Ezra Claytan Daniels – Upgrade Soul and “We Are Not Alone”
2024-10-18 16:30 (America/Chicago) | 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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

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 | 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

Chris Offutt – Code of the Hills
2024-10-19 14:30 | Iowa City Masonic Building, 312 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
With his signature crackling prose, literary master Chris Offutt has staked out his own territory in crime fiction, a place of familial allegiances, old wounds, and revenge—the code of the hills. His new book, a sharp, twisty southern noir with echoes of James Sallis and Daniel Woodrell, will force Mick to face up to the way of life he thought he’d escaped.
Chris Offutt is the author of two collections of short stories, three memoirs, and six novels. His books have been translated into twelve languages and won four international awards. His most recent work is the acclaimed Mick Hardin series from Grove-Atlantic. He also wrote screenplays for True Blood, Weeds, and Treme. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, and a Lannan Fellowship. He received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “prose that takes risks.” His work is included in many anthologies including Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Food Writing, and Modern American Memoirs. He has taught in a number of MFA programs including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is professor emeritus at the University of Mississippi. He grew up in the hills of eastern Kentucky and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Poetry Reading: Perry Janes, Anna Morrison and Hannah Bonner
2024-10-19 14:30 | FilmScene at The Chauncey, 404 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Poets Perry Janes, Anna Morrison and Hannah Bonner will read from and discuss their work, in partnership with Refocus Film Festival.

Panel Discussion: Who Do You Read?
2024-10-19 14:30 | Iowa City Senior Center, 28 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
In this panel, writers will discuss some of their favorite writing by others, sharing the things they like to read and important books they would like to recommend.
Featuring: Nicolás Medina Mora, Chris Tse (International Writing Program), Sharon Wahl, Nicolas Wong (International Writing Program), Peter Závada (International Writing Program)

Natalie Goldberg – Writing on Empty
2024-10-19 15:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Natalie Goldberg has influenced generations of aspiring creative writers with books like Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind. Her books offer down-to-earth guidance for developing a meaningful writing practice in the real world, however different that is for each of us. In her new book, Writing on Empty, she opens up about a new experience; that of losing her will to write, and finding her way back to it.

Marc Ribot – Unstrung: Rants & Stories of a Noise Guitarist
2024-10-19 16:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
After performing his score for Yakov Protazanov’s pioneering sci-fi film Aelita: Queen of Mars as part of FilmScene’s Refocus Film Festival, Ribot joins the Iowa City Book Festival where he will read from his book Unstrung: Rants & Stories of a Noise Guitarist. “Guitarist Marc Ribot helped Tom Waits refine a new, weird Americana on 1985’s Rain Dogs, and since then he’s become the go-to guitar guy for all kinds of roots-music adventurers: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp.” —Rolling Stone
This event is presented in partnership with the Refocus Film Festival and Hancher Auditorium

Nina Lohman – The Body Alone
2024-10-19 16:00 | Iowa City Masonic Building, 312 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
The Body Alone is an inquiry into the experience, meaning, and articulation of pain. It is a personal hybrid account incorporating research, scholarship, and memoir to examine chronic pain through the multi-lens of medicine, theology, and philosophy. Broken bodies tell broken stories. Nina Lohman’s pain experience is portrayed through a cyclical narrative of primers, vocabulary lessons, prescription records, and hypothesized internal monologues—fractured not for the sake of experimentation but because the story itself demands it. In both form and content, The Body Alone represents boundary-pressing work that subverts the traditional narrative by putting pressure on the medical, cultural, and political systems that impact women’s access to fair and equal healthcare. This is more than an illness narrative, it is a battle cry demanding change.

Panel Discussion: A Sense of Place II
2024-10-19 16:00 | Iowa City Senior Center, 28 S. Linn 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: Yassin Adnan (International Writing Program), Jarod K. Anderson, Priya N Hein (International Writing Program), Felipe Franco Munhoz (International Writing Program), and Marguerite Sheffer

Nicolás Medina Mora – América del Norte
2024-10-19 16:30 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Moving between New York City, Mexico City, and Iowa City, a young member of the Mexican elite sees his life splinter in a centuries-spanning debut that blends the Latin American traditions of Roberto Bolaño and Fernanda Melchor with the autofiction of US writers like Ben Lerner and Teju Cole.
Split between the US and Mexico, this stunning debut explores whiteness, power, immigration, and the history of Mexican literature, to wrestle with the contradictory relationship between two countries bound by geography and torn apart by politics.
Nicolás Medina Mora was born and raised in Mexico City. He has degrees from Yale University and the writing program of the University of Iowa, and has worked in New York City as a journalist at Reuters and BuzzFeed. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, and n+1, where he won the 2023 n+1 Writers’ Fellowship for outstanding contributions. He currently lives in Mexico City, where he is a writer and editor for Revista Nexos.

Panel Discussion: Publishing for Beginners
2024-10-20 13:00 | MERGE, 136 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Join us for an insightful panel discussion on ‘Publishing for Beginners,’ where seasoned professionals share essential tips and strategies for navigating the publishing world. Whether you’re aspiring to publish your first book or curious about the process, this session will provide you with practical advice and valuable insider knowledge.
Panelists: Sarah Elgatian, Midwest Writing Center; Mackie Garrett, 508 Press; Jennifer MacBain-Stephens, author; and Steve Semken, Ice Cube Press.
Moderated by Chuy Renteria, artist, dancer, teacher, and storyteller.

A Lunch and Conversation with Natalie Goldberg
2024-10-20 13:00 - 15:00 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
NOTE: This event is sold out.
Natalie Goldberg has influenced generations of aspiring creative writers with books like Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind. Her books offer down-to-earth guidance for developing a meaningful writing practice in the real world, however different that is for each of us. In her new book, Writing on Empty, she opens up about a new experience; that of losing her will to write, and finding her way back to it. Join Natalie at this limited seating, intimate event. PorchLight director Jennifer Colville will talk with Natalie about how to use her new book. There will be a group conversation and a light lunch. The price of the event includes a copy of “Writing on Empty.”
Natalie Goldberg is the author of fifteen books, including Writing Down the Bones (Shambhala, 1986), which has sold over one million copies, has been translated into fourteen languages, and started a revolution in the way we practice writing in this country.
She recently co-edited a collection of talks by revered zen teacher Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life (Shambhala, 2018). In her latest memoir Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home(Shambhala, 2018), she shares her experience with cancer grounded in her practice of zen and writing. Her other books include The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life (Shambhala, 2016), the novel Banana Rose (Bantam, 1995), and the beloved Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, a memoir about her zen teacher Katagiri Roshi.
Natalie is also a prolific painter. Her book Living Color: Painting, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing (Abrams, 2014), describes painting as her second art form. Top of My Lungs (Overlook Press, 2004) contains forty poems, twenty of her paintings in color, and an essay, “How Poetry Saved My Life.” Natalie’s paintings are available to view on this website.
For more than forty years Natalie has practiced zen and taught seminars in writing as a practice. People from around the world attend her life-changing workshops, and she has earned a reputation as a great teacher. The Oprah Winfrey Show sent a film crew to spend the day with Natalie for a segment on Spirituality that covered her writing, teaching, painting, and walking meditation. She lives in Northern New Mexico.
Ticket link: https://www.porchlightliterary.org/event-details/a-lunch-and-conversation-with-natalie-goldberg

Anne Frank’s Diary – A Multilingual Multimedia Reading
2024-10-20 14:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Students from Iowa City, fluent in 15 different languages, will present passages from Anne Frank’s diary. This event provides an opportunity for attendees to engage in meaningful dialogue, reflect on the Holocaust and other tragic global events, and foster a sense of community as the 95th anniversary of Frank’s diary is commemorated.
The event will include remarks by National Book Award winner Theodore Rosengarten, a writer, teacher, and a social activist from McClellanville, South Carolina. Rosengarten taught the history of the Holocaust for decades in the Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charleston and in the Honors College at the University of South Carolina.
The first Anne Frank Initiative Little Library, created in partnership with Clear Creek Amana Middle School, will be unveiled at the event. Co-presented by the Anne Frank Initiative in International Programs at the University of Iowa.

Corban Addison – Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial
2024-10-20 15:00 - 16:30 | Old Brick, 26 E. Market St., Iowa City, IA, 52245, United States
The Fall 2024 One Community, One Book selection is Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial by Corban Addison. This event will be hosted in person at Old Brick, 26 E. Market Street Iowa City. This event is free and open to the public and sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, Hubbell Environmental Law Initiative, and the Iowa City Book Festival. Doors will open at 2:30 p.m. Author Keynote will begin at 3:00 p.m. and will last approximately 75 minutes. Author book signing will occur immediately following the lecture.

Tisa Bryant – Unexplained Presence
2024-10-20 16:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
A multidisciplinary performance melding film with live readings inspired by Bryant’s book of hybrid essays.
This event is co-presented by Refocus Film Festival.

Let’s Move The Needle: Art and Activism in Community
2024-12-01 14:00 - 16:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Join author, artist and craftivist Shannon Downey for a community stitching event and book launch. Filled with reflection, activities, exercises, prompts, and stories, her new book, Let’s Move the Needle, is both a how-to guide and a testament to the power of art and handwork to build community and make change. Everyone can be a changemaker, and change-making can be enjoyable, and a bit sassy!
Shannon Downey is the founder of Badass Cross Stitch and Seriously Badass Women, and is an artist, activist, craftivist, community builder, and general instigator. She is on the faculty at Columbia College Chicago and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.
2-3:00 PM Reading, Q&A and book-signing – Prairie Lights Books will be here with copies of Shannon Downey’s Let’s Move the Needle for sale.
3-4:00 PM Community Stitch-Fest – Get inspired and have some fun! Bring a project or we’ll have instructions and a pattern for learning.
Cosponsored by Prairie Lights Books and Home Ec Workshop.

Free Flicks: I LOVE TO SINGA and DUCK DODGERS IN THE 241⁄2TH CENTURY
2025-02-22 10:00 - 12:00 | FilmScene at The Chauncey, 404 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
FilmScene presents free screenings of classic Looney Tunes films, I Love to Singa and Duck Dodgers in the 241⁄2TH Century. The films run on a loop all morning.
