Karen Russell will read from her new novel, The Antidote, in conversation with Kaveh Akbar.

Karen Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” award and the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list. (She is now decisively over 40.)

Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, Tin House, and The New York Review of Books, and anthologized in The Pushcart Prize and The Best American Short Stories series. With composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone and choreographer and director Troy Schumacher, she co-created BalletCollective’s genre-straddling work, The Night Falls, one of The New York Times’ Best Dance Performances of 2023. Her story “Proving Up” was adapted into a critically acclaimed opera by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, with whom she’s collaborating on an original opera, premiering in 2025.

She has taught literature and creative writing as a visiting professor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and served as the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she now lives in Portland, OR with her husband and two kids.

Her newest novel, The Antidote, is published by Knopf.

Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry 2016), and Martyr!, Kaveh's first novel (Knopf, 2024). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Classics 2022).

In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called "Poetry RX."

_{To subscribe to a weekly emailing list of Writers' Workshop events, please fill in the linked form or email iww@uiowa.edu with “Events Mailing List Subscribe” in the subject line.
Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}