The 2023 One Community, One Book is The Farm by Joanne Ramos. Told from the perspective of four women, The Farm explores gender, race, and class, and of who has access to power, freedom, and choice. This event is free and open to the public. This event will have ASL interpretation. Doors open at 1 p.m. Author Keynote begins at

  Year after year, some of the area’s most treasured comics and writers gather together to relentlessly burn and mock everything sacred and dear about our town. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.

This 19th-century period piece is an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's classic novel. On a trip to St. Petersburg, Anna Karenina (Greta Garbo), neglected wife of the famed Alexei Alexandrovitch Karenin (Basil Rathbone), meets a handsome military officer, Count Vronsky (Fredric March). Vronsky becomes enamored of Anna and follows her back to Moscow to confess his

Hey Buddy, I’m Bill tells the story of Bill Sackter, the namesake of Wild Bill’s (formerly Wild Bill’s Coffee Shop) in the University of Iowa School of Social Work. From his early life in Minneapolis to his 44-year institutionalization for an intellectual disability to his years of friends and fame in Iowa City, the exhibit shares

A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great aunt's secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage. In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a

The Machine Stops: A New Opera by John Lake and Cecile Goding Selected Videoclips and Talkback Opera fan and UI Professor Emerita Miriam Gilbert leads a talkback session on The Machine Stops: A New Opera by John Lake and Cecile Goding, joined by the opera’s lead soprano Élise DesChamps (UI School of Music) and sci-fi

With their deadly plants, razor-sharp shears, shady corners, and ready-made burial sites, gardens make an ideal scene for the perfect murder. But the outsize influence that gardens and gardening have had on the mystery genre has been underappreciated. Now, Marta McDowell, a writer and gardener with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, illuminates the many

Please join us for our annual invited Iowa Bibliophiles lecture as we study Shakespeare’s world through a unique lens. This year we are joined by Heather Wolfe, a consulting curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. She will present her talk “How to read old paper: Searching for meaning in early

Weaving intimate portraits of home with what could be the travel journals of a 21st-century troubadour, Tracie Morris’s human/nature poems is a hymn to the human and more-than-human world. These poems bear the record of a state of heightened perception, springing from the displacements of travel and returning, of memory and its triggers, of global

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University.  Her first job was at Iowa (1965-77), where she went through the ranks, and profited greatly by the absolute support of colleagues among whom she would mention President Sandy Boyd, Vice President May Brodbeck, Chairs John Gerber and David Hayman, and many many others. She met

Author Dr. Chris Jones (The Swine Republic) is joined by journalists Keith Schneider and Erin Jordan to examine Iowa and the Midwest's efforts at water quality, public information, and the modern myth of the "farmer."    

A person’s body affects the way they navigate the world, and their experiences in it. How much power does a body (with regard to, for instance, race, gender, sexuality, physical ability) have over, or in, an artist’s work? And, with what devices can a writer affect issues their body can present-- for instance via symbolism,

Presented in collaboration with the Iowa Writers' Workshop, University Lecture Committee, Iowa City Book Festival, and Refocus Film Festival Part of Hancher's Infinite Dream festival John Irving is one of the foremost writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is the author of several books, including the novels The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp, and most recently The Last Chairlift. He

Josh Larsen is the co-host of the radio show and podcast Filmspotting and author of Movies Are Prayers. He will discuss his new book, Fear Not! A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies. Presented in partnership with the ReFocus Film Festival.

Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he will read from and discuss his new book, Blackouts. Fellow Workshop graduate Jamel Brinkley will moderate.

Daniel Kraus is a New York Times bestselling author. His collaboration with legendary filmmaker George A. Romero, The Living Dead, was acclaimed by The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Iowa native will discuss his new novel, Whalefall. 

“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

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.