Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature

Typedancing
2024-10-18 14:00 (America/Chicago) | 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

Marathon Public Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
2024-04-23 13:00 - 16:00 | Pedmall Weatherdance Fountain Stage, College St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
April is Shakespeare’s birthday month (not to mention National Poetry Month), and Riverside Theatre and the City of Literature will celebrate by highlighting literary masterpieces rarely explored on stage: the Bard’s 154-poem sonnet cycle. This public reading will take place on the Ped Mall’s Weatherdance Fountain Stage on Tuesday, April 23 from 1:00-4:00pm. We welcome ALL members of our community to sign up for a reading slot using this form. Volunteers will be notified at least a week before the event with their assigned time and sonnets.

Jr. High Writing Jam! Featuring the IYWP and author Jen Ferguson
2024-02-24 13:00 - 15:00 | The Tuesday Agency, 404 E College St, Unit 408, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
All 6th, 7th, and 8th graders who like to write are invited. Come together with other writers to compare ideas and be inspired to write something new. Instructors from the Iowa Youth Writing Project will moderate this awesome event. Open mic, and amazing door prizes. FREE!
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Credit Jen Ferguson
Métis with ancestral ties to the Red River (on her father’s side) and Canadian settler (on her mother’s side), an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD in English and Creative Writing. Jen believes writing, teaching and beading are political acts. She is represented by Patricia Nelson at Marsal Lyon Literary Agency.
Her debut young adult novel, THE SUMMER OF BITTER AND SWEET, won a 2022 Govenor General’s Literary Award and is a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book, among other accolades. Her newest book THOSE PINK MOUNTAIN NIGHTS is a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection and has four starred reviews. Her novella “Missing” won the Malahat Review’s 2022 Novella Prize and her essay “Off Balance” was selected for the Best Canadian Essays 2020.
Jen lives on the traditional and unceded territories of the Meskwaki, the Báxoje and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ nations, and teaches fiction writing at Coe College.

The Tuesday Agency is located in The Chauncey, just upstairs from the festival, on the 4th floor, Unit 408.

Author Talk with Jen Ferguson
2024-02-24 11:30 - 12:00 | FilmScene at The Chauncey, 404 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Métis with ancestral ties to the Red River (on her father’s side) and Canadian settler (on her mother’s side), an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD in English and Creative Writing. Jen believes writing, teaching and beading are political acts. She is represented by Patricia Nelson at Marsal Lyon Literary Agency.
Her debut young adult novel, THE SUMMER OF BITTER AND SWEET, won a 2022 Govenor General’s Literary Award and is a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book, among other accolades. Her newest book THOSE PINK MOUNTAIN NIGHTS is a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection and has four starred reviews. Her novella “Missing” won the Malahat Review’s 2022 Novella Prize and her essay “Off Balance” was selected for the Best Canadian Essays 2020.
Jen lives on the traditional and unceded territories of the Meskwaki, the Báxoje and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ nations, and teaches fiction writing at Coe College.

I Quit! with Jean Herring – Cancelled
2024-02-24 11:00 - 11:30 | FilmScene at The Chauncey, 404 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Unfortunately this event is cancelled due to illness. Please check out I Quit! at you local library or bookstore.
Have you ever quit something?
Parents, educators, and coaches often emphasize the importance of motivation, perseverance and determination, but rarely acknowledge the importance of quitting, and how it goes hand in hand with life satisfaction and trying new things. Because sometimes quitting is the best thing – sometimes quitting leads to BETTER things.
In this story, Sophie wants to find an activity she loves. She tries new things and quits along the way as she searches for the perfect fit. Join Sophie and her dog, Dilly, on all their adventures!

The Little Old Lady and the Riceballs with Monica Leo
2024-02-24 10:15 - 11:00 | FilmScene at The Chauncey, 404 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
The Little Old Lady and the Riceballs, a Japanese tale told with puppets, followed by a short discussion of the history of Eulenspiegel as told in Monica Leo’s new book, Hand, Shadow, Rod. from Ice Cube Press.
Since 1974, Eulenspiegel has toured in thirty-one states and four countries around the world. All along establishing and maintaining an internationally known puppetry center in West Liberty, Iowa. Hand. Shadow, Rod traces the theatre’s history and explores the relationship between work and play, between loss and recovery, and between puppets and puppeteers. It also reflects, first hand, on life and culture between the late 1970s and the present day.

Free Flicks: Rabbitson Crusoe and Rabbit of Seville
2024-02-24 10:00 - 12:00 | FilmScene at The Chauncey, 404 E College St, Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
FilmsScene presents free screenings of classic Looney Tunes shorts, Rabbitson Crusoe and Rabbit of Seville. The films run on a loop all morning.

Werner Herzog
2023-10-15 19:30 | Englert Theatre, 221 E. Washington St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Legendary film director Werner Herzog will receive FilmScene’s Cinema Savant award and appear in conversation to discuss his life in film and read from his soon-to-be-released autobiography, Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir.

Presented in collaboration with Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City Book Festival, Infinite Dream Festival, and The Englert Theatre.

Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Crime Novel
2023-10-15 14:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
“The levels of mystery here astound. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts and then the parts decide to act alone and challenge the whole. Lethem is not only interrogating the form of the crime novel, but the venture of storytelling itself. All of this while remaining a joy to read. Full of strange characters and expertly rendered place. This brilliant, genre-defying work will certainly leave a mark.”
—PERCIVAL EVERETT
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighborhood its name.
The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory’s prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget.
Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan Lethem, “one of America’s greatest storytellers” (Washington Post), has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we’ve made.

Open House Party at PorchLight Literary Arts Center
2023-10-14 18:00 - 20:00 | PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, 52240, United States
Join us for drinks and appetizers at PorchLight Literary Arts Center. Walk through our space and find out about all we do: residencies, our new co-op model, Misfit Master Classes, the PromptPress Reading Room, and our free programming.

Ayana Mathis: The Unsettled
2023-10-14 16:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Ayana Mathis with special guest moderator Lan Samantha Chang.
From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter’s squalid conditions: the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can’t forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living.
Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents—families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations—and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte’s venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava’s inheritance.
As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him—his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there.

Patchwork: A Reading of Literary Translation
2023-10-14 16:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
In every corner of this universe, there is a story waiting to be heard. Join the students of the Literary Translation MFA as they gather and read excerpts from their translations of world literature. In collaboration with Exchanges Literary Journal, the inaugural session of this reading series celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Iowa Translation Workshop.

Nathan Hill: Wellness
2023-10-14 14:30 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Nathan Hill’s best-selling debut novel, The Nix, was named the number one book of 2016 by Entertainment Weekly and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate, and many others. The native Iowan returns with Wellness. Moving from the gritty ’90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home-renovation hysteria, this new novel mines the absurdities of modern technology and modern love to reveal profound, startling truths about intimacy and connection.

Mindy Mejia: To Catch a Storm
2023-10-14 14:30 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Mindy Mejia is a CPA and a graduate of the Hamline University MFA program. Her debut novel, The Dragon Keeper, was published by Ashland Creek Press in 2012. She lives in the Twin Cities with her family, and is the author of Strike Me Down, Everything You Want Me to Be, and Leave No Trace. Her latest mystery novel is To Catch a Storm.

Eskor David Johnson: Pay As You Go
2023-10-14 13:00 | Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Eskor David Johnson is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago and the United States. His writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently lives in New York City. Pay As You Go is his debut novel.

Kristen Roupenian: Cat Person
2023-10-14 13:00 | Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn St., Iowa City, IA, 52240, United States
Kristen Roupenian holds a PhD in English from Harvard, an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and a BA from Barnard College. She is the author of the short story, “Cat Person,” which was published in The New Yorker. She will read from her short story collection, Cat Person. Presented in partnership with the ReFocus Film Festival.
