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
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
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."
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.
Featuring: 508 Press earthwords Fools Magazine Ice Cube Press Iowa City Poetry LGBTQ Iowa Archives and Library Midwest Writing Center North American Review Paper Pie PorchLight Literary Arts Center Prompt Press Public Space One snapshots The Iowa Review University of Iowa Press Wilder Things Magazine The Book Fair is sponsored by MERGE Iowa City.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
