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
In this session, two of Iowa's leading spiritual writers discuss their work. Spiritual writing is a growing subgenre in fiction as well as in memoir, poetry, meditations, and self-help. It may or may not be aligned with an organized religion, faith, belief system, or philosophy, yet all spiritual writing seeks to discover human truths and also typically
Rebecca Solnit has been named the eleventh recipient of the Paul Engle Prize, presented by the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature organization. Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist who has written more than twenty books on feminism, environmental and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Whose
