Iowa City Book Festival
October 18-25, 2026
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Yaiza Berrocal Guevara
Yaiza Berrocal Guevara is a Spanish playwright, fiction writer, and screenwriter. Her debut novel, Curling, was published in Spain in 2022 and in the United Kingdom in 2025, with a Greek edition forthcoming in 2026. She is currently working on her second novel, Las promesas.
As a playwright, Berrocal Guevara received Spain’s Calderón de la Barca National Prize for La cadena del frío in 2020. The play was later staged at Sala Beckett in Barcelona. Her other plays include Intenta viure sense mi, Ni temeré les feres, Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nunca antes representadas, and Flesh Market.
She is also the screenwriter of the animated feature Black Butterflies, which premiered at major international film festivals including Annecy, Sitges, IDFA, and Mar del Plata. Her work has received support from institutions including Barcelona Crea, Teatre Lliure, the Fundación Antonio Gala, Spain’s Ministry of Culture, and UNESCO. She is a member of the European CELA program for emerging writers and the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences.
Tisa Bryant
Tisa Bryant is the author of Residual, a nonfiction assemblage of the interiors of grief, the home as archive, and the mystery of mothers, published in 2026 from Nightboat Books. Her first book, Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on the mythologies of Black presences in film, literature and visual art, was reissued by Wave Books in 2024. She is co-editor of the three-volume, cross-referenced literary journal, The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborated with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book, a series of visual mixtapes and love letters to Black people and Black culture, presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, is an editor of hybrid writing for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and editor for The Deep West Assembly, a monograph of recent works by filmmaker Cauleen Smith. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogs for the Studio Museum in Harlem, for artists Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Laylah Ali, Suné Woods and Jaime Cortez, and in various anthologies and publications. She is Associate Professor of English in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Paula Cisewski
Paula Cisewski is the author of six poetry collections, including her newest, The Becoming Game (Hanging Loose Press), a 2026 finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Her other collections include Ceremonies for No Repair, Quitter (winner of the Diode Editions Book Prize), The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, selected by Franz Wright), and Upon Arrival, as well as several chapbooks.
Cisewski’s poems and prose have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Hanging Loose, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, Conduit, and Brevity. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and included in several anthologies. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Oberholtzer Foundation, and Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts. Her poems have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, for Best Spiritual Poetry, and for Best of the Net.
Cisewski has taught writing privately and academically for more than two decades. She earned her BA from St. Catherine’s University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Minneapolis. She is also a co-editor of Beauty School Editions and maintains a visual art practice.
Harriet Clark
Harriet Clark is the winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for her short story, “Descent,” and has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Wallace Stegner Program. The Hill is her debut novel.
Lori Erickson
From a childhood on an Iowa farm, Lori Erickson (lorierickson.net) grew up to become one of America’s leading travel writers specializing in spiritual journeys. She is the author of Every Step Is Home, The Soul of the Family Tree, Near the Exit, and Holy Rover, books that explore the intersection of travel and spirituality. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic Traveler, Travel + Leisure, and Better Homes & Gardens, among other publications. Lori lives in Iowa City with her husband, Bob Sessions, her longtime traveling companion and photographer.
Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos is the author of five books, including the national bestselling essay collection Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and the bestselling craft book Body Work. Her newest memoir, The Dry Season, was published in 2025.
A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, and other organizations, Febos’s essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Vogue, and numerous other publications.
Febos is the Roy J. Carver Professor in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, where she teaches creative nonfiction. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, poet Donika Kelly.
Patricia Foster
Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls, Just Beneath My Skin, Girl from Soldier Creek, and Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter. She has edited four anthologies and received a PEN Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Hall-Waters Award for Distinguished Southern Writing, a Clarence Cason Award, and an Alabama Truman Capote Prize for fiction and nonfiction. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for more than twenty-five years and has taught in France, Australia, Italy, and Spain. She currently lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
James Geary
James Geary is author of the New York Times bestseller The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, the second edition of which is published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the author of Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World, Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, and The Body Electric: An Anatomy of The New Bionic Senses. He is an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has taught at the VII Foundation, Bennington College, Boston University, Brandeis University, the Faber Academy, Tufts University and the Harvard Extension School. He is a 2027 Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar at Ashoka University in India and a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He is the former deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, where he edited Nieman Reports, and the former editor of the European edition of Time magazine.
Sarah Gilmartin
Sarah Gilmartin’s short fiction has appeared in The Dublin Review, The Tangerine and The Stinging Fly. She won the Máirtín Crawford Short Story Award in 2020. Her novels Dinner Party: A Tragedy (2021), Service (2023), and Little Vanities (2026) are published by Pushkin Press. She was the 2025 Arts Council Writer-in-Residence at Dublin City University.
Keiran Goddard
Keiran Goddard is an internationally published novelist, poet, and social theorist. His first collection was shortlisted for the William Blake Prize, his debut novel, Hourglass, was listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize, and his latest novel, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, has been published to widespread acclaim and nominated for the Gordon Burn Prize. The novel has been adapted into a major feature film by Enda Walsh, directed by Clio Barnard and produced by the BBC. Goddard also writes regularly as a critic for The Guardian and The Observer.
Megan Greenwell
Megan Greenwell is a narrative journalist who writes features and books about how systems affect people. She is a contributing writer at Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of the bestselling book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. Megan has written or edited for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, Deadspin, and WIRED. She is also the deputy director of the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, a residential workshop and college-access initiative for high school journalists from low-income backgrounds.
Tiffany Hanssen
Tiffany Hanssen is an on-air host at public radio station WNYC in New York City. During her decades-long career in broadcasting, she has produced award-winning national programs and worked at stations from Las Vegas to Washington D.C. She is also a screenwriter and mom to two boys. And although she was born in Iowa and spent many years in Minnesota, she currently lives in Manhattan.
Darby Harn
Darby Harn is the author of character-driven sci-fi and fantasy, including Dead Malls, Stargun Messenger, and Ever The Hero, which Publisher’s Weekly called an “entertaining debut that uses superpowers as a metaphor to delve into class politics in an alternate America.” His short fiction appears in Strange Horizons, Interzone, and other venues. A graduate of the University of Iowa, he is the host of the One Hour Short Story Workshop, which he’s conducted at several major conventions, including Galaxy Con, Twin Cities Con, and more.
Scott Heim
Scott Heim was born in Hutchinson, Kansas in 1966. He grew up in a small farming community there, and later attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence, earning a B.A. in English and Art History in 1989 and an M.A. in English Literature in 1991. He attended the M.F.A. program in Writing at Columbia University, where he wrote his first novel, Mysterious Skin. HarperCollins published that book in 1995, and Scott followed it with another novel, In Awe, in 1997.
Nicholas Kristof
Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist for The New York Times, where his twice-weekly opinion columns have appeared since 2001. He joined the newspaper in 1984 and has served as a correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, as well as Associate Managing Editor of the Sunday editions.
Kristof won his first Pulitzer Prize with his wife, journalist Sheryl WuDunn, for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement. He received a second Pulitzer Prize for commentary that brought international attention to the genocide in Darfur and other humanitarian crises.
Over the course of his career, Kristof has reported from more than 140 countries. He is the co-author, with WuDunn, of China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia.
Stephanie Krzywonos
Between 2015 and 2021, Stephanie Krzywonos (she/her) spent 886 days living and working in Antarctica. She is the author of The Blue Hours: My Summers and Winter in Antarctica, a hybrid memoir about searching for answers after the tragic death of her best friend, forthcoming from Washington Square Press on December 1, 2026. She graduated from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program in 2025 and now lives in Michigan with her partner Nathan and their dog Milton.
Mark Leidner
Mark Leidner’s previous poetry collections are Returning the Sword to the Stone (Fonograf Editions, 2021), Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (Factory Hollow Press, 2011), and The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator/Two Dollar Radio, 2011). He also wrote the story collection Under the Sea (Tyrant Books, 2018), called “virtuosic” by the New York Times. One of the stories from that collection, “21 Extremely Bad Breakups,” won the 2015 Newfound Prose Prize and in 2018 was adapted for the stage by Amy Rummenie of the Walking Shadow Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Mark also wrote and produced the 2019 feature-length sci-fi thriller Empathy, Inc., which earned rave reviews in Variety, The AV Club, and The Verge and is available on streaming platforms. Mark is a graduate of the University of Georgia, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He grew up in Tifton, GA and now lives in northern California. His website is markleidner.com.
Lyz Lenz
Lyz is a New York Times bestselling author, whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, and others. Her book God Land was published in 2019, through Indiana University Press. Her second book Belabored, was published in 2020 by Bold Type Books. Lyz’s essay “All the Angry Women” was also included in the anthology Not that Bad edited by Roxane Gay. Her third book, This American Ex-Wife, published in 2024, was an instant New York Times best seller. She is also the host of the This American Ex-Wife podcast.
Lyz received her MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Iowa with her two kids and two dogs. She writes a regular newsletter, Men Yell At Me, where she explores the intersection of politics and our bodies in red-state America.
Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li is the award-winning author of five novels, two short story collections, two books of nonfiction, and one memoir. Her latest memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Her acclaimed novel The Book of Goose received the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Born in China, Li came to the University of Iowa to study immunology before discovering her passion for writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. Li is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program. Her next novel, Music Against the Night, will be published in October 2026.
Michael McCarty
Michael McCarty is the author of more than 60 books spanning horror, science fiction, and nonfiction. A five-time Bram Stoker Award finalist, his work explores the intersections of pop culture, the paranormal, and the uncanny. His books include Modern Mythmakers, featuring interviews with Ray Bradbury, Dean Koontz, John Carpenter, Richard Matheson, and others; Ghostly Tales of Route 66; Eerie Iowa; and numerous works of fiction. He is also the recipient of the David R. Collins Literary Achievement Award and lives in Rock Island, Illinois.
Christopher Merrill
Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; 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, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As the former director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.
Sarah Minor
Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist and the author of three books: Carousel: An Essay on Seeing (Yale University Press), Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press) and the award-winning collection Bright Archive (Rescue Press), along with the digital chapbook The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press 2016). Minor teaches in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing MFA program and serves as the Video Essay Editor at Brink Literary Magazine.
Josie Nabhan-Warren
Josie Nabhan-Warren is the 2026–27 Iowa Student Poet Ambassador and a junior at West High School in Iowa City. Selected by literary leaders from across the state, Nabhan-Warren is the sixth student to receive this prestigious honor, which recognizes an outstanding young poet and celebrates the literary arts in Iowa. Nabhan-Warren believes that “poetry is a tool of empathy.” Her work explores voice, connection, and the ways language can help us better understand one another. As Iowa Student Poet Ambassador, she will share her work and advocate for poetry and young writers throughout the state.
Ntombizodwa “Zodwa” Nyoni
Ntombizodwa “Zodwa” Nyoni is a Zimbabwean-born writer and director whose work spans theatre, television, film, radio, and opera. Her writing explores Black diasporic identities, folklore, spirituality, ritual, race, class, politics, migration, and liminality.
Nyoni began writing poetry in 2005 and has performed internationally. In 2014, she won the Channel 4 Playwright’s Scheme for her first full-length play, Boi Boi Is Dead, which was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her plays have since been produced across Europe, Africa, and the United States. Her work includes The Darkest Part of the Night, which was shortlisted for both the Alfred Fagon Award and George Devine Award and named one of The Independent’s top stage shows of 2022, as well as BBC radio dramas, short films, and writing for Netflix’s Castlevania: Nocturne. She is also a dramaturg and lecturer in scriptwriting at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Angela Pelster
Angela Pelster’s new essay collection The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming was published by Milkweed Editions in April 2026. Her first essay collection, Limber, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association award and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the Art of the Essay. Her children’s book, The Curious Adventures of India Sophia, won the Golden Eagle Children’s Choice Award. Her essays have previously appeared in Agni, Orion, LitHub, Ploughshares, Tin House, Granta, and The Kenyon Review, among others. She received her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and she’s been a McKnight fellow, a Bread Loaf fellow, and a Minnesota State Arts Board grantee. She’s the Director of the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University and is the founder and director of Writers Go to the Movies.
Pilar Quintana
Pilar Quintana is the author of five novels and a book of short stories. La perra (The Bitch, New York, World Editions, 2020), which has been translated into more than twenty languages, was on the long list for the Dublin Literary Award, was a finalist for the Premio Nacional de Novela and the National Book Award, and won the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana, an English PEN Translates Award, and the LiBeraturpreis. With her book Los abismos (Abyss, New York, World Editions, 2023), translated into multiple languages, she won the Alfaguara Novel Prize in 2021 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is the editor of the Biblioteca de Escritoras Colombianas (The Library of Colombian Female Writers), a publishing project of the Ministry of Culture to rescue and promote women’s literature.
Ron Rindo
Ron Rindo is the author of three collections of short stories and a novel, and his fiction and essays have appeared in a wide variety of journals and magazines. His new novel, Life, and Death, and Giants, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2025. Following three years teaching at Birmingham-Southern College, Rindo returned to Wisconsin as a professor of American Literature, Nature Writing, and Fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh.
Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack. Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, while Home received the Orange Prize for Fiction and Lila won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Robinson is also the author of numerous books of essays, including Reading Genesis, The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, and Mother Country, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her honors include the National Humanities Medal, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
A longtime member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty, Robinson taught at the University of Iowa for 25 years before retiring as the F. Wendell Miller Professor in 2016. She remains one of America’s most acclaimed novelists and essayists.
Helen Betya Rubinstein
Helen Betya Rubinstein is the author of Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching & Power (October 2026) and The Case Against Rubinstein: An Anti-Fiction (forthcoming in 2027), as well as a booklet of lyric fictions, Because Sex Is a Story & Sex Is a Song. Her essays and fiction have been published in Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and frequently in Literary Hub and Jewish Currents. A graduate of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program as well as Brooklyn College’s MFA program in fiction, Helen is a writing coach in ongoing practice with writers across genre.
Jane Schoenbrun
Jane Schoenbrun is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. Their films include I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Their newest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma starring Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder, was released in 2026. Public Access Afterworld is their first novel.
Matt Singer
Matt Singer is the editor and film critic of ScreenCrush.com and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. He is also the author of Marvel’s Spider-Man: From Amazing to Spectacular and Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.
Melissa Tedone
Melissa Tedone is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Conservation at the University of Delaware and Associate Director of the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. A specialist in the conservation of library and archival materials, she previously served as Library & Archives Conservator at Iowa State University.
Tedone is the lead conservator of the Poison Book Project, an international research initiative investigating the use of toxic pigments in nineteenth-century bookbindings. Her work explores the history of books, bookmaking, and preservation, with a focus on making library collections safer and more accessible.
She holds a PhD in Slavic literary history from Yale University and a master’s degree in library and archives conservation from the University of Texas at Austin.
John Ira Thomas
John Ira Thomas is an Iowa City writer and graphic novelist. He is a longtime member of the creative team behind Candle Light Press, where his work has included Numbers: A Tale of Shades and Angels, Man is Vox: Baracudae, and other graphic novels. His writing often explores crime, moral questions, and the strange intersections of everyday life and the surreal.
Thomas earned a B.A. in philosophy and an M.A. in Latin from Texas Tech University before pursuing graduate study at the University of Iowa. He is also the creator of Tire Magazine, an ongoing metafictional comics project.
Daniel Umemezie
Daniel Umemezie is a Nigerian-American poet whose work explores cultural inheritance and displacement, using bodily transformation as both metaphor and form. His poetry develops a realm between interior experience and external reality. His work has appeared in the North American Review, Scholastic, Magpie Journal and many more. He is forthcoming in Polyphony Lit, and has been recognized as the Iowa Student Poetry Ambassador, the Kenyon Young Writers Program, the Iowa Poetry Association, Humanities Iowa, and others. As the 10th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, Daniel positions cultural specificity as formal resistance, creating what he describes as “architecture of consciousness.”
Bruce Walters
Bruce Walters retired from Western Illinois University in 2021 and was conferred with the title, Professor Emeritus. His artwork has been included in more than one hundred solo, invitational, and competitive exhibitions: in the Midwest at the Des Moines Art Center, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and numerous university museums; internationally as contributing artist at Ulster University, Belfast; University of Dundee, Scotland; and Tate Modern, London. Two recent short films have been broadcast on Midwest PBS stations. He also had two columns “Buried Stories” and “Art in Plain Sight” that ran in the River Cities’ Reader from 2010-2024.
Bruce Walters co-authored the book, Eerie Iowa (with Michael McCarty) as well and is currently working on another nonfiction book for History Press.
Ben Wolf
Award-winning author Ben Wolf has made a career of writing action-packed LitRPG, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy novels, including his exciting Tech Ghost trilogy, his acclaimed Blood Mercenaries series of sword & sorcery books, his hilarious Santa Saves Christmas series, and his legendary LitRPG saga, Rickshaw Riot, co-written with Luke Messa.
He is also the Lead Writer for the Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying Game and has written for the Dungeon Crawler Carl Audio Immersion Tunnel, published by Soundbooth Theater.
When not writing, he plays video games and chokes his friends in Brazilian jiu jitsu. You can follow him on Facebook in the The Ben Wolfpack, on TikTok at @1benwolf, or check out his books at www.benwolf.com.
Ingeborg von Zadow
Ingeborg von Zadow is an internationally renowned playwright based in the UNESCO City of Literature Heidelberg, Germany. Born in Berlin and educated bilingually in Germany, the USA and Belgium, she holds an M.A. in Theater from State University of New York at Binghamton, USA. The Agent/Publisher Verlag der Autoren in Frankfurt a.M., Germany, started representing her professionally at the age of 22, after she had spent her youth writing and performing.
Her plays, often written for young audiences, have themes such as friendship, the actions of human beings and the way of the world. They focus on core emotional experiences and capture moments of growth and self-awareness through humor, rhythm and theatrical imagination. Ingeborg von Zadow´s plays have been staged in more than 160 professional national and international productions and translated into 12 languages. She won the Brothers-Grimm-Prize of the State of Berlin and was nominated for the German Children’s Theater Prize and the Mülheimer Children’s Plays Prize.
Christopher Merrill Receives the 2026 Paul Engle Prize
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In the Cards: A Tarot and Poetry Workshop with Paula Cisewski
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Tree Tour: Literary Grove at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop
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Marilynne Robinson and Nicholas Kristof
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Bonnie Jo Campbell: The Spirits
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Megan Greenwell: Bad Company
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Curator Guided Tour: It’s Been Wonderful Knowing You: Wildlife Conservation and Advocacy Through the Lens of Jay N. “Ding” Darling
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Slamovision: International Slam Poetry Judging
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Pilar Quintana: La perra (The Bitch)
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Mark Leidner: Elegy for Pangaea
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Mark Leidner: A Conversation about Poetry and Humor
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Melissa Tedone: The Poison Book Project
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Panel Discussion: Weirdos Writing for Weirdos: A Contemporary Approach to Speculative Fiction
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International Writing Program: Writers from Cities of Literature
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An Evening with Pulitzer Prize Winner Yiyun Li
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Book Fair
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Friends Foundation Pop-up Used Book Sale
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Lori Erickson: Travels with the Muse
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Queer Coffee Social
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James Geary: The World in a Phrase
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Patricia Foster: A Marriage in Startled Air
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Keiran Goddard: I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
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Tiffany Hanssen: My Name was Gerry Sass
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Ron Rindo: Life, and Death, and Giants
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Scott Heim: Mysterious Skin
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Tisa Bryant: Residual
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Sarah Minor: Carousel
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Harriet Clark: The Hill
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Matt Singer: Funny Business
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Michael McCarty and Bruce Walters: Eerie Iowa
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Nonfiction Writing Program 50th Anniversary Panel
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Jane Schoenbrun: Public Access Afterworld
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Writers Row – Local Author Book Fair
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Poetry in Public Reading featuring Iowa Student Poet Ambassador Josie Nabhan-Warren
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National Youth Poet Laureate Daniel Somtochukwu Umemezie
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John Ira Thomas: TIRE!
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The Iowa City Book Festival could not happen without the support of our dedicated volunteers. From helping with events and welcoming authors and attendees to assisting behind the scenes, volunteers play an important role in making the festival a success. Volunteer opportunities for the 2026 festival will be posted soon. We hope you’ll join us!
Special thanks to the United Way of Johnson & Washington Counties for their help recruiting volunteers.
Recorded Readings
2025
Kazim Ali, Rajaa Alsanea, Anna Barker, Venise Berry, Anna Bruno, Tisa Bryant, Erin Casey, Art Cullen, Siddharth Dasgupta, Johanna Drucker, Carey Dunne, Teresa Dzieglewicz, Jennifer Fawcett, Kellee Forkenbrock, Gregory Galloway, Royal C. Gardner, Mackie Garrett, Ted Geltner, Joe Haldeman, Laura Julier, Donika Kelly, Steve Kemp, Patricia Lockwood, Ndongolera C. Mwangupili, Scott Phillips, Chris Pio, Jesus “Chuy” Renteria, John Scalzi, Tatiana Schlote-Bonne, John Ira Thomas, Daniel Umemezie, Christina Ward, John Warner, Morgan Webb, Yu Yuen Lan
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 18th annual Iowa City Book Festival will be held Oct. 18-25, 2026, 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.
Visiting from out of town? Discounted rooms are available at the Hilton Garden Inn, in downtown Iowa City.
Iowa City Fall Festivals
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.
