnectivity between obscure sects and communities of the 20th Century who dabbled in vague spirituality and used food to both entice and control followers. Holy Food draws on a range of sources, including academic studies, interviews, cookbooks, and religious texts, to offer sharp insights into American history in this highly readable journey through the American kitchen.
“Looks yummy!”
— John Waters
“Holy Food is a titanic feat of research and a fascinating exploration of American faith and culinary rites. Christina Ward is the perfect guide – generous, wise, and ecumenical.” — Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams

Anna Barker: 13 Notes from Napoleon, Iowa: Musings on the Edge of the French Empire
2025-10-11 16:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Born on August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, Napoleon was the ruler of Iowa between 1800 and 1803 when he served as the First Consul of the French Republic. Iowa City, Iowa, evolved out of the 1838 settlement named after him — Napoleon, Iowa — the location marked today by Napoleon Park, off Napoleon Lane, just south of Iowa City. The book illuminates aspects of Iowa’s French past, such as cities named after the Napoleonic battles of Marengo and Waterloo, and explains the mystery of Iowa’s distinctly French-looking flag. Along the way, the author muses on other Napoleon-related matters, such as Empire waist gowns, Goethe’s and Byron’s Bonapartism, the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, the Congress of Vienna, and to what extent Europe’s current internal contradictions have been impacted by its Napoleonic past.

Patricia Lockwood: Will There Ever Be Another You
2025-10-11 16:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together – of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease. She’s afraid of her own floorboards, and “WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON’T HURT ME” plays over and over in her ears. She hates her friends, or more accurately, she doesn’t know who they are.
Has the illness stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Does it mean she’ll get to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people? The very weave of herself seems to have loosened: time and memories pass straight through her body. “I’m sorry not to respond to your email,” she writes, “but I live completely in the present
now.”
Will There Ever Be Another You is the brain-shredding, phosphorescent story of one woman’s dissolution and her attempt to create a new way of thinking, as well as a profound investigation into what keeps us alive in times of unprecedented disorientation and loss, from one of our most original writers.

Panel Discussion: Importance of Genre
2025-10-11 16:00 | Iowa City Masonic Building, 312 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
A lively conversation with writers exploring how genre shapes stories, readers, and the writing process.
Featuring:
Anna Bruno, Gregory Galloway, Scott Phillips, and Tatiana Schlote-Bonne. Moderated by Nina Lohman.

John Ira Thomas: Tire Magazine
2025-10-11 16:30 - 17:30 | Daydreams Comics, 229 E Washington St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Join John Ira Thomas for a journey through the mystical and the mundane through the metafictional series of Tire magazine! John will read from Tire June 2000, Tire Annual 2021, Tire May 2038, and work in progress from The Best of Tire Classifieds. Alternate timeline John’s life may have been ruined by a New Age boomlet fixated on something he drew when he was nine, but the John of this universe is happy to share and laugh along.

Sidekick Coffee and Books Presents: It’s Getting Plot in Here A Romance Book Festival
2025-10-11 18:00 - 21:00 | Sidekick Coffee & Books, 1310 1/2 Melrose Avenue, Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Join Sidekick Coffee and Books for the Romance Book Festival, a night of romance, creativity, and community.
$35 — available now! bit.ly/Sidekick_Romance_Book_Festival
Author Meet & Greet Line-Up:

Chloe Angyal – Pointe of Pride, Pas de Don’t, Barre Fight
Kelly Farmer – Fanning the Flames, Secret Spark, It’s a Fabulous Life
Gin Griffith – Holy Smoke, Cat Fight
Megan Murphy – Fake It Like You Mean It, Heart Racer
Esha Patel – Offtrack, Overdrive
Elise Wayland – Rivals to Lovers
Denise Williams – Just Our Luck, Do You Take This Man

What’s included with your ticket:
Meet & Greets with incredible romance authors
Blind Date with a Book (free book included!)
Champagne shooters
Book embellishment station – bedazzle your book and get creative!
Flirty photo ops & cozy fall vibes
