Sarah Cypher: The Skin and Its Girl

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

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

Tracie Morris: human/nature poems

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

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

Daniel Kraus: Whalefall

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

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. 

Eskor David Johnson: Pay As You Go

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

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: To Catch a Storm

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

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.

Ayana Mathis: The Unsettled

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

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 is determined to rescue her son from the perils

Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Crime Novel

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

“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