Iowa City Book Festival
October 5-12, 2025
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Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. “Sukun” means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant. This Sukun draws a generous selection from Kazim’s six previous full-length collections, and includes 35 new poems. It allows us to trace Ali’s passions and concerns, and take the measure of his art: the close attention to the spiritual and the visceral, and the deep language play that is both musical and plain spoken.
Kazim Ali with Rajaa Alsanea and Yu Yuen Lan, October 12 @ 3:30 p.m. at Prairie Lights Books
Rajaa Alsanea
Rajaa ALSANEA الصانع رجاء is known for her debut novel Girls of Riyadh, recently dramatized by BBC Radio. Translated into 30+ languages and a bestseller in Europe and the Middle East, it was nominated for the 2009 International Dublin Literary Award. Widely studied in academia, it has inspired extensive scholarly research. Alsanea was named Cultural Figure of the Year (Al Arabiya, 2008) and one of Forbes ME’s 40 Most Influential Arabs Under 40 (2017). She is currently a full-time clinician, Clinical Professor and Head of Endodontics in Riyadh.
Kazim Ali with Rajaa Alsanea and Yu Yuen Lan, October 12 @ 3:30 p.m. at Prairie Lights Books
Anna Barker
Professor Anna Barker teaches in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Russian Program and in the UI Tippie College of Business Marketing Program on topics ranging from Tolstoy to Barbie. Her current courses include Introduction to Russian Culture, Russian Literature in Translation, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and Hey Barbie, I Like Your Style – AND Substance: The Archetypal Genius of a Blockbuster.
In 2021, in collaboration with the UI Libraries Special Collections, Barker curated the exhibition “From Revolutionary Outcast to a Man of God: Dostoevsky at 200” which attracted more than 6,000 visitors.
Since 2020, Professor Barker’s online tutorials offered in partnership with the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature, have examined the intersection of literature, history, and culture in classics such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Paradise Lost, Madame Bovary, Les Misérables, War and Peace, and Brothers Karamazov, reaching more than 7,500 readers around the globe.
Her monthly column dedicated to Iowa’s French and Napoleonic past is published in the Iowa City Press-Citizen. She also writes at Substack, and you can follow here literary commentary at Anna’s Thinking Cap. She recently gave a talk on Napoleon at the International Napoleonic Congress in Paris. Her book, Thirteen Notes from Napoleon, Iowa: Musings on the Edge of the French Empire, will be released this fall by Ice Cube Press.
Venise Berry
Venise Berry is the author of three national bestselling novels; So Good, An African American Love Story (Dutton Penguin, 1996), All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale (Dutton Penguin, 2000), and Colored Sugar Water (Dutton Penguin, 2002). She is currently finishing her fourth novel Pockets of Sanity. She has also co-authored and edited several nonfiction works on African American culture and media, including Racialism and the Media and The Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema and Black Culture & Experience: Contem-porary Issues. Her writing has been recognized with awards from the Zora Neale Hurston Society, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and the African American Museum of Iowa.
Berry is an associate professor of Journalism and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. She also teaches in the Solstice MFA program at Pine Manor College, leads workshops through the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and has been a frequent presenter with national organizations supporting Black writers.
Anna Bruno
Anna Bruno is the author of the novels Fine Young People and Ordinary Hazards. Her essays have been featured in NPR, WBUR, Electric Lit, LitHub, Dappled Things, Necessary Fiction, and The Des Moines Register. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MBA from Cornell University, and a BA from Stanford University. She lives in Iowa City with her husband, two sons, and blue heeler.
Panel Discussion: Importance of Genre, October 11 @ 4 p.m., Iowa City Masonic Building Auditorium
Tisa Bryant
Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced journal of narrative possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, published in 2010 by AIDS Project Los Angeles, and a finalist for a 2010 LAMBDA literary award. Her essays have appeared in exhibition catalogs for visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Suné Woods and Cauleen Smith, and is forthcoming in the anthology Letters to the Future: Black Experimental Women Writers, and in a catalogue of site-specific art from The New School. She has done numerous presentations of cinema essays, most recently at ALOUD’s “School of Prince” event at the Los Angeles Public Library, and at “Speak Nearby,” a symposium of text and performance inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha. Tisa Bryant was a commissioned writer/researcher for Radio Imagination, Clockshop’s year-long Los Angeles celebration of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, in collaboration with the Huntington Library in Pasadena, which houses the Octavia E. Butler Papers. She is working on The Curator, a novel of Black female subjectivity and imagined cinema. Residual, a meditation on grief, longing, desire and archival research, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.
Erin Casey
Erin Casey (she/her) – is an urban fantasy writer and author of The Purple Door District series. She’s a founder of The Writers’ Rooms, a literary non-profit organization that focuses on providing a free, safe environment to all writers no matter their income, skillset, race, and gender. Within the organization, she leads a fantasy/sci-fi group called The Violet Realm which meets twice a month. An advocate for mental health, she openly talks about her struggles with depression/anxiety/ADHD/CPTSD/
Art Cullen
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.”
Art Cullen is editor and co-owner with older brother John of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in rural Northwest Iowa. Art is a Storm Lake native, where he graduated from St. Mary’s High School with his pal Marty Case. Art won the Pulitzer Price in 2017 for a series of editorials about agricultural surface water pollution in Iowa. His columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian and regional publications. He authored a journalistic memoir, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.
Art Cullen: We Crapped In Our Nest, October 11 @ 1:00 p.m., Iowa City Public Library, Meeting Room A
Siddharth Dasgupta
Siddharth Dasgupta is an Indian writer whose work traverses poetry, fiction, and that compelling ocean in between. He was shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize for his fifth book and third collection of poetry—All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart. The same collection was also on the longlist for the Oxford Bookstore Book Cover Prize. Siddharth’s literature has appeared in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Prairie Fire, Cordite, Kyoto Journal, and elsewhere. Aside from his literary writing, Siddharth also articulates the arts, culture, luxury, and travel for a smattering of global publications. He serves as Editor, Visual Narratives with The Bombay Literary Magazine, and calls the city of Poona home. You’ll find the writer on Instagram @citizen.bliss
Panel Discussion: Sense of Place, October 11 @ 2:30 p.m., Iowa City Masonic Building Auditorium
Johanna Drucker
This anthology of articles selected from The Journal of Artists’ Books contains some of the best critical writing on artists’ books produced in the last quarter of a century. Driven by the editorial vision of artist Brad Freeman, JAB began as a provocative pamphlet and expanded to become a significant journal documenting artists’ books from multiple perspectives. With its range of participants and approaches, JAB provided a unique venue for sustained critical writing in the field and developed a broad subscriber base among institutional and private collectors and readers. More than two hundred writers and artists from nearly two dozen countries around the globe were published in its pages.
The JAB Anthology contains contributions by many renowned figures in the field including: Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Janet Zweig, Monica Carroll, Adam Dickerson, Alisa Scudamore, Mary Jo Pauly, April Sheridan, Doro Boehme, Gerrit Jan de Rook, Océane Delleaux, Brandon Graham, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Ward Tietz, Paulo Silveira, Philip Cabau, Leszek Brogowski, Lyn Ashby, Tim Mosely, Debra Parr, Pedro Moura, Levi Sherman, Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso, Isabel Baraona, and the editors.
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).
Carey Dunne
Carey Dunne holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Baffler, Mother Jones and elsewhere. Her first novel, Miracle Cures, will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2027.
Teresa Dzieglewicz
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). Her first book of poetry, Something Small of How to See a River was selected by Tyehimba Jess for the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press). 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.
Jennifer Fawcett
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.
Jennifer Fawcett grew up in rural Eastern Ontario and spent many years in Canada making theatre before coming to the United States. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Her work has been produced in theaters across the country and published in Third Coast Magazine, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Storybrink, and in the anthology Long Story Short. She teaches writing at Skidmore College and lives in upstate New York with her husband and son.
Jennifer Fawcett: Keep This For Me, October 11 @ 1 p.m., Prairie Lights Books
Panel Discussion: Sense of Place, October 11 @ 2:30 p.m., Iowa City Masonic Building Auditorium
Kellee Forkenbrock
Kellee Forkenbrock is the award-winning public services librarian for North Liberty Library in North Liberty, Iowa. She has penned a dozen romance novels under the pseudonym Eliza David and is a contributing writer for publications such as Little Village Magazine and Black Iowa News. A certified Pilates and yoga instructor, Kellee launched her movement coaching brand, The Goddess Grounded LLC, in 2024. Kellee is active in her community, having lent her service to the Iowa City Public Library Board of Trustees, Girls on the Run of Eastern Iowa, and currently as an ambassador for Greater Iowa City and as board president for Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature.
Gregory Galloway
Peck and Al have a good thing going. The two brothers own a bar and a hardware store and make a comfortable living. They also launder money for a criminal organization. Everything is perfectly fine until Peck begins to suspect that his brother is going to betray him to the local District Attorney. Things get even more complicated between them when Al’s hard drive with millions of dollars in Crypto goes missing – Peck was the only other person with access.
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.
Gregory Galloway is the author of the novels The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand and the Alex Award-winning As Simple As Snow. His short stories have appeared in the Rush Hour and Taking Aim anthologies. Greg is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently resides in NW Connecticut.
Panel Discussion: Importance of Genre, October 11 @ 4 p.m., Iowa City Masonic Building Auditorium
Royal C. Gardner
In 2023, the Supreme Court made one of its most devastating rulings in environmental history. By narrowing the legal definition of ‘waters of the United States’ (WOTUS), the court opened the floodgates to unregulated pollution. But while tremendously consequential, the decision was also simply the latest in a long series of battles over WOTUS, and which rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, wetlands, and perhaps even farm fields were to be protected by the Clean Water Act of 1972.
Waters of the United States is an unprecedented exploration of this history—and its importance for today’s efforts to conserve a critical natural resource. The book not only examines how bodies of water are legally defined (and therefore protected), but who gets to decide on these definitions. The result is a fascinating look at the ongoing power struggle between the president and federal agencies, the courts, the states, and Congress, over water quality.
Royal C. Gardner has worked on Clean Water Act issues for more than three decades, first as the Department of the Army’s principal wetland attorney in the Pentagon from 1989-1993 and then as an academic since 1994. He is currently Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Biodiversity Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law. Island Press published his book, Lawyers, Swamps, and Money: U.S. Wetland Law, Policy, and Politics in 2011. Since 2017, he has served as pro bono counsel to aquatic scientists and scientific societies, submitting amici briefs to federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court in County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund and Sackett v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Mackie Garrett
Mackie Garrett is a poet, artist, caregiver, and English as a Second Language teacher based in Iowa City. He designs and letterpress prints zines, chapbooks, greeting cards, and posters as 508 Press. His poems have appeared in THE FOURTH RIVER, PLAINSONGS, SPOON RIVER POETRY REVIEW, SLANT, and other literary journals. In addition to reading, printing, and writing, he enjoys playing music, taking photographs, and sending mail.
Ted Geltner
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.
Ted Geltner is professor of journalism at Valdosta State University. He is author of Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews. His journalism has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Joe Haldeman
Joe Haldeman is an American science fiction author. He is best known for his 1974 novel The Forever War. That novel, and other of his works including The Hemingway Hoax (1991) and Forever Peace (1997), have won major science fiction awards including the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. For his career writing science fiction and/or fantasy he is a SFWA Grand Master and since 2012 a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
Many of Haldeman’s works, including his debut novel and The Forever War (his second) were inspired by his experience serving in the Vietnam War, where he was wounded in combat, and by his adjustment to civilian life after returning home.
He has served twice as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America and is currently an adjunct professor teaching writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Joe Haldeman and The Forever War, October 11 @ 1:00 p.m., Iowa City Masonic Building Auditorium
Laura Julier
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.
Laura Julier is an essayist, editor, and former professor at Michigan State University, where she taught writing, editing, and nonfiction. She serves as the Director of the Professional Writing Program and is the editor of Fourth Genre, an award-winning journal of literary nonfiction. Currently, she is the chaplain at the hospital formerly known as Mercy. Julier lives with her spouse, writer Kate Carroll de Gutes, in Iowa City in a house built in 1893, with a dirt alley behind it and where once a barred owl lived in an old swamp maple.
Donika Kelly
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.
Steve Kemp
Author and Iowa City native Steve Kemp has spent most of his adult life working in national parks, from cook at a park concession in the Grand Tetons to a seasonal ranger in Yellowstone and Denali to publications director for nonprofit park education partner Great Smoky Mountains Association (now Smokies Life). A graduate of the University of Montana’s writing program, Kemp has written for magazines including National Parks, Outside, Outdoor Life, and Smokies Life Journal, and is the author of Trees of the Smokies, Great Smoky Mountains Simply Beautiful, The Blue Ridge Parkway: In Celebration of the American Landscape (forthcoming) and the children’s book, We’re Going to the Mountains.
America’s national parks are facing unprecedented challenges. With visitation pressures mounting and the National Park Service struggling to keep up, author and former park ranger 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.
Steve Kemp: An Exaltation of Parks, October 6 @ 7:00 p.m., Iowa City Public Library, Meeting Room A
Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood is the author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a 2021 Booker Prize finalist and one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2021, and the memoir Priestdaddy, one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2017, as well as the poetry collections Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.
Patricia Lockwood: Will There Ever Be Another You, October 11 @ 4:00 p.m., Prairie Lights Books
Ndongolera C. Mwangupili
Ndongolera C. Mwangupili is the author of Fragments of my Broken Voice a poetry book; Sons of the Hills, a novel that is in the secondary school curriculum in Malawi, and A Gift to the People: Sr. Beatrice Chipeta’s Legacy, a biography. His works also appear in Southern Humanities Review and Florilege. Others have been widely anthologized including in The Caine Prize for African Writing 2024: Midnight in the Morgue and Other Stories. Mwangupili is currently working on a novel, set to reflect on the social reality in his country. His participation is made possible thanks to the generous support of Hugh F. Culverhouse, Jr. and other donations made to the International Writing Program.
Scott Phillips
Scott Phillips is the author of eight novels and a collection of short stories. His first novel, The Ice Harvest, won the California Book Award silver medal for Best First Fiction and was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, among others. It was made into a movie in 2006 starring John Cusack. His latest novel is The Devil Raises His Own (Soho Crime, 2024), a crime saga set in the early days of the film industry, which picks up the tale of Bill Ogden, protagonist in Phillips’s earlier novels Cottonwood and Hop Alley.
Panel Discussion: Importance of Genre, October 11 @ 4 p.m., Iowa City Masonic Building Auditorium
Chris Pio
Chris Pio is a former cross country and track & field coach with 27 years of head coaching experience, including two decades at the NCAA Division III level. He also served as sports information director at his alma mater, Monmouth College (Illinois), for eight years. His long-standing interest in athletic nicknames and mascots led to the creation of the Nicknames & Mascots book series in 2021. The third volume, focused on NCAA Division I schools, was featured at the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books.
His non-fiction books describe the true origin, evolution and relevant meaning of collegiate athletic team nicknames and the colorful physical mascot characters that represent the schools. The books mix sports information, statistics, pop culture and historical trivia for both the diehard sports fan and casual spectator. The N&M series now includes five volumes: Gryphons, Gorloks and Gusties (2021); Gorillas, Gators and Greyhounds (2022); Governors, Gauchos and Gaels (2023); Mustangs, Mariners and Moose (2024); Collegiate Nicknames and Mascots: The Complete Collection (2025). Future plans include similar books on professional and high school athletics. In addition to writing and his full-time position with University of Iowa Health Care, Pio remains active in sports as a meet announcer and event official at national, regional, and conference-level competitions.
Jesus “Chuy” Renteria
Jesus “Chuy” Renteria, an author and artist from West Liberty, Iowa, released their memoir, We Heard it When We Were Young, in 2021 with The University of Iowa Press. The book was recommended by Xochitl Gonzalez on The Today Show and featured in The Chicago Review of Books and NPR. Chuy received the 2023 Poets & Writers Maureen Egan Writers Exchange Award for Fiction. Currently, Chuy is the arts & culture editor for Little Village Magazine, writes the substack Of Spanglish and Maximalism, and is working on their second book.
John Scalzi
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.
John Scalzi is one of the most popular science fiction authors of his generation. His novels, which include the enduring Old Man’s War series, have won numerous accolades, including the Hugo and Locus awards. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, Redshirts (which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel), The Last Emperox, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Starter Villain. His latest releases are When the Moon Hits Your Eye and The Shattering Peace.
John Scalzi: The Shattering Peace, October 11 @ 11:30 a.m., Iowa City Masonic Building Auditorium
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne
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 Schlote-Bonne is the author of the YA horror novel, Such Lovely Skin, and the forthcoming adult horror novel, The Mean Ones (September 2025). She has an MFA from The Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. When she’s not writing, she’s either gaming, lifting heavy weights, or teaching people how to lift heavy weights. She’s the proud parent of two cats, Momo and Yuri.
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne: The Mean Ones, October 11 @ 2:30 p.m., Prairie Lights Books
Panel Discussion: Importance of Genre, October 11 @ 4 p.m., Iowa City Masonic Building Auditorium
John Ira Thomas
John Ira Thomas’s TIRE Magazine 2038, is a metafictional narrative prompted by his ejection from church at age nine. The picture he drew that prompted them to say “it’d be nice if you didn’t come back” became a minor New Age sensation one universe over from here. But fame dissolves into infamy, and the magazine that once exalted him isn’t done with him yet.
John Ira Thomas writes and publishes award-winning books, comics, and graphic novels as Candle Light Press.
Candle Light Press 30th Anniversary signing, October 11 @ 2 – 4 p.m., Daydreams Comics
John Ira Thomas: Tire Magazine, October 11 @ 4:30 – 5:30 p.m., Daydreams Comics
Daniel Somotochukwu Umemezie
Daniel Somotochukwu Umemezie is a student at Cedar Falls High School and the 2025–26 Iowa Student Poet Ambassador, selected through a statewide blind-reading competition and inaugural evaluation process. A multi-award-winning poet recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Daniel crafts lines rich in rhythm, wordplay, and unexpected metaphors—endeavoring, as he puts it, to make poetry feel “less like homework and more like a heartbeat.” His role as ISPA includes public readings, outreach efforts, and promoting the literary arts across Iowa.
Christina Ward
Christina Ward is an author, editor, and seeker. She is also the Vice President and Editor of Feral House, a publisher noted for their books on outré topics. She had the distinct pleasure of riding around town in the Wienermobile with Padma Lakshmi on the hottest day in July of 2019 for “Taste the Nation.” Her current book, Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat—An American History
John Warner
Thanks to a long career as a writer, editor, and writing teacher, John Warner knows writing and sees the existence of generative AI applications like ChatGPT not as a threat, but as an opportunity to break students out of the slumber of “schooling” and instead empower them to develop enduring writing “practices.” He is also the author of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, and The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing.
In addition to John’s books, for more than a dozen years he has been blogging weekly at Inside Higher Ed, and has also been a weekly columnist for the Chicago Tribune, writing about books and the habits of reading as his alter ego, “The Biblioracle.” In 2021 he started an associated Substack newsletter, The Biblioracle Recommends, which was a Substack Featured Publication for 2021.
A native of Chicago, Warner lives with his veterinarian wife Kathy in the Charleston, SC area. He is a faculty affiliate at the College of Charleston.
Morgan Webb
Morgan Webb is the founder of RatTrap Magazine, an annual, grassroots publication based in the Quad Cities. During the summer of 2020 and 2021, she was an intern in the Midwest Writing Center’s YEW program, and during this last summer, she was a workshop leader for the same program. Her work has been featured in The Atlas 15 and 16 and in Kirkwood’s Communiqé.
Yu Yuen Lan
YU Yuen Lan is the author of the novel 我是嬰 [Before I] (2023), poetry collection 島之肉 [Nowhere Land] (2022) and short stories collection 無一不野獸 [The Bestiary] (2018). In recent years, she also served as a judge for the Hong Kong Youth Literary Awards in the fiction category. Her work The Bestiary was nominated for the Renaissance Award 2019 for the literature category. Before I is her recent novel, attempting to break through her personal writing patterns and challenge existing local novel conventions in both form and content. She is currently a freelance journalist, writing feature articles and interviews for cultural magazines and online media. Her participation is made possible by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global.
Kazim Ali with Rajaa Alsanea and Yu Yuen Lan, October 12 @ 3:30 p.m., Prairie Lights Books
The Iowa City Book Festival is bringing books to life! Sign up to volunteer on Saturday, October 11, or Sunday, October 12, and be part of celebrating books, authors, and community.
Special thanks to the United Way of Johnson & Washington Counties for their help recruiting volunteers.
Print copies also can be picked up at the Iowa City Public Library, Coralville Public Library, North Liberty Community Library, Prairie Lights Books, Sidekick Books, Black Rose Books (West Branch), Daydreams Comics, and the Iowa City Senior Center, as well as at Festival events.
Recorded Readings
Jarod K. Anderson – Something in the Woods Loves You
Dostoevsky and the Great Men of History with Anna Barker
Josh Cowen, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers
Bruna Dantas Lobato – Blue Light Hours
Anne Frank’s Diary – A Multilingual Multimedia Reading
Natalie Goldberg – Writing on Empty
Nicolás Medina Mora – América del Norte
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz – The Indian Card
Elizabeth Willis – Liontaming in America
Panel Discussion Videos
A Sense of Place I
Forrest Gander, Catarina Gomes, Nurit Kasztelan, Chris Offutt, Pervin Saket. Moderator: Cate Dicharry
Writing on Film
Marya Gates and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Moderator: Ariana Martinez
Politics
Hatice Açıkgöz, Ari Berman, Natalie Goldberg, Amanda Jones, Nina Lohman. Moderator: Zachary Oren Smith
Who Do You Read?
Nicolás Medina Mora, Chris Tse, Sharon Wahl, Nicolas Wong, Peter Závada. Moderator: Jennifer Colville
A Sense of Place II
Yassin Adnan, Jarod K. Anderson, Priya N Hein, Felipe Franco Munhoz, Marguerite Sheffer. Moderator: Natasa Durovicova
2024 Festival Program
2024
Hatice Açıkgöz, Corban Addison, Yassin Adnan, Lisa Allen-Agostini, Jarod K. Anderson, Anna Barker, Ari Berman, S. Toriano Berry, Venise Berry, Hannah Bonner, Tisa Bryant, Ezra Claytan Daniels, Josh Cowen, Jennifer Croft, Stuart Dybek, Sarah Elgatian, James Fitzmaurice, Forrest Gander, Mackie Garrett, Natalie Goldberg, Catarina Gomes, Nancy Miller Gomez, Priya Hein, Sam Helmick, Putra Hidayatullah, Perry Janes, Amanda Jones, Nurit Kasztelan, Tracy Kidder, Daryl LI 李振宏, Bruna Dantas Lobato, Nina Lohman, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens, Nicolás Medina Mora, Christopher Merrill, Anna Morrison, Felipe Franco Munhoz, Chris Offutt, Tanya Rastogi, Jesus “Chuy” Renteria, Marc Ribot, Megan Rosenbloom, Theodore Rosengarten, Pervin Saket, Josh Sazon, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, Steve Semken, Marguerite Sheffer, John Ira Thomas, Chris Tse, Willy Vlautin, Sharon Wahl, Mélanie Werder-Avilés, Elizabeth Willis, Nicholas Wong, Péter Závada
2023
Sarah Cypher, Élise DesChamps, Miriam Gilbert, Cecile Goding, Werner Herzog, Nathan Hill, John Irving, Eskor David Johnson, Chris Jones, Erin Jordan, Daniel Kraus, John Lake, Brooks Landon, Josh Larsen, Jonathan Lethem, Ayana Mathis, Marta McDowell, Mindy Mejia, Tracie Morris, Joanne Ramos, Kristen Roupenian, Keith Schneider, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Justin Torres
2022
Anna Barker, Curtis Bauer, Cristalle “Psalm One” Bowen, Lan Samantha Chang, Elizabeth Crane, Darrin Crow, Angie Cruz, Anthony Doerr, Johnnie Each, Lori Erickson, John Irving, Sarah Kendzior, Jennifer L. Knox, John Koethe, Alex Kotlowitz, Lyz Lenz, Beth A. Livingston, Ruthina Malone, Debra Marquart, Mary J. Mascher, Elizabeth McCracken, Don McLeese, Randall Munroe, Kyle Munson, Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez, Zachary Oren Smith, Victor Ray, Jason Reynolds, María Sánchez, Rebecca Solnit, Jim Throgmorton, Jerald Walker, Elizabeth Weiss
2021
Robert Costa, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Gina Frangello, Gregory Galloway, Laura Gellot, Julie Hanson, Pierre Joris, Shreya Khullar, Deb Marquart, Dr. Reuben Jonathan Miller, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Marc Rahe, Emily Rapp, Chuy Renteria, Fiona Sampson, Habib Tengour, Bob Woodward
2020
James Autry, Dr. Rana Awdish, Erika Billerbeck, David Bluder, Kelly Carlin, Charles Connerly, Thomas Cook, Lisa Dillmann, Hope Edelman, Dr. Eve L. Ewing, Fatima Farheen, Barbara Feller, Thomas Frank, Anja Kampmann, Jill McCorkle, David Perkins, Anne Posten, Pilar Quintana, Ron Rash
2019
Kendra Allen, Paula Becker, Toi Derricota, Joseph Dobrian, John Domini, Andy Douglas, Cornelius Eady, Sarah Elgatian, Lori Erickson, Melissa Febos, James Geary, Josh Gondelman, David Hamilton, Donika Kelly, Amanda Lee Koe, Jessica Laser, Lyz Lenz, Lauren Markham, Joe Michaud, Kei Miller, Kassandra Montag, Raj Patel, Eileen Pollack, Daniel Poppick, John Sandford, William Steele, Lisa Tetrault, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Christina Ward, Don Waters, Dr. Angela Sadler Williamson, Andrea Wilson
2018
Haifa Abu Al-Nadi, Usman Ali, Sadagat Aliyeva, Eman Alyousuf, Anastacia-Renee, James Anderson, James A. Autry, Kateryna Babkina, Bayasgalan Bastuuri, Ari Berman, Denise Pattiz Bogard, Rumena Bužarovska, Dr. Ira Byock, Tameka Cage Conley, Chow Hon-Fai, Max Allan Collins, Dan Coman, Common, Art Cullen, Z. P. Dala, Kathy Eldon, Jane Gregory, Tahila Hakimi, Eduardo Halfon, Rick Harsch, Tim Harwood, Silvia Hidalgo, Huang Chong-Kai, Dan Kaufman, Rasha Khayat, William Kent Krueger, Mary Kubica, Emily Liebowitz, Bejan Matur, Mindy Meija, Fatima Farheen Mirza, Wayetu Moore, Mike Mullin, Derek Nnuro, Faisal Oddang, Sunni Overend, Melissa Palma, Chuy Renteria, Nancy Rommelmann, Alex Salkever, Chandramohan Sathyanathan, Sjón, David Small, Mark Wilson
2017
Francesca Abbate, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Chris Adrian, Ramsha Ashraf, Larry Baker, Will Bardenwerper , Gary Boelhower, Luis Bravo, Dan Campion, Rafael Campo, Frances Cannon, Alexander Chee, Audrey Chin, Jennifer Colville, Loren W. Cooper, Eliza David, Li Di An, Joseph Dobrian, Michelle Edwards, Nathan Englander, Lori Erickson, Bi Feiyu, Jin Feng, Julia Fierro, Ed Folsom, Melissa Fraterrigo, Alberto Fuguet, Kaori Fujino, Kathryn Gamble, Enza Garcia Arreaza, Ted Genoways, Erin Gitchell, Lorna Goodison, Garth Greenwell, Barbara Hall, Ya Hsien, John Ira Thomas, Justine Johnson Hemmestad, Jon K. Lauck, Dung Kai-Cheng, Hilary Kaplan, Lisa Katz, Anne Kennedy, Jon Kerstetter, Joe Kyugen Michaud, Mike Lankford, Luljeta Lleshanaku, Okky Madasari, Christopher Merrill, Sadek Mohmmed, Peter Nazareth, Pola Oloixarac, Tim Parks, Steve Paul, Jim Perlman, Sarah Prineas, Jennifer Pritchard, Donald Ray Pollock, Julie Russell-Steuart, Jeffrey Ryan, Steve Semken, Yuriy Serebriansky, Yaara Shehori, Daniel Simon, Crystal Spring Gibbons, Whitney Terrell, Jeremy Tiang, Antionette Tidjani Alou, Zachary Turpin, Anja Utler, Inara Versemnieks, Manual Vilas, Xavier Villanova, Jacquelyn Vincenta, Daniel Wallace, Kenneth Whyte, G. Willow Wilson, Andrea Wilson, Poon Yiu Ming
2016
alea adigweme, Wasi Ahmed, Khaled Al Khamissi, Eros Atalia, Rachel Aukes, Yusi Avianto Pareanom, Anna Barker, Dan Barry, Odeh Bisharat, Daniel Boscaljon, Velibor Bozovic, James F. Brooks, Julie A. Burns, Angie Carter, Crystal Chan, Ryan Collins, Jennifer Colville, Rachel Corbett, Galit Dahan-Carlibach, Zp Dala, Eliza David, Joseph Dobrian, John Domini, Ricky Dragoni, Legodile ‘Dredd X’ Seganabeng, Anaïs Duplan, Allen Eskens, John Freeman, Roxane Gay, Mara Genschel, Obari Gomba, Mortada Gzar, Tse Hao Guang, Donald Harstad, Craig A. Hart, Mallory Hellman, Aleksandar Hemon, Ray Hendrickson, Nathan Hill, Claire Hoffman, Adam G. Hooks, Michelle Hoover, Helen Horn, Allegra Hyde, Marie Jackson, Leslie Jamison, Zhou Jianing, Ruel Johnson, Akhil Katyal, Daniel Khalastchi, Suki Kim, Jennifer L. Knox, Chen Ko Hua, Tom Lutz, Alexander Maksik, Emily Martin, Allison Means, Christopher Merrill, Rachel Morgan, Amanah Mustafi, Okey Ndibe, Marc Nieson, Lynne Nugent, Robert Oldshue, Robert Olen Butler, Ukamaka Olisakwe, Robert Owens, Shenaz Patel, Carlos Patiño Pereda, F. Paul Wilson, Alice M. Phillips, Leonard Pitts Jr., Hilary Plum, Vladimir Poleganov, Carolyn Raffensperger, Hensli Rahn Solorzano, Nell Regan, Rick Riordan, Melvin Rivers, Julie Rubini, Julie Russel-Stewart, Deb Schense, Steve Semken, Vivek Shanbhag, Tomoka Shibasaki, Tom Shroder, Courtney Sina Meredith, Katherine E. Standefer, Stephanos Stephanides, Catherine A. Stewart, Kalmia Strong, Kenriikka Tavi, Mariano Tenconi Blanco, Erik Therme, Genevieve Trainor, Tatiana Troitskaya, B.C. Tweedt, Kali VanBaale, Ng VirginiaSuk-Yin, Angelo Volandes, Andrea Wilson, Andrea Wulf, Rachel Yoder, Christina Yohannes, Alice S. Yousef
About the festival
WELCOME TO IOWA CITY! The 17th annual Iowa City Book Festival will be held Oct. 5-12, 2025, at locations throughout downtown and beyond. It will showcase a dynamic mix of original events and collaborative programs with partner organizations, all celebrating the power of the written word and the exchange of ideas.
The Iowa City Book Festival is organized by the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature, a nonprofit 501(c)3 that manages the Iowa City area’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature. The City of Literature works to advance its mission of celebrating and supporting literature on a local, regional, national, and international level, connecting readers and writers through the power of story.
Why Iowa City?
The oldest creative writing program in the country, and still regarded the best. More than forty Pulitzer Prize winners. North America’s only UNESCO City of Literature. How did the midwestern college town of Iowa City, Iowa become the capital of creative writing in America? Check out the City of Literature documentary to find out.
Support the Festival
The vast majority of City of Literature events are offered without charge, but they are not free. Your tax deductible donation gives us the ability to offer programs like this festival. Please consider supporting the City of Literature by making a donation today.
