View the rescheduled event here. Ms. American Pie author Beth Howard will read from her new book, Hausfrau Honeymoon: Love, Language, and Other Misadventures in Germany.  This humorous, engaging, and romantic travel memoir tells of Howard’s misadventures in language and cultural assimilation when she moved to Stuttgart, Germany from 2003 to 2006 to live with her German-born husband.   "Howard is a reincarnation of the most gifted memoir and humorist writers. She's an Erma Bombeck on steroids...

"At a time when fear has been harnessed for political purposes, our task is to turn wisdom and love into a political force." Meet New York Times Bestselling author Marianne Williamson as she joins Prairie Lights Books and Café for an afternoon of political discussion about bringing the country back to its ethical center. Williamson has launched an Exploratory Presidential Committee and is preparing for a big announcement Jan. 28. Williamson, an internationally acclaimed lecturer, activist and...

Iowa City native and bestselling author of Descent Tim Johnston will read from his new literary thriller, The Current. "I would have taken a break long before 2:00 a.m. last night were it not for Johnston's masterly ability to rummage inside the heads of his various characters, revealing the frayed fabric of small-town life in the process and showing us the stand-up grit of a handful of women and men . . . We need a little hyperbole if we're going to adequately describe how much we love a Tim...

Martha Birkett Bordwell will read from her memoir, Missing Mothers.  “By framing her memoir around missing mothers, author Martha Bordwell raises the ethical dilemmas and emotional consequences trans-national adoption has on families. Missing Mothers addresses a challenging and necessary subject in accessible and intimate prose, inviting readers on a complex parenting journey. Through compelling considerations of race, grief, and privilege, we uncover a deep empathy for people in families...

Author, documentary producer, Roboprofessor, and cultural critic Kembrew McLeod will read and show images from his new book, The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock 'n' Roll Glitter Queens—a kaleidoscopic tour of a small geographic area had an outsized impact on American culture during the 1960s and 1970s. "Downtown New York in the latter half of twentieth century was so much more than a Warhol print and a...

Rosellen Brown will read from her novel The Lake on Fire, published by Sarabande. “What a remarkable feat of imagination, recreation and literary craft is this superb novel set in turn-of-the-century Chicago.  What really drives it, in the best tradition of Dreiser, Doctorow, Bellow, Tillie Olson, Anzia Yesierska and Henry Roth, is the deeply sympathetic involvement in moments of consciousness and action, by which a seemingly lost world is triumphantly retrieved.” —Phillip Lopate Brown will be...

A reading from Iowa's inaugural collection of stories written by bicultural Iowans and immigrants, We the Interwoven: An Anthology of Bicultural Iowa tells the stories of three Americans—three Iowans— who have made their home in the heartland over the last two generations.   Authors Sadagat Aliyeva, Chuy Renteria, and Melissa Palma will read excerpts from their collection followed by a Q&A with Andrea Wilson, series editor and Executive Director of the Iowa Writers' House, on topics ranging...

Michelle Kuo will read from and talk about Reading with Patrick: A Student, a Teacher, and a Life-Changing Friendship, which is the 2018 One Community One Book title, selected by the UI Center for Human Rights.   "Anyone interested in questions of pedagogy, racism, and incarceration in America, not to mention literary criticism, will be enthralled by this book." —James Wood Kuo is a graduate of Harvard Law School has worked as a Teach for America volunteer, worked legal aid at a nonprofit for...

Iowa City author Ralph Savarese will read from and talk about his new book, See it Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor. “This deft and impassioned hybrid—part memoir, part disability study, part portraiture, part literary criticism—is a book of revelations about reading, neurodiversity, and American literature. I was repeatedly startled by its slow cascade of correctives and insights—deepened, widened, and enlarged. It is a necessary...

Journalist Elaine Weiss will read from her new book, The Woman’s Hour, which tells of the ratification of the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote. “Unfolding over six weeks in the summer of 1920, The Woman’s Hour is both a page-turning drama and an inspiration for everyone, young and old, male and female.” —Hillary Rodham Clinton  Weiss is an award-winning journalist and author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army in the Great War. A MacDowell Colony Fellow, her work has...

Please join us with seven contributing authors to this years’ The Best Small Fictions Anthology for short readings from their work. This series, which began in 2015, has featured an international group of both seasoned and emerging authors who work in flash, micro fiction, prose poetry, haibun, and other hybrid forms. Readers will include Audra Kerr Brown, Kathy Fish, Brenda Peynado, Denise Howard Long, Scott Garson, Jolene McIIwain, and Angela Mitchell.

Want to join a book club to meet other book lovers in Iowa City? Join Paul Ingram’s Book Club! Led by Paul Ingram, Prairie Lights’ legendary bookseller, this monthly book group is open to all. This month’s book is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, so to read the book, and meet up to talk about it at the Iowa City Public Library meeting room D on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. When Kurt Vonnegut was teaching in the Writer's Workshop, in 1965–66, the Vietnam War was getting underway and the student...

Inman’s War and Shell Games author Jeffrey Copeland will read from Plague in Paradise: The Black Death in Los Angeles, 1924.   "This narrative non-fiction tells the story of how the medical community and civic leaders in Los Angeles worked to stop the highly-contagious Black Plague in 1924. It highlights the work of the doctor, nurse, and priest at the center of the outbreak and how politics, racism, and greed delayed its resolution" —Paragon Jeffrey Copeland is a professor and head of the...

Dana Bowman will read from her new recovery memoir How to be Perfect Like Me, which is featured for the month of September on The Today Show’s website. Dana Bowman can’t escape the lure of perfectionism, but when she experiences a short-lived relapse during the Christmas holiday, she has the startling realization that recovery is more than just giving up alcohol. A funny and revealing follow-up to her best-selling book Bottled: A Mom’s Guide to Early Recovery. Author of the popular momsieblog...

Mitchell L.H. Douglas and Heather Derr-Smith will read from their poetry. Mitchell L.H. Douglas will read from his recent collection, dying in the scarecrow’s arms. “Douglas depicts the assault on people of color in America’s increasingly divided Heartland. A devotee of American popular culture, from rock ’n’ roll to Star Wars to Marvel comic books, Douglas is a poet of “scrutinizing intellect, imagination, and soul.” —Terrance Hayes Mitchell L. H. Douglas is also the author of  \blak\ \al...

Writers’ Workshop graduate Robin Green will read from her new memoir, The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of the Rolling Stone. In the seventies, Green was at Rolling Stone as Hunter S. Thompson crafted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and now, with a distinctly gonzo female voice, she reveals her side of that tumultuous time in America. Brutally honest and bold, Green pulls back the curtain on the iconic magazine that defined a generation, and the boys’ club that surrounded it....

Rebecca Makkai will read from her new novel The Great Believers. “At turns heartbreaking and hopeful, the novel brings the first years of the AIDS epidemic into very immediate view, in a manner that will seem nostalgic to some and revelatory to others…Makkai's sweeping fourth novel shows the compassion of chosen families and the tension and distance that can exist in our birth ones.” —Library Journal Rebecca Makkai is the author of The Borrower, The Hundred-Year House, and Music for Wartime...

Julie Schumacher will read from her new novel, The Shakespeare Requirement. The eagerly awaited sequel to Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement “satirizes the pitfalls of academia with searing wit, skewing everything from the abominable faculty offices to the eccentric personalities throughout the university. Beneath the comedy lies a tragic commentary on the state of higher education, when money counts for more than scholarship, and power is directly tied to fundraising ability...

Translator Corinne Stanley will read poetry by Esther Bendala Pavón in her newly translated poetry collection Silence from the Forest (Silencios Del Bosque). A journey through the landscape of El Bosque, the White Pueblo village of her grandmother, Pavón’s poetry is reminiscent of a young Pablo Neruda's contemplations on life, love, and death, transcended through nature.  Corinne Stanley met Pavón in Spain in 2017. Stanley, who previously worked as a translator for the International Writing...

Iowa City native Julie Boatman Filucci will read from and talk about her book Honest Vision: The Donald Douglas Story. From the author of Together We Fly: Voices From The DC-3 comes an exploration into the life of Donald Wills Douglas, founder of the Douglas Aircraft Company, a genius innovator and engineer. What inspired Douglas to envision a commercial airliner when aviation was in its infancy? What motivated him, and what key elements to his leadership style led the Douglas Aircraft Company...

Iowa City author Kate Kasten will read from her new story collection, Foreign Ground. “(Foreign Ground is) a historically rich chronicling of private suffering across time, strata, and space...(with) a varied cast of characters navigating the trauma of trying to reconcile past with present…The collection swells with heart-rending tension.”—Kirkus Reviews Kate Kasten is the author of four novels: Better Days, The Deconversion of Kit Lamb, Ten Small Beds, and Too Happy as well as a book of fairy...

Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Malinda McCullom will read from her short story collection The Surprising Place. Set largely in Des Moines, Iowa, these 12 stories explore the surprising places where our outsized longings may lead us. In prose as lean and unflinching as an Iowa winter, these stories explore confrontation as equally as consolation. McCollum’s stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Epoch, ZYZZYVA, and the anthologies The Worst Years of Your Life and The Paris...

Iowa native Elizabeth Leiknes will read from her novel The Lost Queen of Crocker County. "This heartwarming redemptive novel proves that you can indeed 'go home again.'...What a charmer this book is! Highly recommended for female reading groups." —Nancy Simpson-Brice Elizabeth Leiknes grew up in rural Iowa and can make thirty-seven dishes featuring corn. She received her master's in writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, and currently lives near Lake Tahoe.

The International Writing Program presents authors Armen of Armenia, Ameena Hussein, and Kiki Petrosino, who willl read from their work. Armen of Armenia is a writer and activist. His first book The Return of Kikos is a collection of interactive short stories, which encourages readers to act as co-authors. His work has appeared in the literary almanac Inqnagir and the Gretert literary newspaper. Ameena Hussein is a sociologist, editor, publisher, and novelist from Sri Lanka. She has published...

Thomas Frank will read from Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society. From the acclaimed author of Listen, Liberal and What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a scathing collection of his incisive commentary on our cruel times―perfect for this political moment. What does a middle-class democracy look like when it comes apart? When, after forty years of economic triumph, America’s winners persuade themselves that they owe nothing to the rest of the country? Thomas Frank is the author...