Writers’ Workshop alumni Lewis Robinson (Fiction) and Aaron McCollough (Poetry) will read from their latest books, The Islanders and Salms.

Lewis Robinson will read from The Islanders. "The Islanders is at once an engrossing story and a timely, urgent warning: what will happen when the one percent decide to pull up the rope ladder behind them? Robinson’s vividly drawn protagonists are the ragtag kids conscripted into a billionaires’ militia training program. With sensory precision, penetrating empathy, and escalating tension, he charts their gradual awakening to and reckoning with the shocking truth.” —Kate Christensen

Lewis Robinson is the author of Officer Friendly and Other Stories and Water Dogs, and he is the winner of a Whiting Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Book Review, and on the National Public Radio program Selected Shorts. He teaches at the University of Maine at Farmington and lives in Portland, Maine with his family.

Aaron McCollough will read from Salms. “Profoundly intelligent and erudite, steeped in the metaphysicals, Aaron McCollough’s poems alternately tantalize with their hermeticism and dazzle with their sudden outpourings of radiant clarity. The mirrors so important to this collection are like the surfaces of lakes: protean, dreamy, distorting, swallowing up and transforming everything in their purview, as McCollough’s voracious intellect swallows up language and delivers it back to us refracted, estranged—as the past itself is transfigured by our memory of it. I found myself reveling in this writing, transfixed among the ‘dusty stars.’”—Donna Stonecipher

Aaron McCollough was raised in Tennessee. He is also the author of Welkin, Double Venus, Little Ease, No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, Underlight, and Rank. He currently works as Head of Partner Success at Ubiquity Press. He has over 10 years of experience in publishing, editorial, and professional writing fields. He is co-publisher, with Karla Kelsey, of SplitLevel Texts

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Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}